Working memory and access to numerical information in children with disability in mathematics

The relationship among working memory, mathematic ability, and the cognitive impairment of children with difficulties in mathematics was examined. A group of children with difficulties in mathematics (MD) was compared with a group of children with a normal level of achievement matched for vocabulary, age, and gender (N = 49). The children were required to perform a variety of working memory and short-term memory tasks that had been administered 1 year previously. Moreover, the children were asked to perform tasks designed to provide information about speed of articulation. The results suggest a general working memory deficit in children with MD, specifically in the central executive component of Baddeley's model and primarily in the ability to inhibit irrelevant information. However, the MD children were not impaired in speech rate and counting speed tasks, which mainly involve the role of the articulatory loop.     

Interpreting the uninterpretable: The effect of self-esteem on the interpretation of meaningless feedback

People often seek out and retain positive information about themselves via self-enhancement processes. Under other circumstances, they seek out and retain self-confirmatory information via self-verification processes. Research on both of these self-evaluation processes has been based heavily on domains such as social skills, in which people have a large database of prior information that presumably influences the way in which incoming self-relevant information is interpreted. In the present research, participants were asked to evaluate themselves on a set of imaginary "pseudotraits" to investigate how self-esteem influences the self-evaluation process when prior information is unavailable. Participants who had been identified through pre-testing as either high or low in self-esteem received false feedback on five pseudotraits (e.g., "casortic"), after which they evaluated the favorability of this feedback. High self-esteem participants tended to view their feedback as favorable, whereas low self-esteem participants did not.     

The Impact of First-Grade “Friendship Group” Experiences on Child Social Outcomes in the Fast Track Program

Many interventions for childrens behavior problems successfully utilize a group format for social skills training, providing opportunities for practice and performance feedback from peers. Recent studies however, suggest that grouping aggressive children together may reduce intervention effectiveness or even increase risk. The present study examined the relative impact of childrens own behavior and their experiences with peers in the first-grade friendship groups of Fast Track, a multi-component preventive intervention program. Two-hundred sixty-six children (56% minority, 29% female) participated in 55 friendship groups. Childrens own positive and negative behavior in friendship groups was related to relative improvements in social cognitive skills, prosocial behavior, and aggression, assessed through child interviews, teacher ratings, and peer sociometric nominations. Results from hierarchical linear models also revealed that the amount of peer escalation children received for their disruptive behavior during sessions impeded some intervention gains, whereas mere exposure to other childrens positive or negative behavior was rarely related to outcomes.Members of the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group are, in alphabetical order, Karen L. Bierman, Pennsylvania State University; John D. Coie, Duke University; Kenneth A. Dodge, Duke University; E. Michael Foster, Pennsylvania State University; Mark T. Greenberg, Pennsylvania State University; John E. Lochman, University of Alabama; Robert J. McMahon, University of Washington; and Ellen E. Pinderhughes, Tufts University     

Modeling parallelization and flexibility improvements in skill acquisition: from dual tasks to complex dynamic skills

Emerging parallel processing and increased flexibility during the acquisition of cognitive skills form a combination that is hard to reconcile with rule-based models that often produce brittle behavior. Rule-based models can exhibit these properties by adhering to 2 principles: that the model gradually learns task-specific rules from instructions and experience, and that bottom-up processing is used whenever possible. In a model of learning perfect time-sharing in dual tasks (Schumacher et al., 2001), speedup learning and bottom-up activation of instructions can explain parallel behavior. In a model of a complex dynamic task (Carnegie Mellon University Aegis Simulation Program [CMU-ASP], Anderson et al., 2004), parallel behavior is explained by the transition from serially organized instructions to rules that are activated by both top-down (goal-driven) and bottom-up (perceptually driven) factors. Parallelism lets the model opportunistically reorder instructions, leading to the gradual emergence of new task strategies.     

Receipt of negative feedback is related to increased negative feedback seeking among individuals with depressive symptoms

In recent years, numerous studies have demonstrated a link between positive and negative feedback seeking by depressed individuals, interpersonal rejection, and depression chronicity. Nonetheless, many of the specific interpersonal patterns underlying these links have yet to be clearly specified. One important lingering question concerns how depressed individuals respond to negative evaluation or feedback from others, because continued negative feedback seeking could place depressed people at risk for further rejection and continuation/exacerbation of depressive symptoms. Two studies were conducted to investigate the influence of negative feedback provisions from others on the feedback seeking behaviors of individuals with depressive symptoms. The results from Study 1 indicated an increased tendency to seek negative feedback among depressive individuals in association with an independent negative evaluation by their college roommates. Using a sample of newlywed couples, Study 2 extended this finding by demonstrating that, when directly provided with negative feedback from their spouses, individuals with depressive symptomatology actively sought further negative feedback, while those without such symptoms did not. Together, the results from these studies suggest that depressed individuals are likely to respond to negative evaluation and feedback from others with behaviors that could place them at risk for further rejection and continuing, if not worsening problems with depression.     

Controlled and automatic uses of memory in depressed patients: effect of retention interval lengths

The present study examines controlled and automatic uses of memory in clinically depressed patients by applying the Process Dissociation Procedure developed by Jacoby (1991) to a stem completion memory task with short and long retention intervals. The results show that the contribution of controlled processes is lower in depressed patients than in controls, especially for the longest retention interval, whereas the contribution of automatic processes is equivalent in both groups and unaffected by the length of the retention interval. These findings are discussed in a cognitive control framework.     

The mental representation of verb-noun compounds in Italian: evidence from a multiple single-case study in aphasia

This study seeks information on the mental representation of Verb–Noun (VN) nominal compounds through neuropsychological methods. The lexical retrieval of compound nouns is tested in 30 aphasic patients using a visual confrontation naming task. The target names are VN compounds, Noun–Noun (NN) compounds, and long morphologically simple nouns (LSN). In order to check the ability to produce simple nouns and verbs in the same participants, a further visual confrontation naming task of objects and actions is used. Results of the study confirm that several patients with disproportionate verb deficit are also impaired in naming VN compounds. Data are in favor of a (de)compositional processing of compound words. A further group of patients is selectively more impaired with compound nouns than with comparably long simple nouns, irrespective of their VN or NN morphological structure. It is suggested that this impairment is to be ascribed to a specific disorder in retrieving two different lexemes with a single lexical entry.     

An Introduction to the Special Issue on Advances in Process and Dynamic System Analysis of Social Interaction and the Development of Antisocial Behavior

A thorough understanding of how social relationships contribute to child and adolescent trajectories for antisocial behavior may be facilitated by: (a) ascertaining multiple relationship processes (e.g., warmth and reciprocity, coercion and deviancy training); (b) focusing on multiple relationships (e.g., with parents, peers, siblings, and teachers): and (c) assessing relationship processes using increasingly sophisticated measurement and theoretical models (e.g., global ratings and sequential and dynamical systems analyses) of observed microsocial interaction. The reports comprising this special issue, and how they build on and advance previous research efforts, are described from this frame of reference.     

Estimating multiple classification latent class models

This paper presents a new class of models for persons-by-items data. The essential new feature of this class is the representation of the persons: every person is represented by its membership tomultiple latent classes, each of which belongs to onelatent classification. The models can be considered as a formalization of the hypothesis that the responses come about in a process that involves the application of a number ofmental operations. Two algorithms for maximum likelihood (ML) and maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation are described. They both make use of the tractability of the complete data likelihood to maximize the observed data likelihood. Properties of the MAP estimators (i.e., uniqueness and goodness-of-recovery) and the existence of asymptotic standard errors were examined in a simulation study. Then, one of these models is applied to the responses to a set of fraction addition problems. Finally, the models are compared to some related models in the literature.Thanks are to Paul De Boeck for creating the intellectually stimulating atmosphere in which this class of models came about, Iven van Mechelen for theone-sided idea, Kikumi Tatsuoka for the use of her data, and Theodoor Bouw for running part of the simulation study.     

Methylphenidate Does Not Modify the Impact of Response Frequency or Stimulus Sequence on Performance and Event-Related Potentials of Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Twenty-six children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) participated in a double-blind trial consisting of 2 consecutive weeks each of placebo and methylphenidate (M = 26.92 mg/day = 0.78 mg/kg/day). As expected, stimulant therapy resulted in moderate weight loss, increased somatic complaints, and teacher and parent reports of reduced inattentiveness, aggression, and oppositionality. In both phases of the trial, patients were tested in a choice reaction time task assessing two aspects of the task that presumably affect response selection: response frequency (ratio of targets/nontargets = 25/75 vs. 50/50) and stimulus sequence (alternations vs. repetitions). Both manipulations yielded expected results on performance and event-related potentials (ERPs). Stimulant treatment increased accuracy and speed among younger children and curtailed variability of reaction time for the sample as a whole. However, methylphenidate did not affect ERPs. In combination, the results imply that the enhancement of performance by methylphenidate does not involve the demands of response selection examined in this study.