Psychological Dimensions of Unemployment: A Gender Comparison Between Belgian and South African Unemployed

This study sought to compare South African and Belgian unemployed in their subjective experience of unemployment, committed towards employment and job search behaviour. We also considered gender differences regarding the psychological dimensions of unemployment between Belgium and South Africa. A cross-sectional survey design was used. Unemployed people were sampled from the Potchefstroom area in South Africa (N = 381) and the Brussels area in Belgium (N = 305). The Experiences of Unemployment Questionnaire was administered. While no significant gender differences were found in South Africa, significant differences were found for all three psychological dimensions of unemployment in the Belgian sample. South African intervention programmes should be developed in order to cope with long-lasting unemployment, social isolation and further financial deprivation.     

Are Older Adults More Dependent on Visual Information in Regulating Self-Motion Than Younger Adults?

Older adults look at the ground more while they are walking than younger adults do. In the present study, the effect of blocking that exproprioceptive visual information on the walking pattern of older adults was investigated. The first 0.75 m of the floor in front of healthy young adults (n = 10, mean age = 26.0 years) and 2 groups of older adults (n = 10, mean age 65.7 years; and n = 9, mean age = 75.9 years) was occluded. The dependent variables were step velocity, step length, and step frequency. The effect of the manipulation on those kinematic variables increased with age. The older adults had a significant increase in velocity and step length. The possible use of optic flow information from the ground to regulate the velocity of self-motion is discussed.     

Learning new movement patterns: a study on good and poor writers comparing learning conditions emphasizing spatial, timing or abstract characteristics

In the earliest stages of motor-skill learning cognitive, visuo-spatial and dynamic processes play an important role. Which of these should be addressed first when children need to learn a new complex movement sequence? This study compares three learning methods in a within-subject design by having 18 good and 18 poor 8-year-old writers master unfamiliar, letter-like patterns by (1) tracing a trajectory on a screen, (2) tracking a moving target (pursuit), and (3) performing the pattern using written explicit instructions. Following each 10-trial learning phase, the children completed a short test phase. Besides errors and kinematic data, Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) was used to calculate the deviation for each pattern from the ideal shape (DTW-distance). As predicted, the number of errors and DTW-distance were very low during the learning phase of the tracing and pursuit conditions and higher in the explicit condition. Conversely, in the test phase, tracing yielded the highest DTW-distance and the explicit condition the lowest DTW-distance and error percentages. The results were remarkably similar for the good and poor writers. The poor learning results of the tracing condition and the good results of the explicit condition have important implications for the teaching of handwriting and remedial therapy.     

Changing brains, changing perspectives: the neurocognitive development of reciprocity

Adolescence is characterized by the emergence of advanced forms of social perspective taking and significant changes in social behavior. Yet little is known about how changes in social cognition are related to changes in brain function during adolescence. In this study, we investigated the neural correlates of social behavior during three phases of adolescence, carrying out functional magnetic resonance imaging of participants' brains while they were Player 2 in the Trust Game. We found that with age, adolescents were increasingly sensitive to the perspective of the other player, as indicated by their reciprocal behavior. These advanced forms of social perspective-taking behavior were associated with increased involvement of the left temporo-parietal junction and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In contrast, young adolescents showed more activity in the anterior medial prefrontal cortex, a region previously associated with self-oriented processing and mentalizing. These findings suggest that the asynchronous development of these neural systems may underlie the shift from thinking about self to thinking about the other.     

WordGen: a tool for word selection and nonword generation in Dutch, English, German, and French.

WordGen is an easy-to-use program that uses the CELEX and Lexique lexical databases for word selection and nonword generation in Dutch, English, German, and French. Items can be generated in these four languages, specifying any combination of seven linguistic constraints: number of letters, neighborhood size, frequency, summated position-nonspecific bigram frequency, minimum position-nonspecific bigram f requency, position-specific frequency of the initial and final bigram, and orthographic relatedness. The program also has a module to calculate the respective values of these variables for items that have already been constructed, either with the program or taken from earlier studies. Stimulus queries can be entered through WordGen's graphical user interface or by means of batch files. WordGen is especially useful for (1) Dutch and German item generation, because no such stimulus-selection tool exists for these languages, (2) the generation of nonwords for all four languages, because our program has some important advantages over previous nonword generation approaches, and (3) psycholinguistic experiments on bilingualism, because the possibility of using the same tool for different languages increases the cross-linguistic comparability of the generated item lists. WordGen is free and available at http://expsy.ugent.be/wordgen.htm.     

“Logic of artistic development: the case of Mondrian” [New Ideas in Psychology 21 (2003) 221-246]

In this article I show how we can give a formal representation and analysis of evolutions in artistic style, using the work of the painter Mondrian as an example. Capitalising on the idea that radical change in thought implies related changes in judgement criteria, we can in a ‘‘logic of development’’ specify the relations within, and between, those different sets of artistic judgement criteria that are considered typical of successive stages in artistic development. I discuss some of the problems involved in dealing with post-conventional thinking and judgement. Then I propose five major steps in Mondrian's artistic quest, showing how it is different—and how different it is—from other kinds of (e.g. moral or aesthetic) judgement development. Whereas many kinds of conceptual development lead to (various types of) criterion expansion, this form of entirely postconventional development goes in the opposite direction of a most stringent criterion reduction.     

Salient features in 3-D haptic shape perception

Shape is an important cue for recognizing an object by touch. Several features, such as edges, curvature, surface area, and aspect ratio, are associated with 3-D shape. To investigate the saliency of 3-D shape features, we developed a haptic search task. The target and distractor items consisted of shapes (cube, sphere, tetrahedron, cylinder, and ellipsoid) that differed in several of these features. Exploratory movements were left as unconstrained as possible. Our results show that this type of haptic search task can be performed very efficiently (25 msec/item) and that edges and vertices are the most salient features. Furthermore, very salient local features, such as edges, can also be perceived through enclosure, an exploratory procedure usually associated with global shape. Since the subjects had to answer as quickly as possible, this suggests that speed may be a factor in selecting the appropriate exploratory procedure.     

Sensory Feedback in the Learning of a Novel Motor Task

The role of different forms of feedback is examined in learning a novel motor task. Five groups of ten subjects had to learn the voluntary control of the abduction of the big toe, each under a different feedback condition (proprioceptive feedback, visual feedback, EMG feedback, tactile feedback, force feedback). The task was selected for two reasons. First, in most motor learning studies subjects have to perform simple movements which present hardly any learning problem. Second, studying the learning of a new movement can provide useful information for neuromuscular reeducation, where patients often also have to learn movements for which no control strategy exists. The results show that artificial sensory feedback (EMG feedback, force feedback) is more powerful than “natural” (proprioceptive, visual, and tactile) feedback. The implications of these results for neuromuscular reeducation are discussed.     

Sequential dynamics in visual short-term memory

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is thought to help bridge across changes in visual input, and yet many studies of VSTM employ static displays. Here we investigate how VSTM copes with sequential input. In particular, we characterize the temporal dynamics of several different components of VSTM performance, including: storage probability, precision, variability in precision, guessing, and swapping. We used a variant of the continuous-report VSTM task developed for static displays, quantifying the contribution of each component with statistical likelihood estimation, as a function of serial position and set size. In Experiments 1 and 2, storage probability did not vary by serial position for small set sizes, but showed a small primacy effect and a robust recency effect for larger set sizes; precision did not vary by serial position or set size. In Experiment 3, the recency effect was shown to reflect an increased likelihood of swapping out items from earlier serial positions and swapping in later items, rather than an increased rate of guessing for earlier items. Indeed, a model that incorporated responding to non-targets provided a better fit to these data than alternative models that did not allow for swapping or that tried to account for variable precision. These findings suggest that VSTM is updated in a first-in-first-out manner, and they bring VSTM research into closer alignment with classical working memory research that focuses on sequential behavior and interference effects.     

Translation and associative priming with cross-lingual pseudohomophones: evidence for nonselective phonological activation in bilinguals

Using a lexical-decision task performed by Dutch-English bilinguals, the author showed that the recognition of visually presented first language (L1; e.g., touw) and second language (L2; e.g., back) targets is facilitated by L2 and L1 masked primes, respectively, which are pseudohomophones (roap and ruch) of the target's translation equivalent (rope and rug). Moreover, recognition of L2 targets (e.g., church) was also facilitated by L1 pseudohomophones (pous) of related words (paus [pope]). Contrastingly, no priming was observed for L1 targets (e.g., been [leg]) and L2 pseudohomophone associative primes (knea). Finally, the author found that an L2 target word (e.g., corner) is facilitated by a more frequent L2 (intralingual) homophone (e.g., hook) of its L1 translation equivalent (hoek). These findings strongly suggest language-independent activation of phonological representations in bilinguals and are compatible with the temporal delay assumption of the bilingual interactive activation plus model (A. Dijkstra & W. Van Heuven, 2002).