Development of prospective memory: tasks based on the prefrontal-lobe model.

This study investigated the development of prospective memory using tasks based on the prefrontal-lobe model. Three groups each of 30 children, adolescents, and young adults were compared on prospective-memory performance using ongoing tasks with two levels of cognitive demand (low and high), and two levels of importance (unstressed and stressed) of remembering prospective cues. The Self-Ordered Pointing Task (SOPT), Stroop Color Word Interference Test, and Tower of London were also used to assess relationships between prospective memory and prefrontal-lobe functions. The children remembered fewer prospective cues than either the adolescents or adults, but the adolescents and adults remembered equally well. This trend increased significantly as the cognitive demand of the ongoing tasks increased. However, stressing or not stressing the importance of remembering made no difference to prospective-memory performance. Performance on the SOPT and Stroop Colour Word Interference predicted performance on the high- but not on the low-demand condition. These findings implicate the maturation of the brain's prefrontal region in the development of prospective memory.     

Overcoming focusing failures in competitive environments

This paper attacks one of the chief limitations of the field of behavioral decision research—the past inability to use this literature to improve decision making. Building on the work of Thompson, Gentner, Loewenstein and colleagues (Loewenstein, Thompson, & Gentner, 1999; Thompson, Gentner, & Loewenstein, 2000; Gentner & Markman, 1997), the current paper finds that it is possible to reduce bias in one of the most robust problems in the decision literature, the Acquiring a Company Problem (Samuelson & Bazerman, 1985). Past research has shown that individuals make suboptimal offers as a result of the failure to think about the decisions of others and to incorporate a clear understanding of the rules of the game. In the current study, we find that by allowing study participants to see and understand differences in seemingly unrelated decision problems—versions of the Monty Hall Game (Nalebuff, 1987; Friedman, 1998) and Multiparty Ultimatum Game (Messick, Moore, & Bazerman, 1997; Tor & Bazerman, 2003)—study participants can learn to focus more accurately on the decisions of other parties and the rules of the game, the keys to solving the Acquiring a Company Problem. This research offers a new piece of evidence that comparative and analogical processes may be a successful direction for improving decision making. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Primacy, recency, and suffix effects in auditory short-term memory for pure tones: evidence from a probe recognition paradigm.

The present study was designed to explore serial position and suffix effects in the short-term retention of nonverbal sounds. In contrast with previous studies of these effects, a probe recognition paradigm was used to minimize the possibility that participants would use a verbal labelling strategy. On each trial, participants heard a memory set consisting of three pure tones, followed five seconds later by a probe tone. Participants were required to indicate whether or not the probe tone had been a member of the memory set. On most trials, a suffix sound was presented 1 second following the third sound in the memory set. Results revealed that tones presented in the first and last positions of the memory set were recognized more accurately than were tones presented in the middle position. Furthermore, recognition of sounds presented in the last position was compromised when the memory set was followed by a postlist suffix of similar pitch, spectral composition, and spatial location.     

How many fingers am I holding up? The answer depends on children's language background

Monolingual English‐speaking preschool children tend to process number gestures as unanalyzed wholes rather than use the one‐to‐one (finger‐to‐quantity) correspondence. By school age, however, children can use the one‐to‐one correspondence. The purpose of the present studies was to test whether children learn one‐to‐one correspondence through exposure to a variety of finger configurations to convey a single quantity. In Study 1, we compared children with exposure to multiple one‐to‐one configurations, that is, French‐English and German‐English bilingual children, to English monolingual children who see consistent representations. As predicted, the bilingual children performed better in interpreting unconventional number gestures. In Study 2, we compared Chinese‐English bilingual children who knew arbitrary one‐handed Chinese numbers gestures for quantities 6–10 to Chinese‐English bilingual children who did not know these gestures, as well as to monolingual English speakers. Chinese‐English bilinguals who knew the arbitrary gestures were more likely to interpret unconventional gestures arbitrarily (i.e., influenced by the written and/or Chinese gesture forms). These children did not differ from English monolinguals in the interpretation of unconventional gestures. These results are consistent with the argument that children can become sensitive to the one‐to‐one correspondence in number gestures with exposure to multiple configurations for the same quantity.     

Early markers of lexical stress in visual word recognition

The goal of the present study was to investigate the time-course of suprasegmental information in visual word recognition. To this aim we measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a simple lexical decision task in Italian. Two factors were manipulated: Stress dominance (the most frequent stress type) and stress neighborhood consistency (the proportion and number of existent words sharing orthographic ending and stress pattern). Participants were presented with target words either bearing dominant (on the penultimate syllable; 'graNIta,' 'seNIle,' slush, senile) or non-dominant stress (on the antepenultimate syllable; 'MISsile,' 'BIbita,' missile, drink), and either having a consistent (graNIta, MISsile) or an inconsistent stress neighborhood (seNIle, BIbita). Our results showed in the initial stages of processing an effect that we interpreted as an early orthographic marker of stress neighborhood in interaction with dominance. Later, from 250 ms after target onset, a marker of the lexical stress difference also emerged. The role of stress assignment in word recognition is discussed.