Conditions under which children experience inhibitory difficulty with a "button-press" go/no-go task

Go/no-go tasks seem to provide a simple marker of inhibitory development in young children. Children are told to respond to one stimulus on go trials but to make no response to another stimulus on no-go trials; responding on no-go trials is assumed to reflect a failure to inhibit the go response. However, there is evidence to suggest that a type of go/no-go task, which we call the "button-press" task, does not require inhibition. We investigated the conditions under which young children (M=3 years 6 months, N=120) experience inhibitory difficulty with this type of task. The data suggest that the speed of stimulus presentation is crucial and that other studies using this type of task have presented the stimuli too briefly. The importance of establishing the inhibitory credentials of a task before it is used as a marker of inhibitory control is emphasized.     

The On-line Study of Sentence Comprehension: An Examination of Dual Task Paradigms

This paper presents three studies which examine the susceptibility of sentence comprehension to intrusion by extra-sentential probe words in two on-line dual-task techniques commonly used to study sentence processing: the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm and the unimodal all-visual lexical priming paradigm. It provides both a general review and a direct empirical examination of the effects of task-demand in the on-line study of sentence comprehension. In all three studies, sentential materials were presented to participants together with a target probe word which constituted either a better or a worse continuation of the sentence at a point at which it was presented. Materials were identical for all three studies. The manner of presentation of the sentence materials was, however, manipulated; presentation was either visual, auditory (normal rate) or auditory (slow rate). The results demonstrate that a technique in which a visual target probe interrupts ongoing sentence processing (such as occurs in unimodal visual presentation and in very slow auditory sentence presentation) encourages the integration of the probe word into the on-going sentence. Thus, when using such ‘sentence interrupting’ techniques, additional care to equate probes is necessary. Importantly, however, the results provide strong evidence that the standard use of fluent cross-modality sentence investigation methods are immune from such external probe word intrusions into ongoing sentence processing and are thus accurately reflect underlying comprehension processes.     

A comparison of the effects of providing activity and material choice to children with autism spectrum disorders

The present study compares the effects of providing choice between activities or between materials for completion of activities on the on-task behavior of 4 boys with autism spectrum disorders. Results showed that the participants displayed higher levels of on-task behavior during the choice conditions than in the no-choice condition. However, the type of choice opportunity did not seem to have a differential effect.     

Estimation and visualization of confusability matrices from adaptive measurement data

We present a simple but effective method based on Luce’s choice axiom [Luce, R.D. (1959). Individual choice behavior: A theoretical analysis. New York: John Wiley & Sons] for consistent estimation of the pairwise confusabilities of items in a multiple-choice recognition task with arbitrarily chosen choice-sets. The method combines the exact (non-asymptotic) Bayesian way of assessing uncertainty with the unbiasedness emphasized in the classical frequentist approach.We apply the method to data collected using an adaptive computer game designed for prevention of reading disability. A player’s estimated confusability of phonemes (or more accurately, phoneme-grapheme connections) and larger units of language is visualized in an easily understood way with color cues and explicit indication of the accuracy of the estimates. Visualization of learning-related changes in the player’s performance is considered.The empirical validity of the choice axiom is evaluated using the game data itself. The axiom appears to hold reasonably well although a small systematic violation is observable for the smallest choice-set sizes.     

A Bayesian-optimal principle for learner-friendly adaptation in learning games

Adaptive learning games should provide opportunities for the student to learn as well as motivate playing until goals have been reached. In this paper, we give a mathematically rigorous treatment of the problem in the framework of Bayesian decision theory. To quantify the opportunities for learning, we assume that the learning tasks that yield the most information about the current skills of the student, while being desirable for measurement in their own right, would also be among those that are efficient for learning. Indeed, optimization of the expected information gain appears to naturally avoid tasks that are exceedingly demanding or exceedingly easy as their results are predictable and thus uninformative. Still, tasks that are efficient for learning may be experienced as too challenging, and the resulting failures can lower motivation. Therefore, in addition to quantifying the expected informational benefit for learning of any prospective task to be presented next, we also model the expected motivational cost of its presentation, measured simply as the estimated probability of failure in our example model. We propose a “learner-friendly” adaptation algorithm that chooses the learning tasks by optimizing the expected benefit divided by the expected cost. We apply this algorithm to a Rasch-like student model implemented within a real-world application and present initial results of a pilot experiment.     

初中生学业延迟满足的发展特点及其相关因素研究

用问卷法对194名初中生学业延迟满足的特点及相关因素进行了研究。结果表明:初中学生的学业延迟满足存在年级和性别差异,初二和初三学生的学业延迟满足水平明显低于初一学生,女生比男生的学业延迟满足能力高。课堂目标结构与学业延迟满足有显著关系,任务取向的课堂目标与学业延迟满足呈正相关关系;自我取向的课堂目标与学业延迟满足呈负相关关系。任务价值、自我效能与学业延迟满足呈正相关关系,学业延迟满足与学业成绩呈正相关关系。     

Retrieval of names in face and object naming in an interference study

Two experiments using the interference paradigm are reported. In the first experiment, the participants spoke aloud the names of celebrities and the names of objects when presented with pictures while hearing distractors. In the case of proper names, we replicated the data obtained by Izaute and Bonin (2001) using the interference paradigm with a proper name written naming task. In the case of common names, the results replicated those obtained by Shriefers, Meyer, and Levelt (1990). In the second experiment, the participants produced the names of celebrities when presented with their faces while hearing distractors that were either proper names associated with the celebrities (associate condition), that belonged to a different professional category (different condition), or that corresponded to the proper names of the celebrities (identical condition). For negative SOAs, “associate” distractors were found to increase latencies compared to the “different category” condition. The implications of the findings for proper name retrieval are briefly discussed.     

No dual-task practice effect in Alzheimer's disease

Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) requires evidence of progressive decline in cognitive function. However, many tests used to assess cognitive function suffer from considerable practice effects, reducing their reliability. Several studies have reported that the ability to do two things at once, or dual tasking, is impaired in AD, but unaffected by healthy ageing. The apparent specificity of this impairment suggests that this assessment may be particularly useful in the early diagnosis of AD, but the reliability of this assessment remains unknown. Therefore, this study investigated simultaneous performance of digit recall and tracking tasks across six testing sessions in eight people with AD, eight healthy older adults and eight healthy younger adults. The results found that dual-task performance was unaffected by healthy ageing, but significantly impaired in AD, with no effect of repeated exposure. The absence of any improvements in performance despite increased familiarity with the task's demands suggests that not only is the dual-task assessment well suited for monitoring progression over time, but also that dual tasking involves a specific cognitive function which is impaired in the AD brain.     

《心理统计学》教学内容的新探索

本文在对当前国内外主要心理统计学教材进行比较的基础上,指出与上个世纪八十年代的心理统计学教材内容相比较,在内容上的新探索主要体现在（1）由“假设检验”的内容中发展出“统计检验力”和“效果大小”的统计指标和估计方法;（2）引进一般线性模型来统合方差分析和回归分析这两种统计方法;（3）适度增加一些“多元统计分析”的内容等三个方面.本文对前两个方面的新内容作了简要评述,并对教材内容的编排方面提出了新的思路.     

How do we convert a number into a finger trajectory?

How do we understand two-digit numbers such as 42? Models of multi-digit number comprehension differ widely. Some postulate that the decades and units digits are processed separately and possibly serially. Others hypothesize a holistic process which maps the entire 2-digit string onto a magnitude, represented as a position on a number line. In educated adults, the number line is thought to be linear, but the “number sense” hypothesis proposes that a logarithmic scale underlies our intuitions of number size, and that this compressive representation may still be dormant in the adult brain. We investigated these issues by asking adults to point to the location of two-digit numbers on a number line while their finger location was continuously monitored. Finger trajectories revealed a linear scale, yet with a transient logarithmic effect suggesting the activation of a compressive and holistic quantity representation. Units and decades digits were processed in parallel, without any difference in left-to-right vs. right-to-left readers. The late part of the trajectory was influenced by spatial reference points placed at the left end, middle, and right end of the line. Altogether, finger trajectory analysis provides a precise cognitive decomposition of the sequence of stages used in converting a number to a quantity and then a position.