Infant Contingency Learning in Different Cultural Contexts

Three‐month‐old Cameroonian Nso farmer and German middle‐class infants were compared regarding learning and retention in a computerized mobile task. Infants achieving a preset learning criterion during reinforcement were tested for immediate and long‐term retention measured in terms of an increased response rate after reinforcement and after a 24‐h delay compared with baseline. It was hypothesized that infants from both cultural communities would acquire the contingency between own motion and mobile movement, as they similarly experience contingent responses in social interactions. Nso infants were assumed to show a higher learning rate related to their advanced gross motor development, whereas German infants were expected to show a higher baseline because of culture‐typical motor handling promoting a high level of activity (i.e. lying supine). Results showed immediate and long‐term retention in infants from both cultural contexts, as well as a higher baseline for German infants. Although the learning rate was higher for Cameroonian infants, logistic regression revealed that learning was not related to gross motor development but depended on the level of baseline response. Thus, contingency learning was shown in different cultural environments, and the level of baseline activity coined by culture‐specific motor handling turned out to influence learning within the mobile task. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Parents' Empathic Responses and Pain and Distress in Pediatric Patients

We investigated the relationship between parents' empathic responses prior to their children undergoing cancer treatment procedures and children's pain/distress during the procedures. We hypothesized: (1) parents' empathic distress would be positively associated with children's pain/distress, (2) parents' empathic concern would be negatively associated with children's pain/distress; and (3) parents' enduring dispositions and social support would be associated with their empathic responses. Parents completed: (1) measures of dispositions and perceived social support several weeks before their children underwent the procedures, and (2) state measures of empathic distress and empathic concern just before the procedures. Empathic distress was positively associated with children's pain; empathic concern was negatively associated with children's pain/distress. Predictions about dispositions and social support were also substantially confirmed.     

Conscious recollection and binding among context features

Recent research suggests that the subjective feeling of conscious recollection is uniquely characterized by joint memory for several context features while merely familiar memories lack this property (Meiser, Sattler, & Weisser, 2008). In the present research we took the novel approach of extending the dual task paradigm to the simultaneous study of subjective retrieval experience (using the remember/know procedure) and joint memory for two orthogonal context features. While dual task load during encoding lead to reductions in the frequency of the subjective experience of conscious recollection and reductions in overall context memory, joint context memory was not affected. Furthermore, the relation of higher overall context memory for consciously recollected items than for familiar items was preserved even under dual task load. These results have import implications for theories of long-term feature binding and the processes involved in producing the experience of conscious recollection.     

Automatic activation of attribute knowledge in heuristic inference from memory

In memory-based decision making, people often rely on simple heuristics such as take-the-best (TTB; Gigerenzer & Goldstein, Psychological Review, 103, 650–669, 1996), which processes information about the alternatives sequentially and stops processing as soon as a decision can be made. In this article, we examine the memory processes associated with TTB—in particular, to what degree the selective memory retrieval of relevant information required by TTB is accompanied by automatic activation of associated but irrelevant information. To address this question, we studied the fan effect (Anderson, Cognitive Psychology, 6, 451–474, 1974), which is assumed to arise from automatic spread of activation, in inferences from memory. Participants were instructed to use TTB when making decisions about objects on the basis of previously memorized attribute information. Both the number of attributes required by TTB and the number of attributes associated with an object (i.e., fan level) were manipulated. As it turned out, response times and the correct execution of TTB were a function not only of the number of required attributes, but also of the number of associated attributes. This suggests that information that TTB “ignores” is nevertheless activated in memory.     

Use of colour for language processing during reading

The study examined whether literal correspondence is necessary for the use of visual features during word recognition and text comprehension. Eye movements were recorded during reading and used to change the colour of dialogue when it was fixated. In symbolically congruent colour conditions, dialogue of female and male characters was shown in orchid and blue, respectively. The reversed assignment was used in incongruent conditions, and no colouring was applied in a control condition. Analyses of oculomotor activity revealed Stroop-type congruency effects during dialogue reading, with shorter viewing durations in congruent than incongruent conditions. Colour influenced oculomotor measures that index the recognition and integration of words, indicating that it influenced multiple stages of language processing.     

Dyadic Flexibility in Early Parent–Child Interactions: Relations with Maternal Depressive Symptoms and Child Negativity and Behaviour Problems

Lower levels of parent–child affective flexibility indicate risk for children's problem outcomes. This short‐term longitudinal study examined whether maternal depressive symptoms were related to lower levels of dyadic affective flexibility and positive affective content in mother–child problem‐solving interactions at age 3.5 years (N = 100) and whether these maternal and dyadic factors predicted child emotional negativity and behaviour problems at a 4‐month follow‐up. Dyadic flexibility and positive affect were measured using dynamic systems‐based modelling of second‐by‐second affective patterns during a mother–child problem‐solving task. Results showed that higher levels of maternal depressive symptoms were related to lower levels of dyadic affective flexibility, which predicted children's higher levels of negativity and behaviour problems as rated by teachers. Mothers' ratings of child negativity and behaviour problems were predicted by their own depressive symptoms and individual child factors, but not by dyadic flexibility. There were no effects of dyadic positive affect. Findings highlight the importance of studying patterns in real‐time dyadic parent–child interactions as potential mechanisms of risk in developmental psychopathology. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Serotonergic dysfunction: Brain imaging and behavioral correlates

Identification of gene-environment and gene-gene interactions has become increasingly important in understanding psychiatric disorders. Dysfunction of central serotonergic neurotransmission has been implicated in alcoholism, depression, and anxiety. We review the literature on nonhuman primates that assesses the interaction between the genetic constitution of the regulatory region of the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) and environmental factors. Prospective studies in nonhuman primates that underwent social stress found a reduction of the serotonin turnover rate among carriers of one or two short alleles in a functional polymorphism of the 5-HTT promoter. In these primates, brain imaging studies showed a relative increase in the availability of raphe serotonin transporters. A low serotonin turnover rate and a high availability of serotonin transporters were associated with reduced response to excessive alcohol intake, anxiety, and impulsive aggression. Animal experiments point to a relationship between serotonergic dysfunction, negative mood states, and excessive alcohol intake, which may in part be mediated by reduced alcohol-induced sedation.     

Judgments of risk frequencies: tests of possible cognitive mechanisms

How do people judge which of 2 risks claims more lives per year? The authors specified 4 candidate mechanisms and tested them against people's judgments in 3 risk environments. Two mechanisms, availability by recall and regressed frequency, conformed best to people's choices. The same mechanisms also accounted well for the mapping accuracy of estimates of absolute risk frequencies. Their nearly indistinguishable level of performance is remarkable given their different assumptions about the underlying cognitive processes and the fact that they give rise to different expectations regarding the accuracy of people's inferences. The authors discuss this seeming paradox, the lack of impact of financial incentives on judgmental accuracy, and the dominant interpretation of inaccurate inferences in terms of biased information processing.     

Time course of linguistic information extraction from consecutive words during eye fixations in reading

Sequential attention shift models of reading predict that an attended (typically fixated) word must be recognized before useful linguistic information can be obtained from the following (parafoveal) word. These models also predict that linguistic information is obtained from a parafoveal word immediately prior to a saccade toward it. To test these assumptions, sentences were constructed with a critical pretarget-target word sequence, and the temporal availability of the (parafoveal) target preview was manipulated while the pretarget word was fixated. Target viewing effects, examined as a function of prior target visibility, revealed that extraction of linguistic target information began 70-140 ms after the onset of pretarget viewing. Critically, acquisition of useful linguistic information from a target was not confined to the ending period of pretarget viewing. These results favor theoretical conceptions in which there is some temporal overlap in the linguistic processing of a fixated and parafoveally visible word during reading.