The child-psychoanalytic play interview: a technique for studying thematic content.

Child psychoanalysts have long viewed play as a reflection of children's inner lives and have used the themes children represent in play for diagnostic and therapeutic work. Given the central role children's play has for clinical work, few studies have addressed play empirically. This paper presents a technique for studying the thematic content of children's play as it emerges during a play session with a child analyst. We report the steps involved in developing this investigative technique and describe the interobserver agreement among four rates using the technique with videotaped play sessions. Implications for future research using such an approach are discussed.     

Behavior identification as a mediator of dispositional inference.

According to Trope's (1986) 2-stage model, the use of situational information ("A was teased") to identify behavior ("A reacted aggressively") may result in subsequent dispositional inferences ("A is an aggressive person") that seem insensitive to situational information. Two determinants of the situational biasing effect on behavior identification were varied, namely, behavior ambiguity and order of situational and behavioral information. It was found that when behavior was ambiguous and preceded by situational information, the latter affected behavior identification but not dispositional inference; in contrast, when behavior was unambiguous or when it was followed by situational information, the latter affected dispositional inference but not behavior identification. Thus, the same conditions that allowed situational information to bias behavior identification also nullified the effect of situational information on dispositional inference.     

On the control of automatic processes: a parallel distributed processing account of the Stroop effect

Traditional views of automaticity are in need of revision. For example, automaticity often has been treated as an all-or-none phenomenon, and traditional theories have held that automatic processes are independent of attention. Yet recent empirical data suggest that automatic processes are continuous, and furthermore are subject to attentional control. A model of attention is presented to address these issues. Within a parallel distributed processing framework, it is proposed that the attributes of automaticity depend on the strength of a processing pathway and that strength increases with training. With the Stroop effect as an example, automatic processes are shown to be continuous and to emerge gradually with practice. Specifically, a computational model of the Stroop task simulates the time course of processing as well as the effects of learning. This was accomplished by combining the cascade mechanism described by McClelland (1979) with the backpropagation learning algorithm (Rumelhart, Hinton, & Williams, 1986). The model can simulate performance in the standard Stroop task, as well as aspects of performance in variants of this task that manipulate stimulus-onset asynchrony, response set, and degree of practice. The model presented is contrasted against other models, and its relation to many of the central issues in the literature on attention, automaticity, and interference is discussed.     

Neurodevelopmental differences in emotional prosody in normal children and children with left and right temporal lobe epilepsy

Emotional prosody, which has been defined as the emotional aspects of speech which communicate pleasure, fear, sorrow, anger, etc., has been demonstrated to be primarily a function of the nondominant hemisphere (typically, the right hemisphere) in adult populations. However, few researchers have addressed the developmental or lateralized nature of emotional prosody in children. In this study, an instrument was developed to measure the receptive aspects of emotional prosody in pediatric populations and administered to normal children ages 6 to 11 years old. An analysis of variance revealed significant age-related differences. Additionally, the instrument was administered to 12 children with right temporal lobe epilepsy and 11 children with left temporal lobe epilepsy. Analysis of variance indicated that there was no significant difference in scores between the left temporal and right temporal lobe groups. However, right temporal epileptic patients scored significantly lower than normal children on all sections of the instrument, suggesting that in children like adults, the right temporal lobe may be dominant with respect to the receptive aspects of emotional prosody.     

Dissociation of short- and long-range apparent motion in visual search

The visual search paradigm was used in four experiments to investigate apparent motion perception. The addition of distractor items led to a linear increase in reaction time under long-range (LR) conditions (greater than 35 min of arc displacement), whereas reaction time was independent of displays size under short-range (SR) conditions (less than 18 min of arc). Although clear performance differences were obtained, Ss had difficulty in distinguishing between the two types of apparent motion displays when asked to make such judgments (Experiment 2). Experiments 3 and 4 explored some variables that may constrain the search process. Search times under LR conditions were reduced when some of the distractors were stationary or the motion of the distractors was homogeneous. Form and motion were found to be separable, whereas color and motion were not. Varying the color (and brightness) interfered with the processing of motion information.     

Intellectual,academic, and adaptive functioning of Tourette syndrome children with and without attention deficit disorder

The intellectual, academic, and adaptive strengths and weaknesses of 30, medication-free children (M = 10.5 years) with Tourette syndrome (TS) were assessed with a battery of standardized psychoeducational measures and the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales. Results indicated significant relative weaknesses in mental and written arithmetic, and relative strengths in reading achievement and abstract, logical thinking. Socialization skills emerged as a significant weakness in adaptive functioning. Comparisons between TS children with attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity (ADD-H) (n = 19) weakness in both groups in all areas assessed, but significantly lower performance IQs in TS subjects with ADD-H. These findings are discussed in relation to future research with TS children.     

Recognition deficits resulting from focussed attention in aphasia

Summary Two nonverbal short-term memory tasks, a Picture Recognition and a Paired Association Task, were performed by matched groups of aphasics and brain-damaged controls (N=52 each). For both tasks the alternatives on the answer forms differed systematically on three dimensions, one of which had been highlighted experimentally for each item before the target picture was indicated. In both tasks aphasics made more errors than braindamaged controls only with respect to those features that had been stressed beforehand; they were less able than controls to take advantage of focussed attention. The number of these errors was correlated with performance in the Token Test, a picture naming and a word comprehension task.There were no differences between the groups in response to variations in the semantic saliency of the discriminating features or in the semantic and phonetic relationship between words denoting the reference stimuli. The lack of interactions might have been due to a strong ceiling effect in both tasks.