Melting Lizards and Crying Mailboxes: Children's Preferential Recall of Minimally Counterintuitive Concepts

Previous research with adults suggests that a catalog of minimally counterintuitive concepts, which underlies supernatural or religious concepts, may constitute a cognitive optimum and is therefore cognitively encoded and culturally transmitted more successfully than either entirely intuitive concepts or maximally counterintuitive concepts. This study examines whether children's concept recall similarly is sensitive to the degree of conceptual counterintuitiveness (operationalized as a concept's number of ontological domain violations) for items presented in the context of a fictional narrative. Seven‐ to nine‐year‐old children who listened to a story including both intuitive and counterintuitive concepts recalled the counterintuitive concepts containing one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2), but not three (Experiment 3), violations of intuitive ontological expectations significantly more and in greater detail than the intuitive concepts, both immediately after hearing the story and 1 week later. We conclude that one or two violations of expectation may be a cognitive optimum for children: They are more inferentially rich and therefore more memorable, whereas three or more violations diminish memorability for target concepts. These results suggest that the cognitive bias for minimally counterintuitive ideas is present and active early in human development, near the start of formal religious instruction. This finding supports a growing literature suggesting that diverse, early‐emerging, evolved psychological biases predispose humans to hold and perform religious beliefs and practices whose primary form and content is not derived from arbitrary custom or the social environment alone.     

Factors influencing infants’ ability to update object representations in memory

Remembering persisting objects over occlusion is critical to representing a stable environment. Infants remember hidden objects at multiple locations and can update their representation of a hidden array when an object is added or subtracted. However, the factors influencing these updating abilities have received little systematic exploration. Here we examined the flexibility of infants’ ability to update object representations. We tested 11-month-olds in a looking-time task in which objects were added to or subtracted from two hidden arrays. Across five experiments, infants successfully updated their representations of hidden arrays when the updating occurred successively at one array before beginning at the other. But when updating required alternating between two arrays, infants failed. However, simply connecting the two arrays with a thin strip of foam-core led infants to succeed. Our results suggest that infants’ construal of an event strongly affects their ability to update memory representations of hidden objects. When construing an event as containing multiple updates to the same array, infants succeed, but when construing the event as requiring the revisiting and updating of previously attended arrays, infants fail.     

The role of verbal and nonverbal memory in the Family Pictures Subtest: Data from children with specific language impairment

This study examined the contribution of verbal and visual memory to performance on the Family Pictures subtest of the Children’s Memory Scale. This subtest purports to assess declarative memory functioning in the visual/nonverbal domain. A total of 115 nine-year-old children participated in this study. Fifty-eight had specific language impairment (SLI), whilst the remaining 57 were typically developing (TD), with no history of language difficulties. Results showed that the children with SLI, who had intact declarative memory for visual but not verbal information, obtained significantly lower scores on the Family Pictures subtest when compared to the TD group. Regression analyses revealed that across the entire sample, individual differences on the Family Pictures subtest was best predicted by a measure of verbal working memory. These results question whether the Family Pictures subtest can be considered a measure of visual memory in pediatric populations. These results have implications for the interpretation of scores on this subtest regarding the nature of the types of neurocognitive difficulties children may exhibit.     

Neuropsychological Functioning in Children with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been associated with deficits in the areas of verbal memory and learning, executive functioning, working memory, and attention in adults. Findings have been less consistent in the few studies examining neuropsychological functioning in childhood PTSD, which are often limited by comparing children with PTSD to children without trauma histories, making it unclear whether observed neuropsychological deficits are related to trauma exposure or to PTSD symptomatology. In an ethnically diverse sample of 62 children who witnessed intimate partner violence (n = 27 PTSD+ and 35 PTSD?), children with PTSD exhibited slower and less effective learning, heightened sensitivity to interference, and impaired effect of rehearsal on memory acquisition on the California Verbal Learning Test – Children's Version, a word list learning task. Both groups performed in the below average range on measures of executive functioning, attention, and intellectual ability.     

Relationship between the number of life events and memory capacity in children

Stressful life events can result into declined memory performance at later age. One hypothesis suggests that stress affects the hippocampus, a brain area important for memory functioning. This study explored a potential relationship between the number of negative stressful life events and hippocampus-dependent declarative but not hippocampus-independent procedural memory performance in a community sample of 255 children, aged 6–12 years. The findings revealed that negative stressful life events were negatively related to verbal declarative memory, but not to nonverbal declarative and procedural memory. The memory impairments could not be accounted for by attention and sleep disturbances, and parenting characteristics as perceived by the child did not influence the vulnerability for the stress-related memory impairments. These findings provide further insight into the deleterious effects of negative stressful life events on learning in school-aged children.     

Time-Based Prospective Memory Performance and Time-Monitoring in Children with ADHD

The current study investigated prospective memory (PM) performance in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and controls and aimed at exploring possible underlying factors of PM performance. Twenty-two children with ADHD and 39 age- and ability-matched typically developing children performed a computerized time-based PM task. As predicted, children with ADHD had fewer correct PM responses than controls. Neither differences in overall ongoing task performance nor, remarkably, differences in overall frequency and accuracy of time monitoring were found. Exploratory analyses suggest that individual differences in time monitoring in the final interval before target times may be related to PM performance in ADHD.     

Memory for symmetry and perceptual binding in patients with schizophrenia

The present study investigated the use of perceptual binding processes in schizophrenic (SC) patients and matched healthy controls, by examining their performance on the recall of symmetrical (vertical, horizontal and diagonal) and asymmetrical patterns varying in length between 2 and 9 items. The results showed that, although SC patients were less accurate than controls in all conditions, both groups recalled symmetrical patterns better than asymmetrical ones. The impairment of SC patients was magnified with supra-span symmetrical arrays, and they were more likely to reproduce symmetrical patterns as asymmetrical, particularly at medium and high length levels. Hierarchical regression analyses further indicated that the between-group differences in the recall of supra-span vertical and horizontal arrays, which require a greater involvement of visual pattern processes, remained significant after removing the variance associated with performance on asymmetrical patterns, which primarily reflects intrafigural spatial processes. It is proposed that schizophrenia may be associated with a specific deficit in the formation and retrieval of the global visual images of studied patterns and in the use of the on-line information about the type of symmetry being tested to guide retrieval processes.     

Therapist Awareness of Client Resistance in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Clients' resistance relates negatively to their retention and outcomes in psychotherapy; thus, it has been increasingly identified as a key process marker in both research and practice. This study compared therapists' postsession ratings of resistance with those of trained observers in the context of 40 therapist–client dyads receiving 15 sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy for generalized anxiety disorder. Therapist and observer ratings were then examined as correlates of proximal (therapeutic alliance quality and homework compliance) and distal (posttreatment worry severity) outcomes. Although there was reasonable concordance between rater perspectives, observer ratings were highly and consistently related to both proximal and distal outcomes, while therapist ratings were not. These findings underscore the need to enhance therapists' proficiency in identifying important and often covert in-session clinical phenomena such as the cues reflecting resistance and noncollaboration.     

History and Analysis of Delayed Discovery Statutes of Limitations in Adult Survivor Litigation

Summary

In this chapter, attorney Mary R. Williams examines how while Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA) cases share many of the types of facts for which delayed discovery, mental incapacity, equitable estoppel and other legal statutes of limitations doctrines were created, the combination of factors of CSA cases, including unusual social dynamics and long-term psychological effects, does not fit exactly with any of these legal doctrines. She explores the historical development of delayed discovery statutes of limitations, evaluates the different types of statutes and case law, and analyzes the problematic use of the concept of repression in legislation. This chapter interprets her ground-breaking state-by-state tabulations of delayed discovery statutes of limitations and reported appellate decisions on limitations in CSA actions, published in this volume as appendices A, B, and C.     

Understanding the multiframe caricature advantage for recognizing facial composites

Eyewitnesses often construct a “composite” face of a person they saw commit a crime, a picture that police use to identify suspects. We described a technique (Frowd, Bruce, Ross, McIntyre, & Hancock, 2007) based on facial caricature to facilitate recognition of these images: Correct naming substantially improves when composites are seen with progressive positive caricature, where distinctive information is enhanced, and then with progressive negative caricature, the opposite. Over the course of four experiments, the underpinnings of this mechanism were explored. Positive-caricature levels were found to be largely responsible for improving naming of composites, with some benefit from negative-caricature levels. Also, different frame-presentation orders (forward, reverse, random, repeated) facilitated equivalent naming benefit relative to static composites. Overall, the data indicate that composites are usually constructed as negative caricatures.