Developmental Links Between Trajectories of Physical Violence,Vandalism, Theft,and Alcohol-Drug Use from Childhood to Adolescence

Differences in developmental trajectories of physical violence, vandalism, theft, and alcohol-drug use from ages 10 to 15 were studied. For females and for males, three trajectories of theft and of alcohol-drug use increased from 10 years to 15 years, while only the high trajectory of vandalism increased from ten to 14. All trajectories of physical violence decreased. Children who engaged in the high trajectories of vandalism, theft, and alcohol-drug use had a high probability of also being high in physical violence. Compared to males, females were less likely to be on the high trajectory of physical violence, and their trajectories of other antisocial behaviors were less strongly associated with high levels of physical violence. The results suggest that physical violence during pre-adolescence and adolescence has a different developmental pattern than other forms of antisocial behavior, and that its relation to these other forms of antisocial behavior differs by sex.     

Early perception of written syllables in French: An event-related potential study

The present study examined whether written syllable units are perceived in first steps of letter string processing. An illusory conjunction experiment was conducted while event-related potentials were recorded. Colored pseudowords were presented such that there was a match or mismatch between the syllable boundaries and the color boundaries. The results showed that congruent stimuli for which the syllable and color boundaries coincided produced a greater positive-going waveform than incongruent stimuli for which the syllable and color boundaries did not coincide. This syllable–color congruency effect was observed to occur both prior to 100 ms, and in a time window commencing at 150 ms. This finding suggests that syllable units are perceived in the initial steps of French visual word processing. Moreover, this study underlines the specificity of the illusory conjunction paradigm as a relevant and powerful tool of investigation of sublexical units that are automatically evoked from word perception.     

Genetic and environmental etiology of emotional and social behaviors in 5-month-old infant twins: influence of the social context

The study investigated the genetic and environmental contributions to individual differences in measures of socioemotional reactivity and emotion regulation with a sample of 115 monozygotic (MZ) and 156 dizygotic (DZ) 5-month-old twin pairs. Twins' zygosity was determined by a combination of DNA typing and physical similarity. Twins' behaviors (motor activity level, social gaze, gaze aversion, positive expression, negative expression, and self-comfort) were videotaped in a laboratory while infants were presented televised sequences of neutral and happy emotional expressions posed by their mother (familiar condition) and a female stranger (unfamiliar condition). Regardless of the social context, the findings based on model-fitting analyses indicated that nonshared environmental influences explained most of the variance of behavioral data. However, there was evidence that motor activity level (an index of emotional arousal) and the latency and frequency of gaze aversion (an index of emotional regulation) were best represented by a model incorporating both additive genetic and nonshared environmental (i.e., AE) influences when infants were exposed to the unfamiliar adult (heritability estimates ranging from 19% to 31%). The results suggest the importance of nonshared environmental influences during early infancy and stress the role of social context for revealing moderate genetic contributions to individual differences in emotional arousal and emotion regulation.     

Grammatical incongruency and vocabulary types

Four experiments conducted in French were performed to investigate the role of grammatical congruency and vocabulary class on lexical decision times. In Experiment 1, using a double lexical decision, slower reaction times were found for pairs of words that disagreed in gender or number than for congruent pairs. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 tested this effect with a standard priming procedure. The grammatical congruency effect varied according to presentation times (130, 150, or 500 msec) and to vocabulary class of context word (closed or open). Closed-class context words induced stronger grammatical effect than did open-class words. These results suggest that the grammatical link existing between the two words of a pair is more immediately computed when the first one is a closed-class item and argue for a distinct computational role of open- and closed-class words in sentence processing.     

Attentional Selectivity in Short-term Memory: Similarity of Process,Not Similarity of Content,Determines Disruption

Background sound substantially disrupts serial recall, even under conditions where participants are explicitly told to ignore it. Study of such a phenomenon may serve to illuminate the manner in which information from various sources interacts in memory, as well as the extent to which unattended information is processed. A review of the literature is presented that points to a number of conclusions. First, that interference occurs in memory, not on the basis of similarity of content between relevant and irrelevant material, but rather on the basis of similarity of process. Specifically, in a serial recall task, the key memory process is that of order retention, and therefore, order information in the sequence of auditory events interferes with the process of ordering within the rehearsal set. Second, that organisation and interference within memory are intimately connected with perceptual processes.     

Autobiographical memory, autonoetic consciousness, and self-perspective in aging

In this study, the authors examined the effects of aging on autobiographical memory in 180 participants by means of a new method designed to assess across 5 lifetime periods the nature of memories-that is, specificity and spontaneity--and the phenomenal experience of remembering--that is, self-perspective and autonoetic consciousness--via the field/observer and remember/know paradigms respectively. Age-related differences were found for the specificity and spontaneity of memories and the phenomenal experience of remembering. There was an increase in observer and know responses with age, but a decrease in field and remember responses and in the ability to justify them by recalling sensory-perceptive, affective, or spatiotemporal specific details. This pattern confirms the existence of a semantic-episodic dissociation in autobiographical memory in aging. Moreover, the data support the view that older participants can subjectively "travel back in time" to relive personal events in the most distant past better than those in the recent past.     

Attentional and perceptual sources of the auditory attentional blink

When a rapid succession of auditory stimuli is listened to, processing of the second of two successive targets among fillers is often impaired, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink (AB). Three experiments were conducted to examine the role of filler items in modulating the size of the auditory AB, using a two-alternative forced choice discrimination paradigm. In the first experiment, dual-stream presentations in which low- and high-pitch items were separated by six semitones were tested. A transient deficit in reporting the probe was observed in the presence of fillers that was greater when fillers were in the same stream as the probe. In the absence of a filler, there was a residual deficit, but this was not related to the time lag between the target and the probe. In the second and third experiments, in which single-stream presentations were used, a typical AB was found in the presence of homogeneous fillers, but heterogeneous fillers tended to produce a greater deficit. In the absence of a filler, there was little or no evidence of a blink. The pattern of results suggests that other attentional and perceptual factors contribute to the blink.     

Disruption by speech of serial short-term memory: The role of changing-state vowels

Serial short-term memory is markedly impaired by the presence of irrelevant speech so long as the successive tokens within the irrelevant speech are phonologically (or acoustically) dissimilar (Jones & Macken, 1995b). In two experiments in which consonant—vowel—consonant syllables were used as irrelevant speech tokens, we sought to evaluate the relative disruptive potency of changes in the final consonant only (Experiment 1), in the initial consonant, or in the vowel portion (Experiment 2) of each token. The results suggest that the vowel changes are the dominant source of disruption. This dominance may be explained, at least in part, by the role played by vowel sounds in the perceptual organization of speech and, in turn, the particular propensity for vowel changes to yield information about serial order. The results are consistent also with the view that the factors that promote order encoding in sound are also the ones that promote disruption.     

Kindergarten predictors of boys' stable behavior problems at the end of elementary school

This study predicted stable social maladjustment at ages 10, 11, and 12 from teacher behavioral ratings in kindergarten and a measure of family demographics. Kindergarten teachers rated 1,034 boys on hyperactivity, aggression, inattention, anxiety–withdrawal, and prosocial behavior. Sociodemographic information was collected from the parents. At ages 10, 11, and 12, teacher, parent, peer, and self-report behavior ratings were collected on 743 boys. School achievement was documented from school records. Boys whose average scores on each of the five behavioral ratings across ages 10, 11, and 12 were above the 90th percentile according to at least two informants were defined as having stable behavioral problems. From teacher ratings collected in kindergarten and family demographics, logistic regression analyses predicted stable social maladjustment. For each negative outcome there was a unique set of predictors. The results are discussed with reference to the early identification of children who are at risk.This research was supported by a grant from the Conseil Québécois de la Recherche Sociale. We would also like to thank H. Beauchesne, H. Boileau, P. Charlebois, L. David, L. Desmarais-Gervais, S. Larivée, and M. LeBlanc for their participation.