Perceptions Among Child Welfare Staff when Modifying A Child Mental Health Intervention to be Implemented in Child Welfare Services

In order to increase access to child mental health evidence‐based interventions (EBIs) for vulnerable and hard‐to‐engage families involved in the child welfare (CW) system, innovative approaches coupled with input from service providers are needed. One potential solution involves utilizing task‐shifting strategies and implementation science theoretical frameworks to implement such EBIs in CW settings. This study examined perceptions among CW staff who were members of a collaborative advisory board involved in the implementation of the 4Rs and 2Ss Strengthening Families Program (4R2S) in CW placement prevention settings, utilizing task‐shifting strategies and the Practical, Robust, Implementation, and Sustainability Model. Advisory board members reported difficulties in engaging families, heavy workloads, and conflicting implementation initiatives. While 4R2S was perceived as generally aligned with their organization's mission, modifications to the intervention and to agency procedures were recommended to promote implementation success. Suggested modifications to the existing 4R2S training and supervision are discussed. Findings underscore the importance of understanding the experiences of CW service providers, which can inform future efforts to implement child mental health EBIs in CW services.     

Neurodevelopmental model of long-term outcomes of adult survivors of childhood brain tumors

Childhood brain tumors and related treatments disrupt the developing brain and have a cascading impact on core cognitive skills and intellectual (intelligence quotient [IQ]) and academic achievement outcomes. Theoretical models for this cascade have been developed based on the literature, but no studies thus far have empirically evaluated the models. The current study aimed to empirically test the two extant models and generate a new data-driven model of the relationships among neurodevelopmental risk factors, core cognitive skills (i.e., processing speed, attention span, working memory), and IQ and achievement outcomes. Fifty-seven adult survivors of childhood brain tumors and fifty-seven demographically matched neurotypical individuals were included in the current study. The average age at brain tumor diagnosis was 8 years, and the average time since diagnosis was 17 years. Three a priori path models tested the hypothesized relationships among variables. Results of the path analyses revealed that the hybrid model best fit the data for both survivors and controls based on all statistical criteria. For survivors, processing speed was the core cognitive skill most widely associated with neurodevelopmental risk factors and outcomes. However, working memory and attention span also had unique contributions to IQ and academic achievement. Processing speed appears to be the central cognitive skill that disrupts the other core cognitive skills of attention span and working memory, and all three make a unique contribution to IQ and academic achievement. This is best demonstrated by a novel neurodevelopmental model that combines components of two earlier untested theoretical models.     

A Practical Approach to Revising Prioritized Knowledge Bases

This paper investigates simple syntactic methods for revising prioritized belief bases, that are semantically meaningful in the frameworks of possibility theory and of Spohn's ordinal conditional functions. Here, revising prioritized belief bases amounts to conditioning a distribution function on interpretations. The input information leading to the revision of a knowledge base can be sure or uncertain. Different types of scales for priorities are allowed: finite vs. infinite, numerical vs. ordinal. Syntactic revision is envisaged here as a process which transforms a prioritized belief bases into a new prioritized belief base, and thus allows a subsequent iteration.     

Is this still called a dog? 18‐month‐olds' generalization of familiar labels to unusual objects

In two experiments the flexibility of 18‐month‐olds' extension of familiar object labels was investigated using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm. The first experiment tested whether infants consider intact and incomplete objects as equally acceptable referents for familiar labels. Infants looked equally long at the intact and incomplete objects whether or not a label was presented. In the second experiment, infants were requested to find the referent of a target word among an incomplete target and an intact distracter or an intact target and an incomplete distracter. The incomplete objects were missing a large or small part. Infants looked longer at the incomplete target, even when large or small parts were deleted. Taken together, these findings suggest that infants do not hold a strong shape bias when generalizing familiar words. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When language affects cognition and when it does not: an analysis of grammatical gender and classification

The focus of this work was on the relation between grammatical gender and categorization. In one set of studies, monolingual English-, Spanish-, French-, and German-speaking children and adults assigned male and female voices to inanimate objects. Results from Spanish and French speakers indicated effects of grammatical gender on classification; results from German speakers did not. A connectionist model simulated the contradicting findings. The connectionist networks were also used to investigate which aspect of grammatical gender was responsible for the different pattern of findings. The predictions from the connectionist simulations were supported by the results from an artificial language-learning task. The results from this work demonstrate how connectionist networks can be used to identify the differences between languages that affect categorization.     

Pigeons group time intervals according to their relative duration

In the present research, we asked whether pigeons tended to judge time intervals not only in terms of their absolute value but also relative to a duration from which they must be discriminated (i.e., longer or shorter). Pigeons were trained on two independent temporal discriminations. In one discrimination, sample durations of 2 and 8 sec were associated with, for example, red and green hue comparisons, respectively, and in the other discrimination, sample durations of 4 and 16 sec were associated with vertical and horizontal line comparisons, respectively. If pigeons are trained on a temporal discrimination and tested with intermediate durations, the subjective midpoint typically occurs close to the geometric mean of the two trained values. The 4- and 8-sec values were selected to be the geometric mean of the two values in the other discrimination. When a 4-sec test sample was presented with the comparisons from the 2- and 8-sec discrimination, the pigeons preferred the comparison associated with the shorter sample. Similarly, when an 8-sec test sample was presented with the comparisons from the 4-and 16-sec discrimination, the pigeons preferred the comparison associated with the longer sample. Thus, a relative grouping effect was found. That is, durations that should have produced indifferent choice were influenced by their relative durations (shorter than or longer than the alternative) during training.     

A cross-modal weapon focus effect: The influence of a weapon's presence on memory for auditory information

To examine whether a weapon's presence impairs witnesses' memory for auditory information (as it impairs memory for visual information), we conducted two experiments in which undergraduates watched one version of a videotape depicting a male target who held either a weapon or a neutral object and conversed with a female character. The semantic content of his remarks was either easy or difficult to comprehend. The weapon's presence did not affect voice identification accuracy or memory for the target's vocal characteristics (e.g., pitch, loudness, speech rate) but did worsen memory for semantic content in the Difficult Comprehension condition. Our results can be explained by multiple resource models of attention, which propose separate resource "pools" for different sensory modalities.     

Secondary attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder following perinatal and childhood stroke: impact on cognitive and academic outcomes

This cross-sectional retrospective clinical research study examines a large group of children followed within a pediatric stroke program and a developmental attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) clinic at the Hospital for Sick Children, between May 2004 and June 2016. All children with a history of stroke who participated in a neuropsychological assessment between the ages of 4 and 18 years were considered for inclusion. From a sample of 275 participants with a history of stroke, 36 children (13.1%) received a diagnosis of secondary ADHD. Children with secondary ADHD were younger at the time of stroke and more likely to be identified as having a presumed perinatal stroke and persistent seizures than children without secondary ADHD diagnoses. There were no differences in pattern of lesion, size, or laterality between children who developed secondary ADHD and those who did not. Children with secondary ADHD had the lowest scores across all cognitive and academic measures compared to children with stroke-only and developmental ADHD. Findings highlight the added risk of receiving a diagnosis of secondary ADHD following pediatric stroke. Implications for future research and directed intervention are discussed.     

Selective social learning in infancy: looking for mechanisms

Although there is mounting evidence that selective social learning begins in infancy, the psychological mechanisms underlying this ability are currently a controversial issue. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether theory of mind abilities and statistical learning skills are related to infants’ selective social learning. Seventy‐seven 18‐month‐olds were first exposed to a reliable or an unreliable speaker and then completed a word learning task, two theory of mind tasks, and a statistical learning task. If domain‐general abilities are linked to selective social learning, then infants who demonstrate superior performance on the statistical learning task should perform better on the selective learning task, that is, should be less likely to learn words from an unreliable speaker. Alternatively, if domain‐specific abilities are involved, then superior performance on theory of mind tasks should be related to selective learning performance. Findings revealed that, as expected, infants were more likely to learn a novel word from a reliable speaker. Importantly, infants who passed a theory of mind task assessing knowledge attribution were significantly less likely to learn a novel word from an unreliable speaker compared to infants who failed this task. No such effect was observed for the other tasks. These results suggest that infants who possess superior social‐cognitive abilities are more apt to reject an unreliable speaker as informant. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/zuuCniHYzqo     

Developing skills in counselling and psychotherapy: a scoping review of Interpersonal Process Recall and Reflecting Team methods in initial therapist training

The authors conducted a scoping review of the peer-reviewed literature associated with Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) and Reflecting Team (RT) methods in order to find evidence for their use within skills development in therapist trainings. Inclusion criteria were: empirical research, reviews of empirical research, and responses to these; RT or IPR for skills development in counsellors/psychotherapists undertaking initial training. Six papers were identified (four IPR, two RT), all from the USA. Of the four IPR papers, three were themselves reviews, the fourth empirical paper being of poor methodological quality. There was some evidence that IPR is more valuable in developing reflective practice than in initial skills training. The small number of RT studies, of varying methodological quality, made it difficult to draw any conclusions about the appropriateness of this method for initial skills training. However, the method appeared to have been broadly welcomed by students for its potential to be inclusive and collaborative. The limitations of this current review are acknowledged, and research recommendations made.