Reading and Phonological Awareness Skills in Children Exposed to Domestic Violence

This study examined whether children exposed to domestic violence perform worse on tests of reading and phonological awareness than children from nonviolent homes. Forty children, ages 6 to 9 years, were divided into control or domestic violence groups based on their mothers' responses on the revised Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS2). The groups were matched on age, gender, nonverbal IQ, and socioeconomic status. The domestic violence group performed worse than the control group on all measures of reading and phonological awareness. Significantly more children in the domestic violence group were identified as having reading difficulties compared to the control group. The results suggest that domestic violence may negatively impact children's reading skills, and appropriate intervention techniques should be developed.     

Both associative activation and thematic extraction count,but thematic false memories are more easily rejected

The main aim of this study was to analyse the roles played by associative activation and thematic extraction in the explanation of false memories using the Deese, Roediger, McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Associative lists with two different types of critical items (CIs) were used: one, the associative CI, corresponded to the word most strongly primed by the associates in the list and another, the thematic CI, was the word that best described the theme of the list. Following three different types of encoding instructions (standard, warning or strategic), false recognition for these two types of CIs was analysed in either self-paced or speeded response recognition tests. The results showed considerable levels of false memories for both types of CIs. Even without the quality of being “good themes”, associative CIs produced high levels of false recognition, which suggests that associative activation plays a prominent role in false memory formation. More interestingly, thematic CIs were more prone to be edited out, reinforcing the argument that thematic identifiability has a major role in the rejection of false memories.     

Stereotypes and stereotyping: What's the brain got to do with it?

Influential social-psychological models suggest that perceivers frequently use information-processing strategies that result in the stereotype-based construal and treatment of other people. To elucidate in greater detail when, why, and how social encounters elicit stereotyping, researchers have begun to incorporate neuroscientific tools into their repertoire of investigative methods. The current article reviews these studies and considers their significance in light of existing theories of person perception, knowledge representation, and impression formation. Finally, using the concrete example of stereotyping, benefits and pitfalls of adopting a social neuroscience approach are discussed.     

Writing product and process in children with English as an additional language

ABSTRACT

Children draw on limited cognitive resources to write and these resources are under more demand when writing in English as an additional language (EAL). This study investigated the relationship between writing process measures along with two language measures, phonological awareness and lexical retrieval, and measures of writing product. Thirty-nine EAL children took part in the study and their writing was digitised so that execution speed, burst length, and the pattern of pauses were available for analysis. The results found that lexical retrieval was significantly associated, indirectly through execution speed and burst length, with the number of words, lexical richness, and writing quality. The results are discussed in the context of common underlying proficiency theory and lexical retrieval as part of the translation process of writing.     

Word order does not constrain phonological activation in single word production

It has recently been claimed that the canonical word order of a given language constrains phonological activation processes even in single word production (Janssen, Alario, & Caramazza, 2008). This hypothesis predicts for languages with canonical adjective–noun word order that naming an object (i.e., noun production) is facilitated if the task-irrelevant colour of the object (i.e., adjective) is phonologically similar to the object name (e.g., blue–boat as compared to red–boat). By contrast, there should be no corresponding effect in naming the colour of the object (i.e., adjective production). In an experiment with native speakers of German, however, we observed exactly the opposite pattern. Phonological congruency facilitated colour naming but had no effect on object naming. Together with extant data from other languages our results suggest that object colour naming is affected by the phonology of the object name but not vice versa, regardless of the canonical word order in the given language.     

Poly I:C母体免疫刺激诱导的子代精神分裂症神经发育动物模型研究

精神分裂症是一组病因未明的重性精神障碍,其病理生理学机制极其复杂,建立能够确切模拟精神分裂症的动物模型对于其发病机制的研究及抗精神分裂症药物的研发具有十分重要的意义。本文意在介绍产前母体免疫刺激（聚肌胞苷酸聚肌苷酸-聚胞苷酸,poly-I:C）诱导子代出现精神分裂症样的神经发育动物模型,以及该模型对精神分裂症的病因研究、生物学机制及其治疗和药物研发的重要意义。     

Catching nonconscious goals in the act of decision making

Research has consistently found that goals triggered by environmental cues can influence decision making processes outside of conscious awareness. This lack of awareness led naturally to the presumption that decision makers could not report the activation level of nonconsciously primed goals. This paper shows that goal activation levels can be reported, so long as the report is made during the decision process on a continuous goal activation scale. These results indicate that default lack of awareness is less a limitation of the cognitive system and more a function of the method used to recover goals during a decision process.     

语音加工的发展、老化及其神经机制

作为人类语言活动的重要组成成分,语音加工经历着“习得-发展-老化”的变化过程。本文首先综述了婴儿、儿童、成年人及老年人在语音意识、语音提取,语音工作记忆等方面的表现及相应加工机制。其次,分析了不同年龄段个体语音加工发展变化的神经基础。最后,通过比较不同时期个体语音加工发展进程,围绕语音加工发展过程、语音老化有无关键年龄以及如何干预等问题进行展望。     

Perceived optimality of competing solutions to the Euclidean travelling salesperson problem

The Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is a nondeterministic-polynomial hard (NP-hard) combinatorial problem that occurs in a wide range of industrial domains, including logistics, route finding, and computer wiring. Interestingly, despite the problem’s inherent computational difficulty, when presented in Euclidean space (ETSP), human participants can produce close-to-optimal solutions in near-linear time. However, when asked to compare and select the most optimum solution from a set of pre-defined competing solution options, participants can struggle. In this study we investigate this paradox by asking participants to compare four closed-loop Euclidean TSP solutions, in order to determine which solution they perceived to have the most optimal tour cost. We hypothesise that the extracted geometric properties have an effect on stimulus selection in a discrimination task (selection or no selection). Accordingly, we extracted four geometric properties from competing stimuli in order to create a perceptual activation function. Predictive analytics demonstrated that a classification model could identify the most optimal solution 97% of the time using the perceptual activation scores alone, yet human participants only correctly determined the most optimal solution 47% of the time. Mixed-effects models suggest that ‘likelihood of stimulus selection’ can be modelled as a function of the weighted coefficients of competing perceptual activation scores within each trial; however only a small amount of the variance is explained by these perceptual activation scores. Finally, a drift–diffusion model was used to create a theoretical framework of how likelihood of stimulus selection is influenced by competing perceptual activators. Our study highlights a novel way of extracting and analysing the importance of geometric properties that influence ETSP discrimination tasks, and links this analysis to human behaviour when discriminating between competing ETSP solutions.