Later language development in narratives in children with perinatal stroke

Studies of young children with unilateral perinatal stroke (PS) have confirmed the plasticity of the developing brain for acquiring language. While recent studies of typically developing children have demonstrated the significant development of language well into adolescence, we know little regarding the course of language development in the PS group as they mature. Will children with PS continue to show the same remarkable plasticity that they exhibited at younger ages? In the present paper we investigate later language and discourse in children with perinatal stroke (ages 7–16) using spoken personal narrative as the discourse context. In contrast to the findings of the discourse studies of younger children with PS, children with left hemisphere lesions made more morphological errors, used less complex syntax and fewer syntactic types than controls; they also produced more impoverished story settings. In contrast, those with right hemisphere lesions performed comparably to controls, except in their impoverished use of complex syntax. The findings provide insight into the nature of later spoken language development in these children, revealing both the nature and extent of neuroplasticity for language as well as potential regional biases.     

Episodic Encoding in Normal Aging: Attentional Resources Hypothesis Extended to Musical Material

The goal of the present study was to examine age-related changes in musical episodic memory for novel tunes. This was conducted by manipulating the encoding condition in a recognition paradigm. After receiving memory instructions (intentional condition), older and younger participants obtained equivalent hits. In contrast, when intentional encoding was accompanied by a dancing judgment (dancing + intentional condition), the recognition performance of the older persons was severely impaired. Impaired recognition was also found when participants only judged the excerpts without being instructed to memorize them (dancing judgment condition). Although older participants demonstrated a preserved ability to perform the dancing judgment on its own, this ability was not optimal and likely precluded the initiation of more elaborate encoding strategies. These results suggest that asking older persons to divide their attention in the study phase reduces the quality of their musical encoding. Given this extension to musical material, we discuss the notion that the age-related attentional resource decline appears to be domain-general rather than specific to verbal material.     

Age-related effects of blood pressure on everyday cognitive function in community-dwelling women

ABSTRACT

Objectives: Blood pressure is an indicator of vascular health that has been associated with cognition and quality of life in older age. Few studies have examined blood pressure across everyday cognitive tasks, which may have superior predictive functional utility than traditional cognitive measures. We explored blood pressure as a predictor of everyday problem solving (EPS) performance in middle-aged and older women. Method: Community-dwelling women (age: 51–91) with low-normal blood pressure to mild hypertension underwent traditional and everyday cognitive testing. EPS was determined by the number of safe/effective solutions generated for real-world scenarios. Results: Analyses revealed that lower systolic blood pressure and pulse pressure were associated with worse EPS ability after controlling for age, education, and traditional cognitive abilities. Discussion: These results support that blood pressure may be an important predictor of everyday cognitive abilities in older age. Potential implications for real-world functioning are discussed.     

Age-Related Changes in Temporal Allocation of Visual Attention: Evidence From the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) Paradigm

The present study explored the temporal allocation of attention in groups of 8-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults performing a rapid serial visual presentation task. In a dual-condition task, participants had to detect a briefly presented target (T2) after identifying an initial target (T1) embedded in a random series of distractors. A single-condition control task required participants to detect T2 without first identifying T1. The attentional blink (AB) reflects impairments in T2 detection due to the previous identification of T1. Although the amplitude of the AB (difference in T2 detection performance between the single task and the dual task) was found to be similar across age groups, its temporal expression (as a function of the T1–T2 lag) differed across age groups. Our results revealed age-related changes a) in the duration of the first lag(s) sparing effect (longer in the younger age groups), b) in the peak position of the AB (temporal displacement toward later lags in the younger age groups), and c) in the width of the AB (T2 impairments occurring for T1–T2 intervals of 400 ms and 500 ms in 8-year-old children, 300 ms in 10-year-old children, and 200 ms and 300 ms in adults). We discuss these differences in terms of changes in the efficiency of perceptual selection and inhibitory processes (attentional gating mechanisms) during development.     

Moral emotions and the envisaging of mitigating circumstances for wrongdoing

Anger may be more responsive than disgust to mitigating circumstances in judgements of wrongdoing. We tested this hypothesis in two studies where we had participants envision circumstances that could serve to mitigate an otherwise wrongful act. In Study 1, participants provided moral judgements, and ratings of anger and disgust, to a number of transgressions involving either harm or bodily purity. They were then asked to imagine and report whether there might be any circumstances that would make it all right to perform the act. Across transgression type, and controlling for covariance between anger and disgust, levels of anger were found to negatively predict the envisioning of mitigating circumstances for wrongdoing, while disgust was unrelated. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings to less serious transgressions, using a continuous measure of mitigating circumstances, and demonstrated the impact of anger independent of deontological commitments. These findings highlight the differential relationship that anger and disgust have with the ability to envision mitigating factors.     

BRIEF REPORT Perception of the duration of emotional events

Participants were trained on a temporal bisection task in which visual stimuli (a pink oval) of 400 ms and 1600 ms served as short and long standards, respectively. They were then presented comparison durations between 400 ms and 1600 ms, represented by faces expressing three emotions (anger, happiness, and sadness) and a neutral‐baseline facial expression. Relative to the neutral face, the proportion of long responses was higher, the psychophysical functions shifted to the left, and the bisection point values were lower for faces expressing any of the three emotions. These findings indicate that the duration of emotional faces was systematically overestimated compared to neural ones. Furthermore, consistent with arousal‐based models of time perception, temporal overestimation for the emotional faces increased with the duration values. It appears, therefore, that emotional faces increased the speed of the pacemaker of the internal clock.     

A sham drug improves a demanding prospective memory task

Every day, people rely on prospective memory—our ability to remember to perform a future action—to carry out myriad tasks. We examined how a sham cognitive enhancing drug might improve people's performance on a prospective memory task. We gave some people (but not others) the sham drug, and asked everyone to perform a high-effort prospective memory task. People who received the sham drug performed better on the prospective memory task. They also took longer to perform their ongoing task, suggesting that they increased their effortful monitoring. These results fit with research showing that suggestions can lead people to increase cognitive effort and increase memory performance.     

Blame Conformity: Leading Eyewitness Statements can Influence Attributions of Blame for an Accident

The present experiment examined whether attributions of blame for an incident can be shifted between individuals as a result of a leading eyewitness statement. Participants watched a video of an accident involving two men and then read either a non‐leading eyewitness statement that blamed no one for the accident or a leading eyewitness statement that blamed one of the two men for the accident. Participants' attributions of blame for the accident were then assessed either immediately or after a 1 week delay. Regardless of the time delay, just over one‐third of participants who read a leading statement subsequently blamed the same person as the eyewitness. In contrast, less than 4% of participants who read a non‐leading statement blamed one of the men. This research is the first to demonstrate blame conformity, where blame for an incident can be shifted between individuals as a result of a leading eyewitness statement. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The embodied cognition theory and the motor component of “yes” and “no” verbal responses

Most of the experiments which give theories of embodied cognition their empirical anchorage only take into consideration the motor responses induced by the task or the motor component of the visual stimulus. And yet, these motor responses are often associated with a linguistic answer. Our hypothesis is that “YES” and “NO” verbal responses have a motor component. In a first experiment we showed that producing a verbal response (YES vs. NO) involves motor planning (pushing vs. pulling): participants push a lever more quickly when they have to answer “yes” than “no”, and conversely, they pull a lever more quickly when they have to answer “no” than “yes”. Moreover, in a second experiment, we showed that perceiving the words “YES” and “NO”, on its own, leads to the same motor planning than when “yes” and “no” answers actually have to be produced. Participants detect the word “YES” faster when they have to push a lever than when they have to pull it and conversely they detect the word “NO” faster when they have to pull the lever than when they have to push it down. These results are discussed in reference to “online” and “offline embodiment” concepts and to the cognitive linguistic theories.