Imitative interaction increases social interest and elicited imitation in non‐verbal children with autism

Recent studies indicate that being intensely imitated for a brief period of time increases social interest among children with autism. The aim of this study was to replicate and extend these findings. Twenty children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were randomly assigned to one of two interaction strategies: imitation (n=10) or contingent (n=10). The children had little or no functional speech, and their developmental age averaged 25 months (mean chronological age =6:5 years). Both conditions were presented with repeated sessions of a modified version of Nadel's ‘still‐face’ paradigm (still‐face/intervention/still‐face/spontaneous play). The analysis revealed a significant increase of both proximal and distal social behaviours (touch and look at person) for the imitation condition, which confirms previous reports. In addition, an increase in elicited imitation, as measured with the PEP‐R developmental assessment procedure, was also observed for children in the imitation condition, but not in the contingent condition. This finding extends earlier reports in that it suggests that the social expectancies unlocked by imitation also spread to tasks outside the experimental setting. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Expertise in pictorial perception: eye-movement patterns and visual memory in artists and laymen

In two sessions with free scanning and memory instructions, eye-movement patterns from nine artists were compared with those of nine artistically untrained participants viewing 16 pictures representing a selection of categories from ordinary scenes to abstraction: 12 pictures were made to accommodate an object-oriented viewing mode (selection of recognisable objects), and a pictorial viewing mode (selection of more structural features), and 4 were abstract. The artistically untrained participants showed preference for viewing human features and objects, while the artists spent more scanning time on structural/abstract features. A group by session interaction showed a change of viewing strategy in the artists, who viewed more objects and human features in the memory task session. A verbal test of recall memory showed no overall difference in the number of pictures remembered, but the number of correctly remembered pictorial features was significantly higher for artists than for the artistically untrained viewers, irrespective of picture type. No differences in fixation frequencies/durations were found between groups across sessions, but a significant task-dependent-group by session interaction of fixation frequency/duration showed that the artistically untrained participants demonstrated repetition effects in fewer, longer fixations with repeated viewing, while the opposite pattern obtained for the artists.     

Age differences in learning from text: Evidence for functionally distinct text processing systems

We investigated the influence of sentence elaboration on self‐regulated learning in order to examine age differences in resource allocation to the construction of textbase‐ and discourse‐level representations. Older and younger adults learned about a topic by reading a series of sentences varying in elaboration (from simple factoids to highly elaborated text) and manner of presentation (progressive change in elaboration vs. random change in elaboration). Younger readers were more likely to recall information from factoids; older adults, from highly elaborated text. Relative to young, older readers showed an advantage in the progressive presentation condition, which minimised frequent changes between textbase‐ and discourse‐level processing. Older adults showed poorer memory monitoring for factoids and less elaborated discourse relative to young, but when passages were highly elaborated or presented progressively, age differences were eliminated. Results support the idea that textbase‐ and discourse‐level encoding arise from functionally distinct systems whose regulation depends on text properties and reader age. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Activation of emotion information in text among younger and older adults

The ability to represent emotions is an important capacity for the understanding of discourse. In the current literature, it is unclear whether older adults represent emotion information in the course of language processing, in particular as it relates to developing an adequate mental model of characters in narratives. We addressed this issue in two studies, one assessing emotion activation at the word level and the other at the mental model level. In the first experiment, subjects performed a lexical decision task in which words were drawn from both logic- and emotion-based categories. For both category types, priming was evident for young and old. In the second experiment, subjects read passages with emotion information that was consistent or inconsistent with the implied emotional tone. Both age groups showed an increase in reading time in response to inconsistent emotion information, indicating that the protagonist's emotional state was represented while reading. Results of these studies generally suggest age preservation in the activation of emotion information in language processing.     

Long-term memory for 400 pictures on a common theme

Long-term memory for large numbers of color photographs with a common motif--doors--was studied using pictures with two levels of informative cues: original photographs, and edited pictures in which extraneous information on details such as vegetation, paint scratches, signs, and lamp posts was removed. In the study phase, subjects viewed 400 pictures and were subsequently tested for memory on two-alternative forced-choice discriminations between studied and distracter pictures from the same picture category, at retention intervals between 0.5 h and 9 days. When tested with the nonedited original photographs immediate memory performance was close to 85% correct; when pictorial details were removed memory performance dropped by 20%. The decay functions were shallow with parallel paths for the categories of pictures. It is concluded that specific details of visual scenes contributed to long-term memory of those scenes.