Socio-economic health inequalities: Their origins and implications

Abstract

Evidence attests to substantial variations in health contingent on socioeconomic position. It is argued that these effects cannot be dismissed as artefact nor can they be explained, in the main, by either social selection or an unequal distribution of accepted behavioural risk factors among different social groups. The most likely explanation would seem to be social causation. However, it is continuing social and material inequality that appears most implicated; accounts which locate the effects in childhood social and material causes are far less compelling. The persistence of socioeconomic health differentials into the materially better-off social strata and the possible determining role of relative as well as absolute living standards suggest that psychological, in addition to material, variables are likely to be involved. Isolating the key psychological variables and identifying the nature of their influences will not be easy tasks, although social relations, psychological stress, uplifts, and control have emerged as possible candidates. However, psychological mediators of this sort most probably constitute surface rather than basic causes. Socio-economic inequality, it is contended, remains the basic cause, and, as such, the proper target for intervention. Psychological interventions are unlikely to yield much in the way of dividends in this context and indeed could inadvertently contribute to victim blaming.     

Differential Development of Learning Strategies on a Pictorial Verbal Learning Test (PVLT) in Primary-School Children

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that developmental differences exist in the use of learning strategies in primary school children. Serial and subjective clustering in a multitrial Pictorial Verbal Learning Test (PVLT) were compared in 79 children aged 6–12. Correlation analyses indicated that serial clustering yielded better performance when information was presented on the initial trials of the test. Subjective clustering was superior when information was presented repeatedly, i.e., after three or more trials. Analyses of variance indicated that subjective clustering was used more often in older children with repeated presentations. On the other hand, there was no increase in the use of serial clustering with age and with repeated presentations. The findings imply that training in the use of proper strategies could have benefit for children who use an inefficient learning strategy and/or have a learning problem. In addition, they point to the importance of the factor “age” in relation to the way information is presented to children.     

When does feature search fail to protect against attentional capture?

ABSTRACT

When participants search for a shape (e.g., a circle) among a set of homogenous shapes (e.g., triangles) they are subject to distraction by colour singletons that are more salient than the target. However, when participants search for a shape among heterogeneous shapes, the presence of a non-target colour singleton does not slow responses to the target. Attempts have been made to explain these results from both bottom-up and top-down perspectives. What both accounts have in common is that they do not predict the occurrence of attentional capture on typical feature search displays. Here, we present a case where manipulating selection history, rather than the displays themselves, leads to attentional capture on feature search trials. The ability to map specific colours to the target and distractor appears to be what enables resistance to capture during feature search.     

Two facets of cognitive control in analogical mapping: The role of semantic interference resolution andgoal-driven structure selection

The study used scene analogies to investigate two component processes of analogical thinking: resolution of semantic interference, which emerges when the proper mapping between analogically matching objects is incoherent with their categorical features (e.g., stereotypical functions), and goal-driven selection of the key relational structure, by directing attention to the most promising objects which constitute that structure among many other candidate objects. We manipulated interference by placing in corresponding scenes the objects from one category in different relational roles. Selection was loaded by including additional, relationally irrelevant objects in a scene. We also manipulated relational complexity and the presence of salient objects (people) in relations. Increased load on both interference resolution and selection decreased the accuracy of analogical mapping, but these factors did not interact. Moreover, the factors yielded opposite patterns of interaction with relational complexity. Finally, salience eased selection, but tended to negatively influence interference resolution. In summary, inference resolution and selection seem to constitute two relatively independent facets of cognitive control involved in analogical thinking. Selection may act before mapping occurs, while interference influences analogy making only if an interfering object takes part in mapping.     

A prelearning manipulation falsifies a pure associational deficit account of retrieval shift during skill acquisition

ABSTRACT

Older adults adopt memory-based response strategies during consistent practice more slowly and less completely than younger adults. In two experiments, participants either prelearned all, half, or none of the noun-pair stimuli prior to the completion of a standard noun-pair lookup task. Higher proportions of prelearning generally led to a faster and more complete strategic shift from visual scanning to memory retrieval during the lookup task, and a strong prelearning criterion for all items eliminated the age-related slowing of retrieval shift. However, the 50% prelearned condition resulted in strategy shift that was inconsistent with simple mechanistic associative learning, revealing a strategic set that was retrieval-avoidant in older adults.     

Mediated conditioning versus retrospective revaluation in humans: The influence of physical and functional similarity of cues

Two experiments assessed whether similarity between the two elements of a compound would influence the degree of mediated extinction versus recovery from overshadowing in human causal judgements. In both Experiments 1 and 2, we assessed the influence of extinguishing one element of a two-element compound on judgements about the other element. In Experiment 1 we manipulated the physical similarity of the two elements of the compound; in Experiment 2, we used equivalence and distinctiveness pretraining in order to vary their functional similarity. We found that these procedures influenced mediated extinction and recovery from overshadowing as a function of both physical and acquired similarity and distinctiveness, respectively. The implications of these results for previously reported differences between humans and nonprimate animals are discussed.     

The word class effect in the picture–word interference paradigm

The word class effect in the picture–word interference paradigm is a highly influential finding that has provided some of the most compelling support for word class constraints on lexical selection. However, methodological concerns called for a replication of the most convincing of those effects. Experiment 1 was a direct replication of Pechmann and Zerbst (2002 Pechmann, T. and Zerbst, D. 2002. The activation of word class information during speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 28: 233–243. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Experiment 4). Participants named pictures of objects in the context of noun and adverb distractors. Naming took place in bare noun and sentence frame contexts. A word class effect emerged in both bare noun and sentence frame naming conditions, suggesting a semantic origin of the effect. In Experiment 2, participants named objects in the context of noun and verb distractors whose word class relationship to the target and imageability were orthogonally manipulated. As before, naming took place in bare noun and sentence frame naming contexts. In both naming contexts, distractor imageability but not word class affected picture naming latencies. These findings confirm the sensitivity of the picture–word interference paradigm to distractor imageability and suggest the paradigm is not sensitive to distractor word class. The results undermine the use of the word class effect in the picture–word interference paradigm as supportive of word class constraints during lexical selection.     

Temporal distinctiveness and repetition benefits in task switching: Disentangling stimulus-related and response-related contributions

Despite the popularity of the Wason selection task in the psychology of reasoning, doubt remains as to whether card choices actually reflect a process of reasoning. One view is that while participants reason about the cards and their hidden sides—as indicated by protocol analysis—this reasoning merely confabulates explanations for cards that were preconsciously cued. This hypothesis has apparently been supported by studies that show that participants predominantly inspect cards which they end up selecting. In this paper, we reanalyse the data of one such study, which used eye-movement tracking to record card inspection times (Ball, Lucas, Miles, & Gale, 2003). We show that while cards favoured by matching bias are inspected for roughly equal lengths of times, their selection rates are strongly affected by their logical status. These findings strongly support a two-stage account in which attention is necessary but not sufficient for card selections. Hence, reasoning does indeed affect participants' choices on this task.     

Effects of visual cue and response assignment on spatial stimulus coding in stimulus–response compatibility

Tlauka and McKenna (2000 Tlauka, M. and McKenna, F. P. 2000. Hierarchical knowledge influences stimulus–response compatibility effects. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53A: 85–103.  [Google Scholar]) reported a reversal of the traditional stimulus–response compatibility (SRC) effect (faster responding to a stimulus presented on the same side than to one on the opposite side) when the stimulus appearing on one side of a display is a member of a superordinate unit that is largely on the opposite side. We investigated the effects of a visual cue that explicitly shows a superordinate unit, and of assignment of multiple stimuli within each superordinate unit to one response, on the SRC effect based on superordinate unit position. Three experiments revealed that stimulus–response assignment is critical, while the visual cue plays a minor role, in eliciting the SRC effect based on the superordinate unit position. Findings suggest bidirectional interaction between perception and action and simultaneous spatial stimulus coding according to multiple frames of reference, with contribution of each coding to the SRC effect flexibly varying with task situations.