Development of prehension between 5 and 10 years of age: distance scaling, grip aperture, and sight of the hand

The authors investigated whether 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 75) differ from adults (N = 12) in the developmental course of distance scaling and the adaptations to the inability to see the hand during prehension movements. The children reached under a surface and grasped and lifted an object suspended through it. All children scaled velocity appropriately for movement distance, both with and without sight of the hand. However, 5- to 6-year-old children did not increase grip aperture with increased distance, whereas older children and adults did. The older children and adults spent longer after peak deceleration when they could not see the hand, and maximum grip aperture (MGA) was larger, providing an increased safety margin. Children aged 5 to 6 spent the same amount of time between peak deceleration and grasp, whether or not they could see the hand, and they failed to increase MGA when they could not see the hand. Prehension in the younger children differed from that of older children in two ways: The younger children did not integrate reach and grasp over different distances and did not use visual information about hand position to optimize accuracy.     

Volume Contents

Volume Contents

Volume Contents     

Cooling blocks ITM and LTM formation and preserves memory

In Lymnaea aerial respiratory behaviour can be operantly conditioned; snails learn not to perform this behaviour. Depending on the training procedure used, snails are competent to form either intermediate-term (ITM; lasting 1-3 h) or long-term (LTM; >4 h) memory. We found that cooling the snails for 1 h immediately after training was sufficient to block either ITM or LTM. Cooling snails for a similar period 10 or 15 min after cessation of training, failed to block ITM and LTM formation, respectively. Finally, we employed the cooling technique to extend both ITM and LTM. That is, cooling could prevent forgetting. Cooling extended LTM that normally persisted for 2 days to at least 8 days. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that forgetting is due to the learning and remembering of interfering events, and thus is an active process.     

Intraindividual coupling of daily stress and cognition

Most psychological theories predict associations among processes that transpire within individuals. However, these theories are often tested by examining relationships at the between-persons (BP) rather than the within-persons (WP) level. The authors examined the WP and BP relationships between daily stress and daily variability in cognitive performance. Daily stress and cognitive performance were assessed on 6 occasions in 108 older adults and 68 young adults. WP variability in stress predicted WP variability in response times (RTs) on a 2-back working memory task in both younger and older adults. That is, RTs were slower on high-stress days compared with low-stress days. There was evidence of an amplified WP stress effect in the older adults on a serial attention task. There was no evidence of stress effects on simple versions of these tasks that placed minimal demands on working memory. These results are consistent with theories that postulate that stress-related cognitive interference competes for attentional resources.     

Making Meaning of Trauma: Trauma Exposure Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

Although traumatic experiences are relatively common, there is wide variability in individuals’ responses to them. This study examined trauma exposure, meaning making efforts (indexed by post-traumatic cognitions), and post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTS) in a non-clinical volunteer student sample (N = 631). We further examined the moderating role of gender, the importance of trauma type (interpersonal vs. non-interpersonal), and the impact of cumulative traumatic experiences. About 75% of the sample reported past trauma (n = 475). Women reported more interpersonal trauma than did men. For both genders, trauma exposure was associated with more PTS. A dose–response relationship was found between the extent of trauma exposure and negative post-traumatic cognitions. Importantly, post-traumatic cognitions predicted PTS controlling for amount of trauma exposure. It appears that it is not merely exposure to negative events that matters, but how we construe and make sense of these experiences. This study extends our understanding of gender differences, meaning-making, and responses to trauma exposure, and suggests avenues of clinical treatment.     

Resolute Expressivism

Over the years, we have witnessed the rise of a metaethical cottage industry devoted to claiming that expressivist analyses cannot capture some allegedly important feature of moral language. In this paper, I show how Simon Blackburn's pragmatist method enables him to respond decisively to many of these objections. In doing so, I hope to call into question some prevailing assumptions about the linguistic phenomena that a metaethical theory should be expected to capture.     

Serial Order in Spatial Immediate Memory

Serial order effects in spatial memory are investigated in three experiments. In the first an analysis of errors in recall data suggested that immediate transpositions were the most common error and that order errors over 2 or 3 adjacent items accounted for the majority of errors in recall. The first and last serial positions are less error-prone than is the middle position in sets of six and seven items. A second experiment investigated recognition of transpositions and found that immediate transpositions were hardest to recognize but that a traditional serial position effect was not found. This may be due to the difficulty of maintaining one set of spatial items when another set is presented for comparison. A probe experiment, in which subjects were asked to recognize whether a single item came from a memory set and then to assign it to its position in the set indicated that the first and last positions were remembered more accurately than were central positions. The combination of serial order data in recall and position data suggests that there are similarities between serial order and position effects in the verbal and spatial domains and that serial order in spatial sequences is position-based.     

Social interactions and physical symptoms in daily life: quality matters for older adults,quantity matters for younger adults

Objective: The present study examined how the different attributes of daily social interactions (quality and quantity) were associated with physical health, and how these associations vary with age.

Method: Using an ecological momentary assessment approach, participants from an adulthood lifespan sample (n = 172; aged 20–79 years) reported their social interactions five times daily, and physical symptoms and symptom severity at the end of each day, for one week.

Main outcome measures: Number of physical symptoms and physical symptom severity.

Results: There was a within-person main effect of the quality (positivity), but not the quantity (frequency), of social interactions on the number of reported physical symptoms and their severity. Moderation analyses further revealed that the quality of daily social interactions predicted fewer physical symptoms for older adults, but not for younger adults; in contrast, the frequency of social interactions predicted less severe physical symptoms for younger adults, but not for older adults. Finally, the reported severity of physical symptoms predicted less frequent but more positive social interactions the next day.

Conclusions: Our findings point to the bidirectional associations between social interactions and health and highlight the importance of considering individuals' developmental context in future research and interventions.     

Serial position memory in the visual—spatial domain: Reconstructing sequences of unfamiliar faces

In two studies we presented pictures of unfamiliar faces one at a time, then presented the complete set at test and asked for serial reconstruction of the order of presentation. Serial position functions were similar to those found with verbal materials, with considerable primacy and one item recency, position errors that were mainly to the adjacent serial position, a visual similarity effect, and effects of articulatory suppression that did not interact with the serial position effect or with the similarity effect. Serial position effects were found when faces had been seen for as little as 300 ms and after a 6-s retention interval filled with articulatory suppression. Serial position effects found with unfamiliar faces are not based on verbal encoding strategies, and important elements of serial memory may be general across modalities.