发展性阅读障碍者的快速命名缺陷

快速命名任务是一种需要命名多个高熟悉项目的认知任务,尤其适合用来对成因复杂的发展性阅读障碍进行研究。许多研究者使用不同类型的快速命名任务发现,发展性阅读障碍者的快速命名缺陷在眼动过程表现为中央凹和副中央凹的加工困难,在认知过程中表现为抑制能力较差等。未来的研究中应该注意到快速命名缺陷的复杂性,采用多种方法相结合的方式来探究快速命名缺陷的本质,从而建立系统性的假说。     

The Nature and Significance of Behavioural Genetic Information

In light of the human genome project, establishing the genetic aetiology of complex human diseases has become a research priority within Western medicine. However, in addition to the identification of disease genes, numerous research projects are also being undertaken to identify genes contributing to the development of human behavioural characteristics, such as cognitive ability and criminal tendency. The permissibility of this research is obviously controversial: will society benefit from this research, or will it adversely affect our conceptions of ourselves and each other? When assessing the permissibility of this research, it is important to consider the nature and deterministic significance of behavioural genetic information. Whilst todate there has been much discussion and debate about the properties of genetic information per se and genetic determinism, this has not been applied to behavioural genetic research and its ethical implications. Therefore, this paper elucidates how behavioural genetic information can be distinguished from other types of genetic and non-genetic information and also synthesises the determinative significance of genetic factors for the development of human behavioural traits. Undertaking this analysis enables the ethical issues raised by this research to be debated in an appropriate context and indicates that separate policy considerations are warranted.

     

Something from nothing: exploring dimensions of children's knowing through the repeated reading of favourite books

Witte‐Townsend and DiGiulio explore some of the dimensions of knowing that children, teachers and parents may engage together during story‐time. They reflect on some of their own long‐term relationships with children and children's books, especially Phoebe Gilman's Gilman P 1992 Something from nothing (New York, NY, Scholastic Inc)  [Google Scholar] Something from nothing (published in 1992) and Simms Taback's Taback S 1999 Joseph had a little overcoat (New York, NY, Viking‐Penguin)  [Google Scholar] Joseph had a little overcoat, published in 1999. The authors probe issues such as why children ask to hear a favourite story over and over and why they suddenly abandon all interest and move on to a new book. They explore the meaning of the silences that sometimes arise during story‐time, pooling around the young listeners as the last words of the book are read. Witte‐Townsend and DiGiulio remind us of the value of literature in the lives of children and they affirm that the reading and re‐reading of favourite stories enables the understanding of complex human issues and contributes significantly to social, emotional and spiritual growth.     

Predicting traumatic stress using emotional intelligence

The study investigated whether emotional intelligence (EI) can predict how individuals respond to traumatic experiences. A random sample of 414 participants (181 male, 233 female) were administered a measure of EI along with the Impact of Event Scale--revised [IES-R; Weiss, D. S. & Marmar, C. R. (1997). The Impact of Events Scale--revised. In J.P. Wilson & T.M. Keane (Eds.), Assessing psychological trauma and PTSD (pp. 399-411). New York: Guilford Press], and the monitoring and blunting questionnaire [MBQ, Anxiety Stress Coping 7 (1994) 53]. The results showed that participants with higher NEIS scores report fewer psychological symptoms relating to their traumatic experiences, that monitors are more likely to have higher NEIS scores than blunters. Traumatic events had a greater impact on females than males, and males had higher EI than females. The implications of these findings for using EI as a predictor for individuals who may experience traumatic stress are discussed.     

Changes in the structure of children's isometric force variability with practice

This study examined the effect of age and practice on the structure of children's force variability to test the information processing hypothesis that a reduction of sensorimotor system noise accounts in large part for age-related reductions in perceptual-motor performance variability. In the study, 6-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and young adults practiced on 5 consecutive days (15 trials/day), maintaining for 15-s trials a constant level of force (5 or 25% of maximum voluntary contraction) against an object using a pinch grip (thumb and index finger). With increasing age, the amount of force error and variability decreased, but the sequential structure of variability increased in irregularity. With practice, children reduced the amount of variability by changing the structure of the force output so as to be more similar to that of their older counterparts. The findings provide further evidence that practice-driven changes in the structure of force output, rather than a decline in the amount of white noise, largely account for age-related reductions in the amount of force variability.     

Why 8-year-olds cannot tell the difference between Steve Martin and Paul Newman: factors contributing to the slow development of sensitivity to the spacing of facial features

Children are nearly as sensitive as adults to some cues to facial identity (e.g., differences in the shape of internal features and the external contour), but children are much less sensitive to small differences in the spacing of facial features. To identify factors that contribute to this pattern, we compared 8-year-olds' sensitivity to spacing cues with that of adults under a variety of conditions. In the first two experiments, participants made same/different judgments about faces differing only in the spacing of facial features, with the variations being kept within natural limits. To measure the effect of attention, we reduced the salience of featural information by blurring faces and occluding features (Experiment 1). To measure the role of encoding speed and memory limitations, we presented pairs of faces simultaneously and for an unlimited time (Experiment 2). To determine whether participants' sensitivity would increase when spacing distortions were so extreme as to make the faces grotesque, we manipulated the spacing of features beyond normal limits and asked participants to rate each face on a "bizarreness" scale (Experiment 3). The results from the three experiments indicate that low salience, poor encoding efficiency, and limited memory can partially account for 8-year-olds' poor performance on face processing tasks that require sensitivity to the spacing of features, a kind of configural processing that underlies adults' expertise. However, even when the task is modified to compensate for these problems, children remain less sensitive than adults to the spacing of features.     

Infants' comprehension of toy replicas as symbols for real objects

Infants' understanding of toy model-real exemplar relations was assessed through preferential looking and habituation tasks. Results from the preferential looking task suggest that 18-month toddlers are just beginning to demonstrate comprehension of symbolic relations between iconic models and their real object counterparts. Performance of 10- and 14-month-old infants in the preferential looking task did not improve when across-domain pairs of videos were used in place of within-domain pairs. Habituation task results indicated that 10-month-olds do not comprehend symbolic relations between miniature toy replicas and their "real" counterparts, but that such understanding begins to emerge by age 14 months. Interactions between symbolic processing and early lexical development are considered, as are methodological implications for the study of infant categorization.     

Framing social information and generalized social phobia

Patients with generalized social phobia (GSP, N=33) and matched community controls (N=31) engaged in a social interaction that was constructed to go well, and then received feedback that framed social cues reflecting either the absence of negative outcomes or the presence of positive outcomes. Following feedback that framed positive social cues, the GSP group predicted they would experience more anxiety in a subsequent interaction than did non-phobic controls. In contrast, following feedback framing the absence of negative outcomes, the GSP group did not differ from controls in their anxiety predictions. The results demonstrated that framing paradigms and methods can be usefully applied to the study of cognitive processes in social phobia and indicated that research to examine how GSP patients process specific types of social information is needed.     

Amodal processing of visual speech as revealed by priming

This study investigated the linguistic processing of visual speech (video of a talker's utterance without audio) by determining if such has the capacity to prime subsequently presented word and nonword targets. The priming procedure is well suited for the investigation of whether speech perception is amodal since visual speech primes can be used with targets presented in different modalities. To this end, a series of priming experiments were conducted using several tasks. It was found that visually spoken words (for which overt identification was poor) acted as reliable primes for repeated target words in the naming, written and auditory lexical decision tasks. These visual speech primes did not produce associative or reliable form priming. The lack of form priming suggests that the repetition priming effect was constrained by lexical level processes. That priming found in all tasks is consistent with the view that similar processes operate in both visual and auditory speech processing.     

Neighbourhood effects on error rates in speech production

Models of speech production differ on whether phonological neighbourhoods should affect processing, and on whether effects should be facilitatory or inhibitory. Inhibitory effects of large neighbourhoods have been argued to underlie apparent anti-frequency effects, whereby high-frequency default features are more prone to mispronunciation errors than low-frequency nondefault features. Data from the original SLIPs experiments that found apparent anti-frequency effects are analysed for neighbourhood effects. Effects are facilitatory: errors are significantly less likely for words with large numbers of neighbours that share the characteristic that is being primed for error ("friends"). Words in the neighbourhood that do not share the target characteristic ("enemies") have little effect on error rates. Neighbourhood effects do not underlie the apparent anti-frequency effects. Implications for models of speech production are discussed.