La mémoire à long terme des durées : fonctionnement et développement

Estimating the duration of an event often requires that we reference our own knowledge about the duration of similar events stored in long-term memory. The ability to preserve these durations in long-term memory therefore seems to serve an important function in time estimation. However, relatively few studies on this topic appear in the psychology literature. In the present article, we describe how time estimation models have treated long-term memory, and discuss relevant empirical data obtained from adults. Then, we present the results of recent experiments that examine 3- to 8-year-old children’s ability to maintain durations in memory, depending on the kind of previous experience the children have had with these durations.     

Les effets de la modalité sensorielle sur la perception du temps

The subjective duration of an event can be influenced by the modality of the signal demarcating that event. For example, auditory signals are often judged as of longer duration than equivalent duration visual signals. Within the framework of pacemaker-accumulator models of timing, such modality effects raise the question of whether the internal clock is modality specific or amodal. The answer to this question is quite important for the development of cognitively and neurologically realistic models of timing and time perception. Here, we argue that the internal clock has both modality specific and amodal components. Specifically, we claim there is a common amodal pacemaker, but the switch-accumulator systems are modality specific. Moreover, we also posit that long-term memory representations of duration are stored amodally.     

Enhancing parental reflective functioning: A special tribute to the life and work of Nancy E. Suchman,PhD

Nancy E. Suchman's contributions to the fields of infant mental health, maternal reflective functioning, and attachment-based intervention will have long-lasting impacts. In particular, through the development and dissemination of her intervention program, Mothering from the Inside Out (MIO), she innovated a way of working with mothers with substance use disorders that represented a paradigm shift within the field of addiction. In this introduction to the special issue, written to honor her life and work, we review Nancy's background and briefly describe her academic accomplishments. The special issue contains nine qualitative and quantitative research reports written by Nancy's colleagues and their collaborators. All nine papers pertain to the theme of understanding, measuring, and promoting parents’ capacity for reflective functioning. Four provide findings that advance our understanding of parental reflective functioning. The other five highlight insights from continuing evaluations of MIO, including new adaptations of the model. To introduce the special issue, we provide an overview of the scope of the work done within these projects. Finally, the special issue concludes with two commentaries contributed by Linda Mayes and Arietta Slade, leading scholars within the field who were also Nancy's close colleagues. Both provide insight into Nancy's impact on the field.     

The perceptions of social context (PoSC): Introducing the PoSC scale

IntroductionThe Perception of Social Context refers to the perceptions that workers have of (1) the immediate supervisor, (2) the colleagues, and (3) top management of their organization.ObjectiveThe purpose of the present paper is to introduce the Perceptions of Social Context (PoSC) scale, an instrument for assessing workers’ perception of their social context.MethodWe used three studies (N total = 960) to test the internal, external, convergent, and predictive validity of the PoSC, as well as its reliability.ResultsIn Study 1, the hypothesized three-factor structure was empirically tested and supported by means of exploratory structural equation modeling. Study 2 provided further support for the factorial structure of the scale and evidence for its convergent and external validity in relation to important organizational variables. Study 3 provided evidence for the predictive validity with respect to job satisfaction and performance.ConclusionEstablished validity allows the PoSC scale to be used to specifically detect behaviors enacted by key social constituents and thus to plan specific and therefore more effective interventions.     

On children's interpretations of negation

French children between 4 and 10 years old were asked to draw representations of French negative sentences. The results indicated that in most cases only the verb is negated when the noun phrase to the right of the negation is introduced by a definite article, but when the noun phrase is introduced by an indefinite article, it is most often the noun phrase itself that is negated. This effect is clear even in 4-year-olds, and it serves to demonstrate that the interpretation of negative sentences depends on phenomena of surface structure as well as of deep structure.     

How much could we boost scholastic achievement and IQ scores? A direct answer from a French adoption study

We observed 32 subjects whose biological parents were both unskilled workers. Abandoned at birth, the subjects had been placed at approximately 4 months of age into families spanning the top 13% of the socio-professional scale. The effects of this change in social class were estimated by comparisons with groups of children of unskilled workers observed in two large scale studies. An internal control group was also available for 20 of the 32 subjects: the biological half-siblings who had been reared in their ‘natural’ environment. The effects observed are an increase of 14 IQ points in the mean IQ score estimated with 2 tests and a reduction by a factor of 4 in the probability of repeating a grade. These are significant despite the small number of subjects; we have shown that the bulk of these effects cannot be attributed to methodological biases. Our observations thus provide a direct quantitative answer to the question posed by Jensen in 1969.     

Dissociations in aphasia: A case report

This paper is a case study of an aphasic patient who displays two interesting characteristics, namely, (1) a dissociation between his oral and written disorders (i.e., oral Wernicke vs. written Broca); (2) an agraphia-alexia syndrome in which the picturability of the entities referred to by words plays an important role. Some of the characteristics shown by this patient have been well described concerning reading but never concerning writing. This second aspect is particularly emphasized.     

On realizable biorders and the biorder dimension of a relation

The paper discusses the mathematical foundations of a technique of multidimensional scaling, generalizing Guttman scaling, in which the structure of the embedding space relies only on ordinal concepts. An empirical relation is represented as an intersection of a minimal number (called bidimension) of Guttman relations. Fairly complete results are given for the cases of bidimensions 1 and 2. In the general case, the main results are based on the equivalence between the bidimension and the dimension of a certain partial order. A characterization of the bidimension as the chromatic number of some hypergraph is also provided.