Aging and memory for expected and unexpected objects in real-world settings.

Adult age differences in the consistency effect were examined in 3 experiments. The consistency effect refers to items inconsistent with expectations being better remembered than items consistent with expectations. Younger and older adults walked into an office room and viewed objects that varied in their consistency with expectation. Immediate and delayed recognition tests on item information (i.e., distractors were defined by their semantic identity) revealed that both age groups recognized unexpected items better than expected items. However, when recognition of token information was requested (i.e., distractors were defined by their physical appearance), younger adults, in contrast to older adults, exhibited consistency effects. Also, under divided attention, young adults revealed the same pattern of data as did elderly adults under full attention. The results are discussed in terms of capacity-related differences in distinctive encoding.     

Caregiving for children through conflict and displacement: a pilot study testing the feasibility of delivering and evaluating a light touch parenting intervention for caregivers in the West Bank

A child's adjustment to wartime stress is reliant not only on individual responses and qualities, but very significantly on the availability of support that they may receive from their parent or caregivers and quality of relationships. Strengthening parental support has the potential to be valuable. A pilot two-arm randomised controlled trial investigated the feasibility of delivering and evaluating the “Caring for Children Through Conflict and Displacement” intervention with caregivers in the West Bank. Feasibility to recruit and train non-specialist staff on-the-ground to screen families for eligibility, collect outcome data, deliver the intervention and to recruit and retain families in the study were examined. Research staff and intervention facilitators were successfully appointed in the field, screened participants and delivered the intervention to 120 caregivers, collecting outcome measures pre-and post-delivery. All families completed the outcome measures, with very little missing data. This indicated that the intervention can be delivered feasibly and evaluated with families in this humanitarian context. Preliminary outcome data showed promise that the intervention may have the potential to both improve family functioning and reduce children's problem behaviour. Implications of family-focused initiatives, particularly within a conflict/post-conflict context for the prevention of several negative health and social outcomes directions, are discussed.     

Individual differences in vocal activity rhythm: Fourier analysis of cyclicity in amount of talk

Speakers in informal conversations tend to alternate regularly between lower and higher amounts of talking; the periods of these low/high activity cycles are on the order of 3, 6, and 15 minutes. Statistically significant periodicities occurred in 55% of the conversations studied. The periodograms that describe the partition of variance among periodic components whow consistent individual differences in the cyclic patterning of vocal activity. Discriminant analysis used the amount of variance accounted for by each of the 12 lowest-frequency periodic components as discriminating variables to see whether speakers could be identified on the basis of the cyclic patterns in vocal activity. Speakers were discriminated and classified at levels well above chance. This suggests that there are consistent individual differences among speakers in the length of cycles in amount of talk.We gratefully acknowledge support from the Central University Research Fund and from the office of the Dean of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire.     

Age-related changes in working and reference memory performance and locomotor activity in the Wistar rat

Wistar rats of three age groups were tested in an automated tunnel-maze system of variable geometry to investigate whether changes in spontaneous locomotor activity and in learning and memory develop differentially or in a correlated fashion as a function of age. Senescent (30 months) as well as mature-adult (17 months) rats showed an age-correlated decline of locomotor activity as compared to the mature-young (5 months) group. Both working-memory (measured as within-trial arm discrimination performance) and reference-memory (measured as avoidance of "blind alley" visits) were severely affected in the senescent group, whereas the middle-aged animals suffered only from a working-memory deficit. The findings provide evidence that locomotor deficits do not necessarily interfere in the assessment of age-related changes in cognitive performance. Furthermore the results support the hypothesis that working and reference memory have different underlying physiological correlates and that these neuronal systems are differentially affected by the aging process.