Narrative Skills,Gender, Culture,and Children’s Long-Term Memory Accuracy of a Staged Event

This study examined the extent to which school-aged children’s general narrative skills provide cognitive benefits for accurate remembering or enable good storytelling that undermines memory accuracy. European American and Chinese American 6-year-old boys and girls (N = 114) experienced a staged event in the laboratory and were asked to tell a story from a picture book that accessed their narrative skill. Children were interviewed about the staged event 6 months later to assess memory accuracy. Greater narrative skill when storytelling was associated with decreased free recall and recognition memory accuracy for the staged event. In free recall responses, this effect was driven by an increase in the likelihood that inaccurate details would be included in responses from children with better general narrative skills. For girls only, narrative skill predicted poorer recognition accuracy. Girls were also more language-proficient and provided more correct details in free recall than did boys. Chinese American children were more accurate than European American children when responding to recall prompts due to less frequent provision of incorrect details, particularly in girls. Findings are discussed in light of the roles of socialization in memory-reporting accuracy.     

Escape from rich‐to‐lean transitions: Stimulus change and timeout

Extended pausing during discriminable transitions from rich‐to‐lean conditions can be viewed as escape (i.e., rich‐to‐lean transitions function aversively). In the current experiments, pigeons’ key pecking was maintained by a multiple fixed‐ratio fixed‐ratio schedule of rich or lean reinforcers. Pigeons then were provided with another, explicit, mechanism of escape by changing the stimulus from the transition‐specific stimulus used in the multiple schedule to a mixed‐schedule stimulus (Experiment 1) or by producing a period of timeout in which the stimulus was turned off and the schedule was suspended (Experiment 2). Overall, escape was under joint control of past and upcoming reinforcer magnitudes, such that responses on the escape key were most likely during rich‐to‐lean transitions, and second‐most likely during lean‐to‐lean transitions. Even though pigeons pecked the escape key, they paused before doing so, and the latency to begin the fixed ratio (i.e., the pause) remained extended during rich‐to‐lean transitions. These findings suggest that although the stimulus associated with rich‐to‐lean transitions functioned aversively, pausing is more than simply escape responding from the stimulus.     

What's Context Got to Do with It? Comparative Difficulty of Test Questions Influences Metacognition and Corrected Scores for Formula‐scored Exams

Summary: On formula‐scored exams students receive points and penalties for correct and incorrect answers, respectively, but they can avoid the penalty by withholding incorrect answers. However, test‐takers have difficulty strategically regulating their accuracy and often set an overly conservative metacognitive response bias (e.g., Higham, 2007). The current experiments extended these findings by exploring whether the comparative difficulty of surrounding test questions (i.e., easy vs. hard)—a factor unrelated to the knowledge being tested—impacts metacognitive response bias for medium‐difficulty test questions. Comparative difficulty had no significant influence on participants' ability to choose correct answers for medium questions, but it did affect willingness to report answers and confidence ratings. This difference carried over to corrected scores (scores after penalties are applied) when comparative difficulty was manipulated within‐subjects: Scores were higher in the hard condition. Results are discussed in terms of implications for interpreting formula‐scored tests and underlying mechanisms of performance.Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Repressive coping and cardiovascular reactivity to novel and recurrent stress

Background and objectives: Repressors tend to report less negative emotion and to describe challenges as less stressful, yet tend to exhibit higher rates of cardiovascular disease. While repressive coping has been shown to be associated with exaggerated physiological reactivity to novel stress, we sought to establish if elevated responses persisted across repeated exposure.

Design and methods: In a sample of 86 healthy female adults, a verbal-autonomic response dissociation index of repressive coping was computed. Participants were exposed to two consecutive stress tasks, with analyses based on comparisons of consecutive stress responses.

Results: Analysis of covariance demonstrated significant differences across the study on diastolic blood pressure and cardiac output, as a function of repressive coping. Repressors showed elevated reactions to both stress tasks; however, cardiac output responses to the second task were more muted indicating that repressive coping was associated with successful adaptation to recurrent stress. Nevertheless, repressive copers maintained an exaggerated cardiovascular responses to recurrent stress.

Conclusions: The present study identifies that repressive coping may be associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease development through elevated cardiovascular reactions to both novel and recurrent stress.     

Motor planning and execution in left- and right-handed individuals during a bimanual grasping and placing task

The issue of handedness has been the topic of great interest for researchers in a number of scientific domains. It is typically observed that the dominant hand yields numerous behavioral advantages over the non-dominant hand during unimanual tasks, which provides evidence of hemispheric specialization. In contrast to advantages for the dominant hand during motor execution, recent research has demonstrated that the right hand has advantages during motor planning (regardless of handedness), indicating that motor planning is a specialized function of the left hemisphere. In the present study we explored hemispheric advantages in motor planning and execution in left- and right-handed individuals during a bimanual grasping and placing task. Replicating previous findings, both motor planning and execution was influenced by object end-orientation congruency. In addition, although motor planning (i.e., end-state comfort) was not influenced by hand or handedness, motor execution differed between left and right hand, with shorter object transport times observed for the left hand, regardless of handedness. These results demonstrate that the hemispheric advantages often observed in unimanual tasks do not extend to discrete bimanual tasks. We propose that the differences in object transport time between the two hands arise from overt shifting visual fixation between the two hands/objects.     

Working memory contributions to reading comprehension components in middle childhood children

This study examined working memory contributions to reading comprehension subskills in Greek children (mean age 9 years, 1 month). The phonological loop of the Baddeley and Hitch working memory model was assessed with 3 recall tasks (words, nonwords, and digits) and a word list matching task. The central executive (CE) was assessed with 3 tasks (listening, counting, and backward digit recall). Participants were also given a receptive vocabulary task, a reading fluency task, and written stories accompanied by comprehension questions. Canonical correlation analyses showed that the comprehension variables were related to the CE rather than the phonological loop measures. CE functions were more strongly associated with elaborative inference generation (involving significant offline processing) and comprehension control (involving metacognitive monitoring). Smaller yet significant associations were observed between the CE and the necessary inference and literal comprehension measures, whereas a moderate relationship was found in the case of the simile comprehension variable. Among the CE variables, listening recall demonstrated the highest loading on the canonical function, followed by moderate yet significant counting and backward digit recall loadings. Vocabulary was found to fully mediate several associations between working memory and comprehension measures; however, the relationship between listening recall and elaborative inferences was partly mediated. Reading fluency and, on several occasions, Greek vocabulary knowledge did not mediate the relationships between CE measures and comprehension skills assessed. This study demonstrates the usefulness of CE measures for identifying young children's possible difficulties in carrying out specific reading comprehension processes.     

Recollection is impaired by the modification of interpretation bias

The interpretation paradigm of cognitive-bias modification (CBM-I) was modified with instructions used in process-dissociation procedures for the purpose of investigating processes contributing to performance on the transfer task. In Experiment 1, nonanxious students were trained to interpret ambiguous situations in either a negative or benign way (or they read nonambiguous scenarios). They were then asked to respond to new ambiguous situations, in the same way as contextually similar analogues during training, or to respond differently. Benign training proactively impaired memory for negative outcomes. This effect was replicated by anxious students in Experiment 2 and discussed with respect to the assumptions underlying process-dissociation procedures and directions for future research.     

The processing of auditory and visual recognition of self-stimuli

This study examined self-recognition processing in both the auditory and visual modalities by determining how comparable hearing a recording of one’s own voice was to seeing photograph of one’s own face. We also investigated whether the simultaneous presentation of auditory and visual self-stimuli would either facilitate or inhibit self-identification. Ninety-one participants completed reaction-time tasks of self-recognition when presented with their own faces, own voices, and combinations of the two. Reaction time and errors made when responding with both the right and left hand were recorded to determine if there were lateralization effects on these tasks. Our findings showed that visual self-recognition for facial photographs appears to be superior to auditory self-recognition for voice recordings. Furthermore, a combined presentation of one’s own face and voice appeared to inhibit rather than facilitate self-recognition and there was a left-hand advantage for reaction time on the combined-presentation tasks.     

Extended cognition and the metaphysics of mind

This paper explores the relationship between several ideas about the mind and cognition. The hypothesis of extended cognition claims that cognitive processes can and do extend outside the head, that elements of the world around us can actually become parts of our cognitive systems. It has recently been suggested that the hypothesis of extended cognition is entailed by one of the foremost philosophical positions on the nature of the mind: functionalism, the thesis that mental states are defined by their functional relations rather than by their physical constituents. Furthermore, it has been claimed that functionalism entails a version of extended cognition which is sufficiently radical as to be obviously false. I survey the debate and propose several ways of avoiding this conclusion, emphasizing the importance of distinguishing the hypothesis of extended cognition from the related notion of the extended mind.