The effect of cues on young children's abilities to discriminate among thoughts, feelings and behaviours

OBJECTIVE: To determine if cues help young children discriminate among thoughts, feelings and behaviours. PARTICIPANTS: Ninety-six children aged 4-7 years from three schools in Norwich, UK. DESIGN: Within each age band (4, 5, 6, 7), children were randomised to the cue or the no cue condition on a stratified basis ensuring that equal numbers of boys and girls from each school were in each of the eight cells (cue condition x age). Cues were glove puppets and post boxes. The effect of IQ was controlled. MEASURES: A discrimination task, in which children were asked to identify a thought, a feeling and a behaviour from each of six brief stories, and a brief IQ assessment were administered to children individually. RESULTS: There was a significant effect of age and cue condition on performance; older children and those who were presented with the cue performed better. There were no gender differences and no interaction between cue condition and age. CONCLUSION: Many young children discriminated among thoughts, feelings and behaviours suggesting that they may be able to engage in this aspect of cognitive behaviour therapy. Simple cues (puppets and posting boxes) improved children's performance and these may be useful therapeutic tools with young children.     

Geometric determinants of human spatial memory

Geometric alterations to the boundaries of a virtual environment were used to investigate the representations underlying human spatial memory. Subjects encountered a cue object in a simple rectangular enclosure, with distant landmarks for orientation. After a brief delay, during which they were removed from the arena, subjects were returned to it at a new location and orientation and asked to mark the place where the cue had been. On some trials the geometry (size, aspect ratio) of the arena was varied between presentation and testing. Responses tended to lie somewhere between a location that maintained fixed distances from nearby walls and a location that maintained fixed ratios of the distances between opposing walls. The former were more common after expansions and for cued locations nearer to the edge while the latter were more common after contractions and for locations nearer to the center. The spatial distributions of responses predicted by various simple geometric models were compared to the data. The best fitting model was one derived from the response properties of 'place cells' in the rat hippocampus, which matches the 'proximities' 1/(d+c) of the cue to the four walls of the arena, where d is the distance to a wall and c is a global constant. Subjects also tended to adopt the same orientation at presentation and testing, although this was not due to using a view matching strategy, which could be ruled out in 50% of responses. Disoriented responses were most often seen where the cued location was near the center of the arena or where the long axis of a rectangular arena was changed between presentation and testing, suggesting that the geometry of the arena acts as a weak cue to orientation. Overall, the results suggest a process of visual landmark matching to determine orientation, combined with an abstract representation of the proximity of the cued location to the walls of the arena consistent with the neural representation of location in the hippocampus.     

Six does not just mean a lot: preschoolers see number words as specific

This paper examines what children believe about unmapped number words - those number words whose exact meanings children have not yet learned. In Study 1, 31 children (ages 2-10 to 4-2) judged that the application of five and six changes when numerosity changes, although they did not know that equal sets must have the same number word. In Study 2, 15 children (ages 2-5 to 3-6) judged that six plus more is no longer six, but that a lot plus more is still a lot. Findings support the hypothesis that children treat number words as referring to specific, unique numerosities even before they know exactly which numerosity each word refers to.     

Developing new treatments: on the interplay between theories, experimental science and clinical innovation

It is often argued that behaviour therapy and cognitive-behaviour therapy have a sound theoretical and experimental basis. In the early days of behaviour therapy, the learning theory accounts that were the basis of treatment made clear suggestions about the procedures that were likely to be effective in treatment. In contrast, more recent cognitive-behavioural models tend to specify targets for therapy, but not the procedures that might be optimal for changing the targets. As a consequence, a considerable amount of work has to be done in order to create an effective cognitive-behavioural treatment from a promising cognitive-behavioural model. The process by which cognitive-behavioural treatments are developed is rarely discussed in the literature. For this reason, the way in which one group has used a mixture of phenomenological, experimental and treatment development studies to create effective cognitive therapy programmes for anxiety disorders is described.     

Depression, low self-esteem and mindfulness

Negative biases in processing information about the self have long been recognised as a central feature in the development and maintenance of clinical depression. In practice, however, it may not be easy to distinguish between patients whose negative thinking about the self is primarily an aspect of current mood state, and those for whom it represents a reflection of more enduring issues (low self-esteem). The paper speculates that, in both cases, metacognitive awareness (acceptance of the idea that thoughts, assumptions and beliefs are mental events and processes rather than reflections of objective truth) may be an important precursor to active engagement in therapy on the part of the patient, and considers what aspects of cognitive therapy might be used to promote it in clinical practice.     

Infants' sensitivity to correlations between static and dynamic features in a category context

Four experiments with the habituation procedure investigated 14-22-month-olds' ability to attend to correlations between static and dynamic features embedded in a category context. In Experiment 1, infants were habituated to four objects that exhibited invariant relations between moving features and motion trajectory. Results revealed that 14-month-olds did not process any independent features, 18-month-olds processed individual features but not relations among features, and 22-month-olds processed relations among features. In Experiment 2, 14-month-olds differentiated all of the features in the events in a simpler discrimination task. In Experiments 3a and 3b, 22-month-olds failed to show sensitivity to correlations between dynamic and static features in a category context. In Experiment 4, 22-month-olds, but not 18-month-olds, generalized the learned feature-motion relation to a novel instance. The results are discussed in relation to infants' developing ability to attend to correlations, constraints on learning, category coherence, and the development of the animate-inanimate distinction.     

The Strategy and Attribution Questionnaire: Psychometric properties of a Lithuanian translation in an adolescent sample

The present study provides a preliminary validation of the Lithuanian version of the Strategy and Attribution Questionnaire (SAQ, Nurmi, et al., 1995), a self-reported measure of social and cognitive behavioral strategies. An attempt to validate SAQ subscales was made by correlating them with the Youth Self-Report (Achenbach, 1991) and school grades. This was done with a sample of 14- to 17-year-old adolescents (N= 734). The results showed that although internal consistency reliabilities were good, they were lower when compared with the original version of SAQ. The SAQ subscales were moderately associated with various validity criteria, such as anxiety/depression, withdrawal, social problems and somatic complaints and school grades. Results also showed moderate correlations between similar strategic components across achievement and affiliative situations. The results provide preliminary evidence for concurrent validity of the Lithuanian version of SAQ.     

Medial prefrontal cortex lesions abolish contextual control of competing responses

There is much debate as to the extent and nature of functional specialization within the different subregions of the prefrontal cortex. The current study was undertaken to investigate the effect of damage to medial prefrontal cortex subregions in the rat. Rats were trained on two biconditional discrimination tasks, one auditory and one visual, in two different contexts. At test, they received presentations of audiovisual compounds of these training stimuli in extinction. These compounds had dictated either the same (congruent trials) or different (incongruent trials) responses during training. In sham-operated controls, contextual cues came to control responding to conflicting information provided by incongruent stimulus compounds. Experiment 1 demonstrated that this contextual control of responding was not evident in individual rats with large amounts of damage that included the prelimbic and cingulate subregions of the prefrontal cortex. Experiment 2 further dissociated the result of Experiment 1, demonstrating that lesions specific to the anterior cingulate cortex were sufficient to produce a deficit early on during presentation of an incongruent stimulus compound but that performance was unimpaired as presentation progressed. This early deficit suggests a role for the anterior cingulate cortex in the detection of response conflict, and for the medial prefrontal cortex in the contextual control of competing responses, providing evidence for functional specialization within the rat prefrontal cortex.     

Severity of Emotional and Behavioral Problems Among Poor and Typical Readers

The purpose of this study was to examine the severity of behavioral and emotional problems among adolescents with poor and typical single word reading ability (N = 188) recruited from public schools and followed for a median of 2.4 years. Youth and parents were repeatedly assessed to obtain information regarding the severity and course of symptoms (depression, anxiety, somatic complaints, aggression, delinquent behaviors, inattention), controlling for demographic variables and diagnosis of ADHD. After adjustment for demographic variables and ADHD, poor readers reported higher levels of depression, trait anxiety, and somatic complaints than typical readers, but there were no differences in reported self-reported delinquent or aggressive behaviors. Parent reports indicated no differences in depression, anxiety or aggression between the two groups but indicated more inattention, somatic complaints, and delinquent behaviors for the poor readers. School and health professionals should carefully assess youth with poor reading for behavioral and emotional symptoms and provide services when indicated.