Learning about life and death in early childhood

have argued that young children initially understand biological phenomena in terms of vitalism, a mode of construal in which "life" or "life-force" is the central causal-explanatory concept. This study investigated the development of vitalistic reasoning in young children's concepts of life, the human body and death. Sixty preschool children between the ages of 3 years, 7 months and 5 years, 11 months participated. All children were initially given structured interviews to assess their knowledge of (1) human body function and (2) death. From this sample 40 children in the Training group were taught about the human body and how it functions to maintain life. The Control group (n=20) received no training. All 60 children were subsequently reassessed on their knowledge of human body function and death. Results from the initial interviews indicated that young children who spontaneously appealed to vitalistic concepts in reasoning about human body functioning were also more sophisticated in their understanding of death. Results from the posttraining interviews showed that children readily learned to adopt a vitalistic approach to human body functioning, and that this learning coincided with significant development in their understanding of human body function, and of death. The overall pattern of results supports the claim that the acquisition of a vitalistic causal-explanatory framework serves to structure children's concepts and facilitates learning in the domain of biology.     

What response times tell of children's behavior on the balance scale task

Analysis of accuracy of responses to balance scale problems gives a global idea of the cognitive processes that underlie problem-solving behavior on this task. We show that response times (RTs) provide additional detailed information about the kind and duration of these processes. We derive predictions about the RTs from Siegler's (1981) model for the balance scale task, including the counterintuitive prediction that young adults are slower than children in solving particular balance scale problems. The predictions were tested in a study in which 191 6- to 22-year-old participants were presented with a computerized balance scale task. RTs were analyzed with regression models. In addition to qualitative differences between items, we also modeled quantitative differences between items in the regression models. Analyses supported the predictions and provided additional knowledge on the rules. Rule II was reformulated as a rule that always involves the encoding, but not always the correct application of the distance cue. RTs provided evidence for the use of a buggy-rule and not an addition-rule. Finally, a relation between rule inconsistency and increased RT was found.     

Confidence judgments in event recall: developmental progression in the impact of question format

Two studies were conducted to examine developmental progression in children's and adults' ability to adequately monitor their own attempts to recall event details as well as the dependence of such metamemorial competencies on question formats. Eight and 10-year-old children as well as adults (Study 1, N=116; Study 2, N=60) rated their confidence when responding to specific questions about an observed event. Confirming most recent results, children and adults gave higher confidence ratings after correct than after incorrect answers. This ability, however, was limited to an unbiased question format. When being asked misleading questions, children's ability to differentiate was undermined, as reflected in equally high confidence judgments after correct and incorrect answers, even when the interview contained a mix of misleading and unbiased questions. When the interviewer "bombarded" the children with an uninterrupted series of misleading questions, children's difficulties appeared to be even more pronounced. These findings highlight the importance of the way in which questions are asked, and point to age-related progression in the relative impact of questioning style.     

Predicting face similarity judgements with a computational model of face space

Current models of face representation involve the notion of a high-dimensional face space. Computational models of face space based on principal components analysis (PCA) have been successfully used to predict human judgements of face sex or race. In this work the capability of PCA-based face spaces to predict human judgements of face similarity is examined. Three different paradigms were used. In Experiment 1 subjects learned face-name associations for 18 faces and identified these faces on tachistoscopic presentation. The number of confusions was used as a measure of face similarity. In Experiment 2 the same subjects subjectively rated the similarity of all 153 possible face pairs. In Experiment 3 reaction time to identify a face in an odd-man-out task was measured as an index of face similarity. These empirical measures were correlated with distance of the faces in PCA-based spaces of different dimensionalities. For Experiments 1 and 2 these correlations were highest for one-or two-dimensional face spaces (r=−0.27 vs. −0.28). For Experiment 3 the correlation was highest for a space consisting of 13 dimensions (r=−0.51). Thus PCA-based spaces seem capable to predict human similarity judgements to some extent. Possible reasons for the differences in predictability between paradigms are discussed.     

Empathic-Cognitive Development in Students of Counseling

Empathy is both crucial to counseling and a desired outcome in higher education. Since the 1960s, many studies have examined the relationship between stages of adult cognitive development and level of empathy, particularly in counselors. Though positive, findings related to this critical research focus have been grounded in small, local samples, leading several investigators to call for a replication using a large, national sample. In response, this study surveyed 340 graduate student members of a large professional counseling association across the United States. Results indicated that more mature forms of thought (according to the Perry scheme) are associated with higher empathy levels (Hogan scale). Implications are drawn for adult development theory, education of counselors, and higher education reform.     

A Computational Evaluation of Sentence Processing Deficits in Aphasia

Individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia experience difficulty when processing reversible non‐canonical sentences. Different accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The Trace Deletion account (Grodzinsky, 1995, 2000, 2006) attributes this deficit to an impairment in syntactic representations, whereas others (e.g., Caplan, Waters, Dede, Michaud, & Reddy, 2007; Haarmann, Just, & Carpenter, 1997) propose that the underlying structural representations are unimpaired, but sentence comprehension is affected by processing deficits, such as slow lexical activation, reduction in memory resources, slowed processing and/or intermittent deficiency, among others. We test the claims of two processing accounts, slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, and two versions of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH), in a computational framework for sentence processing (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) implemented in ACT‐R (Anderson, Byrne, Douglass, Lebiere, & Qin, 2004). The assumption of slowed processing is operationalized as slow procedural memory, so that each processing action is performed slower than normal, and intermittent deficiency as extra noise in the procedural memory, so that the parsing steps are more noisy than normal. We operationalize the TDH as an absence of trace information in the parse tree. To test the predictions of the models implementing these theories, we use the data from a German sentence—picture matching study reported in Hanne, Sekerina, Vasishth, Burchert, and De Bleser (2011). The data consist of offline (sentence‐picture matching accuracies and response times) and online (eye fixation proportions) measures. From among the models considered, the model assuming that both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency are present emerges as the best model of sentence processing difficulty in aphasia. The modeling of individual differences suggests that, if we assume that patients have both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, they have them in differing degrees.     

Neuropsychological functioning in kleptomania

Kleptomania is characterized by the failure to resist impulses to steal objects not needed for personal use or their monetary value. The objective of this study was to examine cognitive and executive functioning in subjects with kleptomania. Fifteen women with a primary DSM-IV diagnosis of kleptomania underwent a detailed psychiatric examination, including measures of kleptomania severity, and a battery of neuropsychological tests that emphasized executive functions. Correlational analyses were computed between measures of kleptomania severity and tests of executive functioning. Kleptomania subjects reported a mean duration of illness of 17.9 years and shoplifting a mean of 1.7 times per week. All subjects reported an inability to resist urges to shoplift. Neuropsychological testing revealed group mean test scores within 0.5 standard deviations of normative standards for age. Five subjects (33.3%), however, had below-average performance on at least one measure of executive functioning, and 4 (26.7%) had below-average scores on two executive measures. Correlational analyses revealed a statistically significant correlation between kleptomania severity and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test performance (r=-0.693, p=0.004). As a group, subjects with kleptomania did not demonstrate deficits on neuropsychological testing. Greater kleptomania symptom severity, however, was correlated with impairment in executive functioning.     

Global coherence in younger and older adults: Influence of cognitive processes and discourse type

The purpose of the present research was to examine the influence of cognitive processes on discourse global coherence ability measured across different discourse tasks and collected from younger (n = 40; 20–39 years) and older (n = 40; 70–87 years) cognitively healthy adults. Study participants produced oral language samples in response to five commonly used discourse elicitation tasks and they were analyzed for maintenance of global coherence. Participants also completed memory and attention measures. Group differences on the global coherence scale were found for only one type of discourse—recounts. Across discourse elicitation tasks the lowest global coherence scores were found for recounts compared to the other discourse elicitation tasks. The influence of cognitive processes on maintenance of global coherence differed for the two age groups. For the younger group, there were no observed significant relationships. For the older group, cognitive measures were related to global coherence of stories and procedures.     

Does inconsistency always lead to negative affect? The influence of need for closure on affective reactions to cognitive inconsistency

We present an experiment showing that need for closure (NFC)—defined as the epistemic desire for certainty—can moderate individuals' affective reactions to cognitive inconsistency. Informed by Kruglanski and colleagues' new theory, that cognitive inconsistency elicits negative affect particularly under certain circumstances, we find that NFC (i.e. the desire for certain, stable and unambiguous knowledge) influences the strength of consistency effects and resulting negative affect. More specifically, we find that individuals who are high on NFC experience more negative affect upon encountering an inconsistent (vs. consistent) cognition. However, when individuals are low on NFC, inconsistency is irrelevant, and their affect depends on whether the ultimate outcome of the cognition is positive or negative. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this research.     

Computational model of enactive visuospatial mental imagery using saccadic perceptual actions

From the onset of cognitive revolution, the concept of mental imagery has been given different, many times opposing, theoretical accounts. Mental imagery appears to be a ubiquitous, yet wholly individual, easy to explain experience on the one hand, being hard to deal with scientifically on the other hand. The focus of this research is on an enactive approach to visuospatial mental imagery, inspired by Sima’s perceptual instantiation theory. We designed a hybrid computational model, composed of a forward model, an inverse model, both implemented as neural networks, and a memory/controller module, that grounds simple mental concepts, such as a triangle and a square, in perceptual actions, and is able to reimagine these objects by performing the necessary perceptual actions in a simulated humanoid robot. We tested the model on three tasks – salience-based object recognition, imagination-based object recognition and object imagination – and achieved very good results showing, as a proof of concept, that perceptual actions are a viable candidate for grounding the visuospatial mental concepts as well as the credible substrate of visuospatial mental imagery.