Effects of discrete emotions on young children's ability to discern fantasy and reality

This study examined 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 128; 54% girls) ability to discriminate emotional fantasy and reality. Children viewed images depicting fantastic or real events that elicited several emotions, reported whether each event could occur, and rated their emotional reaction to the image. Children were also administered the Play Behavior Questionnaire and Pretend Action Tasks to assess play behaviors. Findings revealed age-related improvements in performance and biases in judgment based on the emotion depicted. Children reported that happy fantastic events could occur significantly more often than frightening and angry fantastic events and that happy real events could occur significantly more often than frightening and angry real events. Children's emotional reactions to the images but not play behaviors were significantly related to their fantasy-reality distinctions. Implications for the relation between emotions and children's fantasy-reality distinctions are discussed.     

Previewing the neighborhood: the role of orthographic neighbors as parafoveal previews in reading

In 2 experiments, a boundary technique was used with parafoveal previews that were identical to a target (e.g., sleet), a word orthographic neighbor (sweet), or an orthographically matched nonword (speet). In Experiment 1, low-frequency words in orthographic pairs were targets, and high-frequency words were previews. In Experiment 2, the roles were reversed. In Experiment 1, neighbor words provided as much preview benefit as identical words and greater benefit than nonwords, whereas in Experiment 2, neighbor words provided no greater preview benefit than nonwords. These results indicate that the frequency of a preview influences the extraction of letter information without setting up appreciable competition between previews and targets. This is consistent with a model of word recognition in which early stages largely depend on excitation of letter information, and competition between lexical candidates becomes important only in later stages.     

The effect of word frequency, word predictability, and font difficulty on the eye movements of young and older readers

Young adult and older readers' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing target words that varied in frequency or predictability. In addition, half of the sentences were printed in a font that was easy to read (Times New Roman) and the other half were printed in a font that was more difficult to read (Old English). Word frequency, word predictability, and font difficulty effects were apparent in the eye movement data of both groups of readers. In the fixation time data, the pattern of results was the same, but the older readers had larger frequency and predictability effects than the younger readers. The older readers skipped words more often than the younger readers (as indicated by their skipping rate on selected target words), but they made more regressions back to the target words and more regressions overall. The E-Z Reader model was used as a platform to evaluate the results, and simulations using the model suggest that lexical processing is slowed in older readers and that, possibly as a result of this, they adopt a more risky reading strategy.     

Stroop Interference,Practice, and Aging

We report two experiments that investigate practice effects on Stroop color-word interference in older and younger adults. Both experiments employed a computerized, single-item version of the Stroop task with a voice response, and both involved practice over hundreds of trials. Both experiments showed generally similar practice patterns, including a practice-related reduction in the size of the color-word interference effect. However, the older group continued to show a larger interference effect throughout practice. These findings indicate that older adults show the same trend in practice-related improvement on the Stroop task as younger adults.     

Searching for an O in an array of Cs: eye movements track moment-to-moment processing in visual search

We examined how closely the underlying cognitive processing in a visual search task guides eye movements by comparing two different search tasks. In the extended search task, participants searched for an O in eight clusters of Landolt Cs with varying gap widths (four characters per cluster, arranged to look like words in text). In the single-cluster task, participants searched a single cluster (identical to the ones in the extended search). The key manipulation was gap size; although gap orientation for the distractors varied within a cluster, gap size was constant within a cluster but differed in size from cluster to cluster. The principal findings were that (1) gaze durations in the extended search were almost completely a function of the difficulty of the cluster (i.e., the gap size of the Cs) and (2) the effect of gap size on gaze durations in the extended search was very similar to its effect on response times in the single-cluster search. Thus, it appears that eye movements in the search task are determined almost exclusively by the ongoing cognitive processing on that cluster.     

Incidental visual memory for targets and distractors in visual search

We explored incidental retention of visual details of encountered objects during search. Participants searched for conjunction targets in 32 arrays of 12 pictures of real-world objects and then performed a token discrimination task that examined their memory for visual details of the targets and distractors from the search task. The results indicate that even though participants had not been instructed to memorize the objects, the visual details of search targets and distractor objects related to the targets were retained after the search. Distractor objects unrelated to the search target were remembered more poorly. Eye-movement measures indicated that the objects that were remembered were looked at more frequently during search than those that were not remembered. These results provide support that detailed visual information is included incidentally in the visual representation of an object after the object is no longer in view.     

Eye movements and picture processing during recognition

Eye movements were monitored during a recognition memory test of previously studied pictures of full-color scenes. The test scenes were identical to the originals, had an object deleted from them, or included a new object substituted for an original object. In contrast to a prior report (Parker, 1978), we found no evidence that object deletions or substitutions could be recognized on the basis of information acquired from the visual periphery. Deletions were difficult to recognize peripherally, and the eyes were not attracted to them. Overall, the amplitude of the average saccade to the critical object during the memory test was less than 4.5 degrees of visual angle in all conditions and averaged 4.1 degrees across conditions. We conclude that information about object presence and identity in a scene is limited to a relatively small region around the current fixation point.     

School‐based humanistic counselling for psychological distress in young people: A practice research network to address the attrition problem

Aims: School‐based humanistic counselling (SBHC) is a common psychological intervention for young people, particularly in the UK. However, studies have tended to suffer from high attrition rates, such that effects may have been over‐estimated. This paper describes a low budget ‘star topology’ practice research network (PRN) outcome evaluation of SBHC in a sample where attrition rates were minimised. Design: A practice‐based longitudinal study in a small PRN compared levels of psychological distress at first and last session from session‐by‐session data. Multilevel regression modelling was used to identify predictors of outcomes. Methods: Eight counsellors working across 11 schools agreed to use session‐by‐session self‐rating on the Young Person's CORE (YP‐CORE) yielding data from 256 young people aged 11 to 17. Predictors of outcomes were analysed using multilevel regression analysis. Results: Mean levels of distress on the YP‐CORE reduced from 18.29 (SD = 7.32) at baseline to 9.10 (SD = 6.19) at endpoint, giving a baseline to endpoint effect size of 1.26 (95% CI = 1.06–1.46). Lower levels of psychological distress at endpoint were associated with male clients, younger age groups, greater rates of attendance at counselling, and bereavement as a presenting problem. Conclusions: This ‘star topology’ PRN focused on a single study and demonstrated that such a system can provide relatively low cost, high quality data. The data showed that SBHC is associated with large reductions in psychological distress, and that this cannot be attributed to the high attrition rates of previous datasets.     

Task-relevant perceptual features can define categories in visual memory too

Although Konkle, Brady, Alvarez, and Oliva (2010, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139(3), 558) claim that visual long-term memory (VLTM) is organized on underlying conceptual, not perceptual, information, visual memory results from visual search tasks are not well explained by this theory. We hypothesized that when viewing an object, any task-relevant visual information is critical to the organizational structure of VLTM. In two experiments, we examined the organization of VLTM by measuring the amount of retroactive interference created by objects possessing different combinations of task-relevant features. Based on task instructions, only the conceptual category was task relevant or both the conceptual category and a perceptual object feature were task relevant. Findings indicated that when made task relevant, perceptual object feature information, along with conceptual category information, could affect memory organization for objects in VLTM. However, when perceptual object feature information was task irrelevant, it did not contribute to memory organization; instead, memory defaulted to being organized around conceptual category information. These findings support the theory that a task-defined organizational structure is created in VLTM based on the relevance of particular object features and information.     

Eye movements are functional during face learning

In a free viewing learning condition, participants were allowed to move their eyes naturally as they learned a set of new faces. In a restricted viewing learning condition, participants remained fixated in a single central location as they learned the new faces. Recognition of the learned faces was then tested following the two learning conditions. Eye movements were recorded during the free viewing learning condition, as well as during recognition. The recognition results showed a clear deficit following the restricted viewing condition, compared with the free viewing condition, demonstrating that eye movements play a functional role during human face learning. Furthermore, the features selected for fixation during recognition were similar following free viewing and restricted viewing learning, suggesting that the eye movements generated during recognition are not simply a recapitulation of those produced during learning.