The effect of feedback on children’s metacognitive judgments: a heuristic account

In three experiments, we investigated whether the feedback effect on the accuracy of children’s metacognitive judgments results from an improvement in monitoring processes or the use of the Anchoring-and-Adjustment heuristic. Experiment 1 revealed that adding feedback increased the accuracy of young children’s (aged 4, 6, and 8 years) memory prediction. In Experiment 2, the influence of an external anchor on children’s metacognitive judgment was established. Finally, in Experiment 3, two memory tasks that differed in terms of difficulty were administered. Participants were randomly assigned to an anchoring (high/low/no anchor) and a feedback (feedback/no feedback) condition. Results demonstrated that children in the feedback condition adjusted their predictions toward the feedback, regardless of the task’s difficulty. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that external information provided by feedback is used as an anchor for judgment. This interpretation is strengthened by the correlation found between the two scores computed to assess participants’ susceptibility to anchoring and feedback effects, which indicates that children who are more sensitive to the anchoring effect are also more sensitive to the feedback effect.     

Crossmodal temporal order and processing acuity in developmentally dyslexic young adults

We investigated crossmodal temporal performance in processing rapid sequential nonlinguistic events in developmentally dyslexic young adults (ages 20-36 years) and an age- and IQ-matched control group in audiotactile, visuotactile, and audiovisual combinations. Two methods were used for estimating 84% correct temporal acuity thresholds: temporal order judgment (TOJ) and temporal processing acuity (TPA). TPA requires phase difference detection: the judgment of simultaneity/nonsimultaneity of brief stimuli in two parallel, spatially separate triplets. The dyslexic readers' average temporal performance was somewhat poorer in all six comparisons; in audiovisual comparisons the group differences were not statistically significant, however. A principal component analysis indicated that temporal acuity and phonological awareness are related in dyslexic readers. The impairment of temporal input processing seems to be a general correlative feature of dyslexia in children and adults, but the overlap in performance between dyslexic and normal readers suggests that it is not a sufficient reason for developmental reading difficulties.     

Dualism and its Importance for Medicine

Cartesian dualism has been viewed by medical theorists to be oneof the chief causes of a reductionist/mechanistic treatment ofthe patient. Although I aver that Cartesian dualism is one culprit for the misapprehension of the genuine treatment of patients in termsof both mind and body, I argue that interactive dualism whichstresses the interaction of mind and body is essential to treatpatients with dignity and compassion. Thus, adequate medical carethat is humanistic in nature is difficult (if not impossible)to achieve without physicians adhering to a dualistic frameworkin which the body and person is treated during illness.     

Quantity judgments and individuation: evidence that mass nouns count

Three experiments explored the semantics of the mass-count distinction in young children and adults. In Experiments 1 and 2, the quantity judgments of participants provided evidence that some mass nouns refer to individuals, as such. Participants judged one large portion of stuff to be "more" than three tiny portions for substance-mass nouns (e.g. mustard, ketchup), but chose according to number for count nouns (e.g. shoes, candles) and object-mass nouns (e.g. furniture, jewelry). These results suggest that some mass nouns quantify over individuals, and that therefore reference to individuals does not distinguish count nouns from mass nouns. Thus, Experiments 1 and 2 failed to support the hypothesis that there exist one-to-one mappings between mass-count syntax and semantics for either adults or young children. In Experiment 3, it was found that for mass-count flexible terms (e.g. string, stone) participants based quantity judgments on number when the terms were used with count syntax, but on total amount of stuff when used with mass syntax. Apparently, the presence of discrete physical objects in a scene (e.g. stones) is not sufficient to permit quantity judgments based on number. It is proposed that object-mass nouns (e.g. furniture) can be used to refer to individuals due to lexically specified grammatical features that normally occur in count syntax. Also, we suggest that children learning language parse words that refer to individuals as count nouns unless given morpho-syntactic and referential evidence to the contrary, in which case object-mass nouns are acquired.     

The Meaning vs. The Medical Model in the Empirically Supported Treatment Program: A Consideration of The Empirical Evidence

A review of the debate on the Empirically Supported Treatment Program is presented. It is argued that underlying the specifics of the debate are fundamentally incompatible paradigms: a meaning vs. a medical model. The findings from two gold standard multi-site studies are reviewed to conclude that the control condition meets requirements for an empirically supported treatment. The empirical finding of the failure of clinical training to improve treatment outcomes is explained by the focus on rational factors in training. It is recommended that training of therapists focus on enhancing experiential capacity rather than mastery of manualized treatment approaches.     

The placebo effect in popular culture

This paper gives an overview of the placebo effect in popular culture, especially as it pertains to the work of authors Patrick O’Brian and Sinclair Lewis. The beloved physician as placebo, and the clinician scientist as villain are themes that respectively inform the novels, The Hundred Days and Arrowsmith. Excerpts from the novels, and from film show how the placebo effect, and the randomized clinical trial, have emerged into popular culture, and evolved over time. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “Placebo: Its Action and Place in Health Research Today,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 12–13 April, 2003.     

Informed consent and the use of placebo in poland: Ethical and legal aspects

The concept of informed consent was one of the most fruitful ideas that deeply changed the relationships between physicians and their patients from paternalism to respect for the personal autonomy of subjects needing professional medical care. The great progress in medicine, also involving the pharmaceutical industry, has created an increasing need to perform different clinical and experimental trials. The evolution of clinical research in the last decades has influenced strongly the design of these studies. One of the most important changes in this field has been the use of placebo groups in double-blind controlled studies. The controversies have involved not only the use of placebo when standard or proven treatment was available, but also some specific problems concerning the procedure of obtaining informed consent in such trials. This paper briefly presents the evolution of informed consent in Poland as well as different ethical and legal problems concerning informed consent and the use of placebo controls in clinical trials. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “Placebo: Its Action and Place in Health Research Today,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 12–13 April, 2003.     

The influence of hierarchy on probability judgment

Consider the task of predicting which soccer team will win the next World Cup. The bookmakers may judge Brazil to be the team most likely to win, but also judge it most likely that a European rather than a Latin American team will win. This is an example of a non-aligned hierarchy structure: the most probable event at the subordinate level (Brazil wins) appears to be inconsistent with the most probable event at the superordinate level (a European team wins). In this paper we exploit such structures to investigate how people make predictions based on uncertain hierarchical knowledge. We distinguish between aligned and non-aligned environments, and conjecture that people assume alignment. Participants were exposed to a non-aligned training set in which the most probable superordinate category predicted one outcome, whereas the most probable subordinate category predicted a different outcome. In the test phase participants allowed their initial probability judgments about category membership to shift their final ratings of the probability of the outcome, even though all judgments were made on the basis of the same statistical data. In effect people were primed to focus on the most likely path in an inference tree, and neglect alternative paths. These results highlight the importance of the level at which statistical data are represented, and suggest that when faced with hierarchical inference problems people adopt a simplifying heuristic that assumes alignment.     

Remarks on the identifiability of thurstonian paired comparison models under multiple judgment

It is well-known that the representations of the Thurstonian models for difference judgment data are not unique. It has been shown that equivalence classes can be formed to provide a more meaningful partition of the covariance structures of the Thurstonian ranking models. In this paper, we examine the equivalence relations between Thurstonian covariance structure models for paired comparison data obtained under multiple judgment and discuss their implications on the general identification constraints and methods to check for parameter identifiability in restricted models.The author is indebted to Ulf Böckenholt and Albert Maydeu-Olivares for their significant comments and suggestions which led to considerable improvement in this article.     

The early acquisition of verb meaning in German by normally developing and language impaired children

The research reported here focuses on the early acquisition of event structure in German. Based on longitudinal studies from 5 normally developing (ND) and 6 language-impaired (LI) children, a model of "event structural bootstrapping" is presented that spells out how ND children log into the verb lexicon. They project a target-consistent event tree, depicting the head-of-event of transitions. Young LI children, failing to employ this bootstrapping strategy, resort to radically underspecified event representations. The results from a truth-value judgment experiment with 16 ND and 16 LI children showed that ND children perform correctly on transitional verbs, while LI children perform at chance level on the same tasks. These findings are accounted for by the model of event structural bootstrapping to the extent that LI children lack an explicit representation of the head-of-event.