Age differences in memory span

Five-year-olds recalled fewer items than adults in memory-span tasks involving both familiar and unfamiliar faces. This occurred even though the use of rehearsal and recoding strategies was minimized for adults. This residual age difference may be partially accounted for by two further processing limitations in children. The five-year-olds needed more time than adults to name a face (Experiment 1) and to encode a face (Experiment 2). In order to test whether limitations in children's initial recognition and stimulus-identification processes could account for recall performance, Experiment 3 reduced adults' exposure duration in the memory-span task. This led to a drastic reduction in the age difference. Other factors contributing to remaining age differences included adults' adaptability in using various alternative encoding and retrieval strategies which elevated their recall performance.     

Hemispheric specialization in reading and word recognition

Three experiments dealing with hemispheric specialization are presented. In Experiment 1, words and/or faces were presented tachistoscopically to the left or right of fixation. Words were more accurately identified in the right visual field and faces were more accurately identified in the left visual field. A forced choice error analysis for words indicated that errors made for word stimuli were most frequently visually similar words and this effect was particularly pronounced in the left visual field. Two additional experiments supported this finding. On the basis of the results, it was argued that word identification is a multistage process, with visual feature analysis carried out by the right hemisphere and identification and naming by the left hemisphere. In addition, Kinsbourne's attentional model of brain function was rejected in favor of an anatomical model which suggests that simultaneous processing of verbal and nonverbal information does not constrict the attention of either hemisphere.     

Ducking the collection of costly evidence: Motivated use of statistical heuristics

We examined whether motivation affects people's use of statistical heuristics. In two studies, subjects had to decide how many instances to observe before making predictions. Half the subjects were led to believe that the observation of each instance would be relatively high in cost, and half were led to believe that it would be relatively low in cost. In both studies, only subjects for whom evidence collection was relatively high in cost accessed the aggregation principle and came to believe that aggregates afforded greater predictability than did single instances. Their belief that predictability increases sharply with sample size may have allowed these subjects to conclude what they wanted to conclude, namely that smaller samples would suffice for their predictions.     

The importance of including quality-of-life indices in international social and economic development activities

Psychology has not been a visible player in international social and economic development efforts. Through its demonstrated commitment to the concept of quality of life, psychology has an opportunity to help shape foreign policy and to improve the lives of countless people around the globe. Poverty has reached unacceptable limits of humanitarian tolerance and political consequence throughout the world. The United Nations estimates that 20% of the world's population now lives in conditions of absolute poverty in which there is an absence of even the bare essentials for living. Social and economic development efforts have often failed despite good intentions because they have often concentrated on improving peoples' material level of living but not their quality of life. This article addresses the need to include quality-of-life (QOL) indices in international social and economic development efforts. In addition, the article calls attention to the need to use valid cross-cultural measurement strategies (i.e., culturally equivalent) when assessing QOL across cultural and national boundaries. Current approaches to social and economic development rely heavily on interventions that do not reflect the actual peoples' perceptions of life satisfaction and subjective well-being. Self-serving political and economic national interests have kept new approaches to development from being implemented. New interventions must be holistic, decentralized, integrated, empowering, participatory, and human-resource directed, and must include culturally equivalent objective and subjective quality-of-life indices as the arbiters of success.     

Self-medication Hypothesis and Family Socialization Theory: Examining Independent and Common Mechanisms Responsible for Binge Drinking

For many, binge drinking behaviors start early and become a persistent pattern of use throughout the lifespan. In an effort to strengthen understanding of etiology, this study considered the mechanisms from the self-medication hypothesis and family socialization theory. The goal was to identify whether emotional distress is a potential shared mechanism that accounts for the development of binge drinking in different developmental periods. This study used the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) dataset to examine binge drinking across time for n = 9,421 participants ranging in age from 11 to 18 (M = 15.39, SD = 1.62) at Wave I and ranging from 24 to 32 (M = 28.09, SD = 1.61) at Wave IV of the study. Using an autoregressive cross-lagged model, I examined how parent-child closeness, depressive symptoms, and binge drinking were related over three developmental periods. In examining cross-sectional and longitudinal relations, depressive symptoms were significantly related to binge drinking more often than parent-child closeness; however, results indicated the self-medication model may primarily account for concurrent drinking behaviors rather than long-term. The family socialization theory was indicated to account for some variability above and beyond the self-medication hypothesis. No indirect association between binge drinking and the parent-child relationship was detected through depressive symptoms, failing to support a shared mechanism between the two theories. The results provide support for a multifaceted assessment process for substance using clients, and support the use of Multisystemic Family Therapy, Multidimensional Family Therapy, and perhaps Attachment-Based Family Therapy.     

Audio-visual priming in 7-month-old infants: An ERP study

The current study investigates categorical priming across modalities in 7-month-old infants using electroencephalographic (EEG) measures. In two experiments, infants were presented with sounds as primes, followed by images of human figures and furniture items as targets. In experiment 1 (N = 20), images were preceded by infant-directed (ID) or adult-directed (AD) speech to explore effects of intermodal categorical mismatches. Furniture targets (mismatching category) elicited an increased amplitude of the Negative central (Nc) component compared to human targets (matching category), p < .01, indicating increased attention. Results did not vary with manner of speaking (ID or AD). Experiment 2 (N = 17) explored whether a categorical mismatch between prime and target would elicit increased positive slow wave (PSW) amplitudes for human targets, indicating increased memory effort. Here, bicycle ringtones and ID speech served as primes. Again, furniture targets elicited an increased Nc regardless of prime category, p < .05, and a categorical change from human speech to furniture target images elicited an increased PSW, p < .05. No PSW effect was found for human targets following bicycle ringtones, however. The experiments reported here suggest that auditory primes may increase infant attention and memory updating particularly for non-social, categorically mismatching stimuli.     

Maternal prenatal anxiety trajectories and infant developmental outcomes in one-year-old offspring

A longitudinal study of a sample of women and their offspring from two urban areas (N = 233) was conducted to test whether maternal prenatal anxiety trajectories from early to late pregnancy are associated with 12-month infant developmental outcomes, independent of maternal postpartum anxiety symptoms, prenatal and postpartum depressive symptoms, parity, birth outcomes and maternal education. Three types of maternal anxiety trajectories over the course of pregnancy were identified and labeled increasing, decreasing, and stable-low. Only increasing maternal prenatal anxiety was associated with 12-month infant outcomes, specifically lower Bayley-III scores on receptive language and gross motor skills. Maternal anxiety measured at each individual timepoint in pregnancy was not associated with infant Bayley-III outcomes, highlighting the importance of examining trajectories of maternal affect.     

The emergence of psychopathy: implications for the neuropsychological approach to developmental disorders

In this paper, I am going to examine the disorder of psychopathy and consider how genetic anomalies could give rise to the relatively specific neuro-cognitive impairments seen in individuals with this disorder. I will argue that genetic anomalies in psychopathy reduce the salience of punishment information (perhaps as a function of noradrenergic disturbance). I will argue that the ability of the amygdala to form the stimulus-punishment associations necessary for successful socialization is disrupted and that because of this, individuals with psychopathy do not learn to avoid actions that will harm others. It is noted that this model follows the neuropsychological approach to the study of developmental disorders, an approach that has been recently criticized. I will argue that these criticisms are less applicable to psychopathy. Indeed, animal work on the development of the neural systems necessary for emotion, does not support a constructivist approach with respect to affect. Importantly, such work indicates that while environmental effects can alter the responsiveness of the basic neural architecture mediating emotion, environmental effects do not construct this architecture. However, caveats to the neuropsychological approach with reference to this disorder are noted.     

The development of the memorability-based strategy: insight from a training study

We investigated whether the memorability-based strategy, a process supporting the rejection of nonexperienced event occurrence, could be promoted through training. The performance of children who received memorability-based training was compared with that of (a) children who received source-monitoring training and (b) children who did not receive any specific training but were instructed to be as accurate as possible. Participants (142 6- to 10-year-olds) enacted common and bizarre actions. Eighteen days later, participants received misinformation about the first session. Five days after being misinformed, children were questioned about the first session. Compared with children in the no training condition, those in both training conditions reported significantly more true events, but only older children who received the memorability-based training were more likely to reject bizarre suggested events. Age interacted with action type when metacognitive assessments about false event rejection were examined, consistent with the idea that the use of the memorability-based strategy develops late during the elementary school years.     

Sensitivity of 4-year-olds to featural and second-order relational changes in face distinctiveness

Sensitivity to adult ratings of facial distinctiveness (how much an individual stands out in a crowd) has been demonstrated previously in children age 5 years or older. Experiment 1 extended this result to 4-year-olds using a "choose the more distinctive face" task. Children's patterns of choice across item pairs also correlated well with those of adults. In Experiment 2, original faces were made more distinctive via local feature changes (e.g., bushier eyebrows) or via relational changes (spacing changes, e.g., eyes closer together). Some previous findings suggest that children's sensitivity develops more slowly to relational changes than to featural changes. However, when we matched featural and relational changes for effects on distinctiveness in adult participants, 4-year-olds were equally sensitive to both. Our results suggest that (a) 4-year-olds' face space has important aspects of structure in common with that of adults and that (b) there is no specific developmental delay for a second-order relational component of configural/holistic processing.