Sex differences in the relation between math performance, spatial skills, and attitudes

Sex differences have been previously found in cognitive and affective predictors of math achievement, including spatial skills and math attitudes. It is important to determine whether there are sex differences not only in the predictors themselves, but also in the nature of their relation to math achievement. The present paper examined spatial skills and math attitudes as predictors of curriculum-based measures of math performance in middle-school students, specifically comparing the patterns of these predictive relations for boys and girls. The results of the current study showed that, despite similar levels of math performance for boys and girls, the significance of particular predictors varied as a function of sex. Specifically, spatial skills predicted math performance in boys, but not in girls. We suggest that sex differences in spatial reasoning in conjunction with the differential involvement of spatial reasoning in math problem solving may lead to later sex differences in math outcomes.     

Assessment of cognitive function across pregnancy using CANTAB: A longitudinal study

Significant changes in endogenous plasma hormone levels are required to sustain pregnancy which provides a unique opportunity to study their effect on cognitive function.     

Perspective-taking in dialogue as self-organization under social constraints

We present a dynamical systems account of how simple social information influences perspective-taking. Our account is motivated by the notion that perspective-taking may obey common dynamic principles with perceptuomotor coupling. We turn to the prominent HKB dynamical model of motor coordination, drawing from basic principles of self-organization to describe how conversational perspective-taking unfolds in a low-dimensional attractor landscape. We begin by simulating experimental data taken from a simple instruction-following task, in which participants have different expectations about their interaction partner. By treating belief states as different values of a control parameter, we show that data generated by a basic dynamical process fits overall egocentric and other-centric response distributions, the time required for participants to enact a response on a trial-by-trial basis, and the action dynamics exhibited in individual trials. We end by discussing the theoretical significance of dynamics in dialog, arguing that high-level coordination such as perspective-taking may obey similar dynamics as perceptuomotor coordination, pointing to common principles of adaptivity and flexibility during dialog.     

A unity of the self or a multiplicity of locations? How the graphesthesia task sheds light on the role of spatial perspectives in bodily self-consciousness

Integrating multisensory stimuli from a self-centred perspective is crucial for the unity of the self. On the other hand, understanding external space and communicating spatial knowledge with others necessitate the adoption of decentred perspectives. How do we juggle these two requirements? In this article, we review those studies that have used the graphesthesia task in order to investigate the perspectives that people adopt when interpreting ambiguous tactile symbols (e.g., b, d, p, and q). With such ambiguous symbols, self-centred and decentred perspectives conflict with one another. The results reviewed here reveal that the perspectives adopted vary significantly with spatial, personal, and interpersonal factors. Such findings suggest that the self can adopt a multiplicity of spatial locations. However, the unity of the self can partly be explained by the predominance of a head-centred perspective. On the other hand, perspective-taking abilities contribute to the distinction between self and others, reinforcing self-consciousness.