Clinical and demographic features of the online counselling client population

The purpose of this research was to determine the demographics and characteristics of clients seeking online counselling over an eight‐month period of clinical online practice. Two hundred and seventeen clients seeking Internet counselling completed a Counselling Application and a Life History Questionnaire. The characteristics of the relatively new client population include the following categories: gender, age groups, martial status, education, primary reason for seeking online therapy, secondary issues, frequency of email exchanges, and online vs. face‐to‐face counselling preferences. Implications for online counselling practice are discussed.     

用双任务测定技术测量手-脚协调水平

基于多重任务的心理信息加工原理,提出一种可以更好地利用分离的双重任务操作绩效测量和计算操作者手脚协调能力的方法,并提出手-脚协调估计值K的计算方法。经手脚协调任务实验验证,手-脚协调估计值K可以较好地用于测量操作者的手脚协调能力。     

The influence of relational complexity and strategy selection on children's reasoning in the Latin Square Task

The present study focused on children's deductive reasoning when performing the Latin Square Task, an experimental task designed to explore the influence of relational complexity. Building on Birney, Halford, and Andrew's (2006) research, we created a version of the task that minimized nonrelational factors and introduced new categories of items. The results of two experiments conducted with school-aged children yielded an apparent dilution of complexity effects and suggest that specific inferential strategies can reduce the relational complexity that children need to process. A theoretical account is proposed emphasizing the influence of adaptive selection of strategies that mediate processing capacity constraints in reasoning development.     

Sequencing and Optimization Within an Embodied Task Dynamic Model

A model of gestural sequencing in speech is proposed that aspires to producing biologically plausible fluent and efficient movement in generating an utterance. We have previously proposed a modification of the well‐known task dynamic implementation of articulatory phonology such that any given articulatory movement can be associated with a quantification of effort ( Simko & Cummins, 2010 ). To this we add a quantitative cost that decreases as speech gestures become more precise, and hence intelligible, and a third cost component that places a premium on the duration of an utterance. Together, these three cost elements allow us to derive algorithmically optimal sequences of gestures and dynamical parameters for generating articulator movement. We show that the optimized movement displays many timing characteristics that are representative of real speech movement, capturing subtle details of relative timing between gestures. Optimal movement sequences also display invariances in timing that suggest syllable‐level coordination for CV sequences. We explore the behavior of the model as prosodic context is manipulated in two dimensions: clarity of articulation and speech rate. Smooth, fluid, and efficient movements result.     

“儿童认知发展水平诊断工具”动态测验的初步编制与应用

本研究旨在将“儿童认知发展水平诊断工具” (Inventory of Piaget’s Developmental Task, IPDT)中的守恒与关系领域分测验改编成动态测验, 并应用于不同程度学业成绩儿童当中以探查其认知发展的潜在水平。在实验研究基础上结合以往动态测验的编制技术, 把动态施测过程分为“前测—干预—迁移—后测”4个阶段, 分别确定各阶段的测题并构建了6等级提示系统。在中等学业成绩儿童(n = 33)和低学业成绩儿童(n = 35)中的应用发现, 动态测验测得的能力获得变量对儿童的学业成绩具有重要的预测作用, 证实了所改编测验的有效性; 动态测验情境下中、低学业成绩儿童的潜在认知水平基本相同, 所改编的动态测验有助于发掘儿童的潜在认知发展水平。     

Self-reflection and the temporal focus of the wandering mind

Current accounts suggest that self-referential thought serves a pivotal function in the human ability to simulate the future during mind-wandering. Using experience sampling, this hypothesis was tested in two studies that explored the extent to which self-reflection impacts both retrospection and prospection during mind-wandering. Study 1 demonstrated that a brief period of self-reflection yielded a prospective bias during mind-wandering such that participants’ engaged more frequently in spontaneous future than past thought. In Study 2, individual differences in the strength of self-referential thought — as indexed by the memorial advantage for self rather than other-encoded items — was shown to vary with future thinking during mind-wandering. Together these results confirm that self-reflection is a core component of future thinking during mind-wandering and provide novel evidence that a key function of the autobiographical memory system may be to mentally simulate events in the future.     

Lexical processing while deciding what task to perform: reading aloud in the context of the task set paradigm

The results of two experiments provide the first direct demonstration that subjects can process a word lexically despite concurrently being engaged in decoding a task cue telling them which of two tasks to perform. These results, taken together with others, point to qualitative differences between the mind‘s ability to engage in lexical versus sublexical processing during the time they are engaged with other tasks. The emerging picture is one in which some form of resource(s) plays little role during lexical processing whereas the need for some form of resource(s) during sublexical processing serves to bottleneck performance.     

Squeezing, striking, and vocalizing: Is number representation fundamentally spatial?

Numbers are fundamental entities in mathematics, but their cognitive bases are unclear. Abundant research points to linear space as a natural grounding for number representation. But, is number representation fundamentally spatial? We disentangle number representation from standard number-to-line reporting methods, and compare numerical estimations in educated participants using line-reporting with three nonspatial reporting conditions (squeezing, bell-striking, and vocalizing). All three cases of nonspatial-reporting consistently reproduced well-established results obtained with number-line methods. Furthermore, unlike line-reporting—and congruent with the psychophysical Weber–Fechner law—nonspatial reporting systematically produced logarithmic mappings for all nonsymbolic stimuli. Strikingly, linear mappings were obtained exclusively in conditions with culturally mediated elements (e.g., words). These results suggest that number representation is not fundamentally spatial, but builds on a deeper magnitude sense that manifests spatially and nonspatially mediated by magnitude, stimulus modality, and reporting condition. Number-to-space mappings—although ubiquitous in the modern world—do not seem to be rooted directly in brain evolution but have been culturally privileged and enhanced.     

青少年与同伴的自我表露及其与孤独感的关系

采用问卷法,以655名初高中生为被试,考察青少年与同伴自我表露的发展特点及其与孤独感的关系。结果表明:(1)高中生与不同表露对象以及在不同主题上的自我表露都高于初中生;(2)女生在除身体发育外的6个主题上的自我表露以及与同性最要好朋友的自我表露都高于男生;(3)青少年与最要好同性朋友的自我表露以及在兴趣爱好和身体发育两个主题上的自我表露能显著负向预测其孤独感。