Influences Between Online‐Exclusive,Conjoint and Offline‐Exclusive Friendship Networks: The Moderating Role of Shyness

Prior research has indicated that shy adolescents are more motivated to form friendships online than to form friendships offline. Little is known about whether having friendships found exclusively online may impact self‐esteem and forming offline friendships for these adolescents. This study therefore aimed to provide insight into the moderating role of shyness in the longitudinal interplay between friendships in online and offline contexts in early adolescence. Adolescents and their friends (193 girls, 196 boys; M_age = 13.29) were followed with three consecutive measurements with intervals of eight months. Results showed that particularly for shy adolescents, having friends exclusively online predicted increases in self‐esteem. Self‐esteem, in turn, was found to predict forming more friendships found both offline and online and forming more friendships found exclusively offline. Thus, findings supported the social compensation perspective that shy adolescents may benefit from having friends exclusively online, as these friendships may increase self‐esteem, thereby facilitating the formation of friendships found partially and completely offline. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Personality Types and Development of Adolescents' Conflict with Friends

This study examined the development of adolescents' conflict frequency and conflict resolution with their best friends, and tested whether adolescents with different personality types differed in these developmental changes from early to middle adolescence. Dutch adolescents (N = 922, 468 boys; M_age = 12.4 years at first wave) annually filled in questionnaires for five consecutive years. Growth modelling revealed that, whereas adolescents' conflict frequency and hostile conflict resolution did not change, positive problem solving, withdrawal, and compliance during conflict with best friends increased from age 12 to 16 years. Adolescents with different personality types differed in the mean levels of conflict frequency and conflict resolution strategies. That is, resilients had less conflict with friends than undercontrollers and overcontrollers. During conflict, resilients used the least hostile conflict resolution and compliance, and employed the most positive problem solving. Undercontrollers adopted the least positive problem solving, and overcontrollers complied and withdrew the most. Using a person‐centred approach, three developmental conflict resolution types were identified based on different constellations of the four conflict resolution strategies over time. Adolescents with different personality types had different distributions on the conflict resolution types. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Impaired holistic and analytic face processing in congenital prosopagnosia: Evidence from the eye-contingent mask/window paradigm

There is abundant evidence that face recognition, in comparison to the recognition of other objects, is based on holistic processing rather than analytic processing. One line of research that provides evidence for this hypothesis is based on the study of people who experience pronounced difficulties in visually identifying conspecifics on the basis of their face. Earlier, we developed a behavioural paradigm to directly test analytic vs. holistic face processing. In comparison to a to be remembered reference face stimulus, one of two test stimuli was either presented in full view, with an eye-contingently moving window (only showing the fixated face feature, and therefore only affording analytic processing), or with an eye-contingently moving mask or scotoma (masking the fixated face feature, but still allowing holistic processing). In the present study we use this paradigm (that we used earlier in acquired prosopagnosia) to study face perception in congenital prosopagnosia (people having difficulties recognizing faces from birth on, without demonstrable brain damage). We observe both holistic and analytic face processing deficits in people with congenital prosopagnosia. Implications for a better understanding, both of congenital prosopagnosia and of normal face perception, are discussed.     

A Systemic Analysis of Cheating in an Undergraduate Engineering Mechanics Course

Cheating in the undergraduate classroom is not a new problem, and it is recognized as one that is endemic to the education system. This paper examines the highly normative behavior of using unauthorized assistance (e.g., a solutions manual or a friend) on an individual assignment within the context of an upper division undergraduate course in engineering mechanics. The findings indicate that there are varying levels of accepting responsibility among the students (from denial to tempered to full) and that acceptance of responsibility can lead to identification of learning and necessary behavioral changes. The findings have implications for institutions and engineering faculty, in particular the need for consistent academic integrity education and the teaching of professional integrity and ethics.     

Conflict detection,dual processes,and logical intuitions: Some clarifications

Recent studies on conflict detection during thinking suggest that reasoners are sensitive to possible conflict between their heuristic judgement and elementary logical or probabilistic principles. I have argued that this conflict sensitivity calls for the postulation of logical intuitions and has implications for the way we conceive the interaction between System-1 and System-2 in dual process theories. In this paper I clarify potential misconceptions about this work, discuss the link with other approaches, and sketch directions for further research.     

Explaining Variability: Numerical Representations in 4- to 8-Year-Old Children

The present study aims to examine relations between number representations and various sources of individual differences within early stages of development of number representations. The mental number line has been found to develop from a logarithmic to a more linear representation. Sources under investigation are counting skills and executive functions and are set out against mental number lines from 0 to 10 and 0 to 100 in a sample of 4- to 8-year-old children (N = 80). Findings indicate that counting skills, inhibition, and updating are the most important predictors of the shape of the mental number line over and above age-related developmental differences, with number lines from 0 to 10 being linear to a large extent and number lines from 0 to 100 developing from a random pattern toward logarithmic representations. The shape of the mental number line was found to predict scores on the number comparison task only on the smaller-scale comparison task.     

Capacity estimates in working memory: Reliability and interrelationships among tasks

The concept of capacity has become increasingly important in discussions of working memory (WM), in so far as most models of WM conceptualize it as a limited-capacity mechanism for maintaining information in an active state, and as capacity estimates from at least one type of WM task—complex span—are valid predictors of real-world cognitive performance. However, the term capacity is also often used in the context of a distinct set of WM tasks, change detection, and may or may not refer to the same cognitive capability. We here develop maximum-likelihood models of capacity from each of these tasks—as well as from a third WM task that places heavy demands on cognitive control, the self-ordered WM task (SOT)—and show that the capacity estimates from change detection and complex span tasks are not correlated with each other, although capacity estimates from change detection tasks do correlate with those from the SOT. Furthermore, exploratory factor analysis confirmed that performance on the SOT and change detection load on the same factor, with performance on our complex span task loading on its own factor. These findings suggest that at least two distinct cognitive capabilities underlie the concept of WM capacity as it applies to each of these three tasks.     

Utilization of reward-prospect enhances preparatory attention and reduces stimulus conflict

The prospect of gaining money is an incentive widely at play in the real world. Such monetary motivation might have particularly strong influence when the cognitive system is challenged, such as when needing to process conflicting stimulus inputs. Here, we employed manipulations of reward-prospect and attentional-preparation levels in a cued-Stroop stimulus conflict task, along with the high temporal resolution of electrical brain recordings, to provide insight into the mechanisms by which reward-prospect and attention interact and modulate cognitive task performance. In this task, the cue indicated whether or not the participant needed to prepare for an upcoming Stroop stimulus and, if so, whether there was the potential for monetary reward (dependent on performance on that trial). Both cued attention and cued reward-prospect enhanced preparatory neural activity, as reflected by increases in the hallmark attention-related negative-polarity ERP slow wave (contingent negative variation [CNV]) and reductions in oscillatory Alpha activity, which was followed by enhanced processing of the subsequent Stroop stimulus. In addition, similar modulations of preparatory neural activity (larger CNVs and reduced Alpha) predicted shorter versus longer response times (RTs) to the subsequent target stimulus, consistent with such modulations reflecting trial-to-trial variations in attention. Particularly striking were the individual differences in the utilization of reward-prospect information. In particular, the size of the reward effects on the preparatory neural activity correlated across participants with the degree to which reward-prospect both facilitated overall task performance (shorter RTs) and reduced conflict-related behavioral interference. Thus, the prospect of reward appears to recruit attentional preparation circuits to enhance processing of task-relevant target information.