Effects of peer social initiations on the behavior of withdrawn preschool children

Social approach to peers was evaluated as an intervention for isolate preschoolers. During baseline, confederate peers made few social approaches to the target subjects. Confederates greatly increased their rate of social approaches during the first intervention, decreased social approaches during a second baseline, and increased social approaches again in a second intervention phase. Increases in confederate social initiations immediately increased the frequency of subjects' positive social behavior. Additionally, five of six subjects showed an increase in their own positive social initiations during intervention periods. The results suggest that: (a) peers may be programmed to increase the positive social behaviors of their isolate classmates, and (b) remediating social deficits requires assessment and intervention specifically tailored to the individual child.     

Invariance of the weight parameter in information integration

The relative effect of each informational dimension in an information integration task is a joint function of its weight and the range of values over which it is varied. A method is developed for separating these two factors. Weights obtained by this method were compared across variations of stimulus range. Subjects rated the performance of students on the basis of midterm exam scores and final exam scores. For some subjects, the range of scores on the final exam was twice that on the midterm and the reverse was true for other subjects. An averaging model was shown to describe the results, and weights did not differ for different stimulus ranges. This was true for each of two instructional conditions: one in which a particular weighting strategy was prescribed and one in which there was no prescribed weighting. Students who were instructed to use a 2∶1 weighting were found to assign more than twice as much weight to the final as to the midterm.     

Traumatic Brain Injury as a Risk Factor for Alzheimer's Disease: A Review

Accumulating epidemiological evidence implicates traumatic brain injury as a pathogenic agent in the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Considering the increase in the prevalence of both traumatic brain injury and AD in recent times, the possibility that brain trauma may provoke the early development of AD has important implications for health service planning, preventative efforts, and medico-legal compensation settlements. This paper evaluates the plausibility of the proposed link between traumatic brain injury and AD, largely by way of exploring a theoretical perspective advanced by Satz (1993) and considering recent contributions from the epidemiological, neuropathological, and biochemical literature that are pertinent to this issue. The literature reviewed provides sufficient support and empirical vindication to give credence to the proposed association between these two neuropsychological entities at the statistical, theoretical, and biological level.     

Emerging from the causal drain

For over 20 years, Jaegwon Kim’s Causal Exclusion Argument has stood as the major hurdle for non-reductive physicalism. If successful, Kim’s argument would show that the high-level properties posited by non-reductive physicalists must either be identical with lower-level physical properties, or else must be causally inert. The most prominent objection to the Causal Exclusion Argument—the so-called Overdetermination Objection—points out that there are some notions of causation that are left untouched by the argument. If causation is simply counterfactual dependence, for example, then the Causal Exclusion Argument fails. Thus, much of the existing debate turns on the issue of which account of causation is appropriate. In this paper, however, I take a bolder approach and argue that Kim’s preferred version of the Causal Exclusion Argument fails no matter what account one gives of causation. Any notion of causation that is strong enough to support the premises of the argument is too strong to play the role required in the logic of the argument. I also consider a second version of the Causal Exclusion Argument, and suggest that although it may avoid the problems of the first version, it begs the question against a particular form of non-reductive physicalism, namely emergentism.     

Object‐based visual processing in children with spina bifida and hydrocephalus: A cognitive neuropsychological analysis

The aim of the study was to use cognitive neuropsychological analysis to investigate object‐based visual processing skills in children with spina bifida myelomeningocele and hydrocephalus (SBH). Fourteen children with SBH (aged 8–12) and 21 age‐, socio‐economic status‐, and Verbal IQ‐matched healthy controls were assessed using the Birmingham Object Recognition Battery. Overall, the performance of the children with SBH on the object‐processing tasks was intact, indicating normal development of the ventral visual processing pathway. While the initial results indicated that the children with SBH performed statistically significantly less accurately on some tasks, these group differences no longer met significance criteria after capacity for sustained attention was statistically controlled.     

INCREASED PEER-TEACHING WITH GROUP-ORIENTED CONTINGENCIES FOR ARITHMETIC PERFORMANCE IN BEHAVIOR-DISORDERED ADOLESCENTS1

Group-oriented contingencies were applied to increase the arithmetic problem-solving rates of four behavior-disordered adolescent residents in a psychiatric hospital. The experiment followed an ABAC reversal design consisting of baseline conditions (A₁ and A₂), and cumulative (B) and mixed (C) interdependent group-oriented contingency conditions. Under the cumulative arrangement, the subjects earned five cents for every correctly solved multiplication problem. The same conditions were in effect with the mixed contingency, except that each subject was required to work at least three problems before any subject could earn money. The results indicated consistent increases in the subjects' arithmetic computation rates as a function of the group-oriented contingencies. Concurrent observations were made across the four conditions of the experiment on four categories of the subjects' verbalizations: antecedent peer-teaching, consequent peer-teaching, positive statements, and negative statements. The subjects' rates of antecedent peer-teaching verbalizations covaried with the group-contingency-induced increases in their levels of computation behavior. The majority of the verbalization involved answers to number fact questions or redirecting peers to engage in on-task activities. The three other categories of the subjects' verbalizations that were observed—consequent peer-teaching, positive statements, and negative statements—were not found to covary with the subjects' altered rates of computation behavior.     

The development of the multidimensional locus of pain control questionnaire (MLPC): Factor structure,reliability, and validity

This study was conducted to develop a comprehensive Multidimensional Locus of Pain Control questionnaire (MLPC) and to examine how locus of pain control is related to pain appraisals, pain coping strategies, and adjustment to chronic pain. Subjects were 170 chronic headache patients. By means of factor analysis, four subscales were derived: an Internal, a Chance, a Physician, and a Medication locus of pain control orientation scale. The reliability and validity of the subscales appeared to be satisfactory. The results of the present study indicate that the locus of pain control orientation is significantly related to pain appraisals such as perceived pain control and catastrophizing and, to a lesser degree, to coping strategies as measured by the Coping Strategies Questionnaire (CSQ). However, almost no relationship was observed between locus of pain control and adjustment to pain. Further research with the MLPC in different chronic pain populations is warranted in order to investigate whether the results found in this study can be generalized to chronic pain patients in general.     

An Investigation of Neuronal Integrity in Severe Paediatric Traumatic Brain Injury

Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) and its association with neuropsychological functioning was examined in the chronic injury phase of paediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI). Fifteen children, aged 10-16 years, with severe TBIs were compared with 15 controls, matched for age and gender. The TBI group was found to have significantly lower levels of N-acetyl aspartate (NAA) and Choline (Cho) in the right frontal lobe and generally displayed reduced performances on neuropsychological tests. A correlation between metabolites and reaction times was also obtained. Findings indicate a role of proton MRS as a measure of neuronal integrity following severe paediatric TBI and suggest a potential association of MRS with specific neuropsychological impairments.     

An Examination of Lexical and Sublexical Reading Skills in Children with Neurofibromatosis Type 1

Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) is an inherited neurocutaneous disorder associated with a high frequency of cognitive and learning difficulties. Based on discrepancies between IQ and academic achievement, approximately 17% of children with NF1 have been classified as having reading impairments. In this study, the lexical and sublexical reading skills of children with NF1 (n = 30) were examined using the Castles' Word/Non-Word Test (modified version), together with measures of neuropsychological functioning and academic achievement. Twenty children (67%) demonstrated deficits in one or more reading subskills, with 75% of these meeting criteria for phonological dyslexia and 20% classified with mixed dyslexia. These findings indicate that a large proportion of children with NF1 may be characterized by a specific difficulty with the sublexical procedure, suggesting a difficulty employing spelling-to-sound rules to assemble a pronunciation when reading. In line with previous studies, the present findings also suggest that discrepancy-based methods may not be sufficiently sensitive to identify children who experience reading difficulties.