Short-term memory, executive control, and children's route learning

The aim of this study was to investigate route-learning ability in 67 children aged 5 to 11years and to relate route-learning performance to the components of Baddeley's model of working memory. Children carried out tasks that included measures of verbal and visuospatial short-term memory and executive control and also measures of verbal and visuospatial long-term memory; the route-learning task was conducted using a maze in a virtual environment. In contrast to previous research, correlations were found between both visuospatial and verbal memory tasks-the Corsi task, short-term pattern span, digit span, and visuospatial long-term memory-and route-learning performance. However, further analyses indicated that these relationships were mediated by executive control demands that were common to the tasks, with long-term memory explaining additional unique variance in route learning.     

An internet survey of emotional health,treatment seeking and barriers to accessing mental health treatment among Chinese-speaking international students in Australia

The present internet survey examined the demographic characteristics of Chinese-speaking international students in Australia, psychological distress levels as measured by the Kessler-10 (K-10) Item scale, help-seeking history and preferences, as well as treatment barriers. Of the 144 respondents, 54% reported high psychological distress (mean K-10 score?=?23.96; SD?=?9.03). However, only 9% of those who were highly distressed reported they had sought mental health services in the past year. While the majority preferred help from informal social networks, they tended to favour mental health services over traditional culture-specific forms of help. Common barriers to accessing mental health services reported by respondents with high psychological distress included costs or transportation concerns, limited knowledge of available services, time constraints, the perception that symptoms were not severe enough to warrant treatment, language difficulties and lack of knowledge of symptoms of psychological distress. Although the majority preferred face-to-face treatments over internet treatments, a considerable percentage of respondents were willing to try either treatment modality. Chinese-speaking international students are a high risk group for developing psychological distress, yet they tend to underuse mental health services. Education about the effectiveness of face-to-face and online treatments may increase treatment seeking by this population.     

The development of route learning in Down syndrome,Williams syndrome and typical development: investigations with virtual environments

The ability to navigate new environments has a significant impact on the daily life and independence of people with learning difficulties. The aims of this study were to investigate the development of route learning in Down syndrome (N = 50), Williams syndrome (N = 19), and typically developing children between 5 and 11 years old (N = 108); to investigate use of landmarks; and to relate cognitive functions to route‐learning ability in these groups. Overall, measures of attention and long‐term memory were strongly associated with route learning, even once non‐verbal ability was controlled for. All of the groups, including 5‐ to 6‐year‐old TD children, demonstrated the ability to make use of all landmark types to aid route learning; those near junctions, those further from junctions, and also distant landmarks (e.g. church spire, radio mast). Individuals with WS performed better than a matched subset of TD children on more difficult routes; we suggest that this is supported by relatively strong visual feature recognition in the disorder. Participants with DS who had relatively high levels of non‐verbal ability performed at a similar level to TD participants.     

Exploring block construction and mental imagery: Evidence of atypical orientation discrimination in Williams syndrome

The visuospatial perceptual abilities of individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) were investigated in two experiments. Experiment 1 measured the ability of participants to discriminate between oblique and between nonoblique orientations. Individuals with WS showed a smaller effect of obliqueness in response time, when compared to controls matched for nonverbal mental age. Experiment 2 investigated the possibility that this deviant pattern of orientation discrimination accounts for the poor ability to perform mental rotation in WS (Farran, Jarrold, & Gathercole, 2001). A size transformation task was employed, which shares the image transformation requirements of mental rotation, but not the orientation discrimination demands. Individuals with WS performed at the same level as controls. The results suggest a deviance at the perceptual level in WS, in processing orientation, which fractionates from the ability to mentally transform images.     

Perceptual grouping and distance estimates in typical and atypical development: comparing performance across perception, drawing and construction tasks

Perceptual grouping is a pre-attentive process which serves to group local elements into global wholes, based on shared properties. One effect of perceptual grouping is to distort the ability to estimate the distance between two elements. In this study, biases in distance estimates, caused by four types of perceptual grouping, were measured across three tasks, a perception, a drawing and a construction task in both typical development (TD: Experiment 1) and in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS: Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, perceptual grouping distorted distance estimates across all three tasks. Interestingly, the effect of grouping by luminance was in the opposite direction to the effects of the remaining grouping types. We relate this to differences in the ability to inhibit perceptual grouping effects on distance estimates. Additive distorting influences were also observed in the drawing and the construction task, which are explained in terms of the points of reference employed in each task. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the above distortion effects are also observed in WS. Given the known deficit in the ability to use perceptual grouping in WS, this suggests a dissociation between the pre-attentive influence of and the attentive deployment of perceptual grouping in WS. The typical distortion in relation to drawing and construction points towards the presence of some typical location coding strategies in WS. The performance of the WS group differed from the TD participants on two counts. First, the pattern of overall distance estimates (averaged across interior and exterior distances) across the four perceptual grouping types, differed between groups. Second, the distorting influence of perceptual grouping was strongest for grouping by shape similarity in WS, which contrasts to a strength in grouping by proximity observed in the TD participants.     

A “spoon full of sugar” helps the medicine go down: How a participant friendly version of a psychophysics task significantly improves task engagement,performance and data quality in a typical adult sample

Few would argue that the unique insights brought by studying the typical and atypical development of psychological processes are essential to building a comprehensive understanding of the brain. Often, however, the associated challenges of working with non-standard adult populations results in the more complex psychophysical paradigms being rejected as too complex. Recently we created a child- (and clinical group) friendly implementation of one such technique – the reverse-correlation Bubbles approach – and noted an associated performance boost in adult participants. Here, we compare the administration of three different versions of this participant-friendly task in the same adult participants to empirically confirm that introducing elements in the experiment with the sole purpose of improving the participant experience, not only boosts the participant’s engagement and motivation for the task but results in a significantly improved objective task performance and stronger statistical results.     

A Review of Spiritual and Religious Measures in Nursing Research Journals: 1995--1999

Background: A series of systematic reviews has revealed relatively high levels of interest in religion and spirituality in different nursing specialties, but not in general nursing research journals. Purpose: To identify the extent to which spirituality and religiousness were measured in all quantitative and qualitative research articles published in Research in Nursing and Health, Nursing Research, Advances in Nursing Science (ANS), and Image: The Journal of Nursing Scholarship from 1995 to 1999. Methods: A full-text search was conducted of ANS and Image using the Ovid search system. Nursing Research and Research in Nursing and Health were hand searched for spiritual/religious measures. Characteristics of selected studies, the measures taken, and their uses were coded for data analysis. Results: A total of 564 research studies were identified, of which 67 (11.9%) included at least one measure of spirituality or religiousness. A significant difference was found between the percentage of qualitative and quantitative studies that contained measures of these concepts. Of the 119 qualitative studies, 23 (19.3%) contained a measure of religion or spirituality, compared to 44 of the 445 (9.9%) quantitative studies. Nominal indicators of religious affiliation were the most commonly used measures in the quantitative studies and measures of religion and spirituality were rarely used in the analyses. Although only a few quantitative or qualitative studies intended to focus on religion or spirituality, these themes often emerged spontaneously in the qualitative research. Conclusions: Research in Nursing and Health, Advances in Nursing Science, Nursing Research, and Image: The Journal of Nursing Scholarship all published research measuring spirituality and religiousness during the time-period studied. The rate at which spirituality and religion appeared in these nursing research articles is substantially higher than that found in most fields outside of nursing. Even more frequent inclusion of spiritual and religious variables and richer measures of spirituality and religiousness would help to increase the available scientific information on the role of spirituality and religion in nursing care.     

Egocentric and allocentric navigation strategies in Williams syndrome and typical development

Recent findings suggest that difficulties on small‐scale visuospatial tasks documented in Williams syndrome (WS) also extend to large‐scale space. In particular, individuals with WS often present with difficulties in allocentric spatial coding (encoding relationships between items within an environment or array). This study examined the effect of atypical spatial processing in WS on large‐scale navigational strategies, using a novel 3D virtual environment. During navigation of recently learnt large‐scale space, typically developing (TD) children predominantly rely on the use of a sequential egocentric strategy (recalling the sequence of left–right body turns throughout a route), but become more able to use an allocentric strategy between 5 and 10 years of age. The navigation strategies spontaneously employed by TD children between 5 and 10 years of age and individuals with WS were analysed. The ability to use an allocentric strategy on trials where spatial relational knowledge was required to find the shortest route was also examined. Results showed that, unlike TD children, during spontaneous navigation the WS group did not predominantly employ a sequential egocentric strategy. Instead, individuals with WS followed the path until the correct environmental landmarks were found, suggesting the use of a time‐consuming and inefficient view‐matching strategy for wayfinding. Individuals with WS also presented with deficits in allocentric spatial coding, demonstrated by difficulties in determining short‐cuts when required and difficulties developing a mental representation of the environment layout. This was found even following extensive experience in an environment, suggesting that – unlike in typical development – experience cannot contribute to the development of spatial relational processing in WS. This atypical presentation of both egocentric and allocentric spatial encoding is discussed in relation to specific difficulties on small‐scale spatial tasks and known atypical cortical development in WS.     

The relative efficacy of predicting IQ from mother-child interactions using ratings versus behavioral count measures

The relative efficacy of using ratings versus behavioral count measures to predict intelligence from mother-child interactions was investigated for 45 mother-child dyads who constituted a heterogeneous sample with respect to socioeconomic status. These dyads were observed when the children were 36 months of age; children were tested with standardized IQ tests at 36 and 60 months. Social interactions between mothers and children were coded from video tapes with two different systems by independent observers. The behavioral count system was used to code second-by-second the duration and frequency of behaviors during the session. The rating system was used to judge maternal behaviors on three scales following the session. A series of forced stepwise multiple regression analyses compared the predictive utility of the two systems both concurrently and over time. The ratings of maternal behavior yielded high correlations with child IQ both concurrently and over time and were not contributed to significantly by the behavioral count measures. The authors speculate that ratings proved more efficacious because the raters could make more subjective and intuitive judgments concerning maternal behavior.     

Evidence for unusual spatial location coding in Williams syndrome: an explanation for the local bias in visuo-spatial construction tasks?

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) display poor visuo-spatial cognition relative to verbal abilities. Furthermore, whilst perceptual abilities are delayed, visuo-spatial construction abilities are comparatively even weaker, and are characterised by a local bias. We investigated whether this differentiation in visuo-spatial abilities can be explained by a deficit in coding spatial location in WS. This can be measured by assessing participants' understanding of the spatial relations between objects within a visual scene. Coordinate and categorical spatial relations were investigated independently in four participant groups: 21 individuals with WS; 21 typically developing (TD) children matched for non-verbal ability; 20 typically developing controls of a lower non-verbal ability; and 21 adults. A third task measured understanding of visual colour relations. Results indicated first, that the comprehension of categorical and coordinate spatial relations is equally poor in WS. Second, that the comprehension of visual relations is also at an equivalent level to spatial relational understanding in this population. These results can explain the difference in performance on visuo-spatial perception and construction tasks in WS. In addition, both the WS and control groups displayed response biases in the spatial tasks. However, the direction of bias differed across the groups. This finding is explored in relation to current theories of spatial location coding.