Exploring the Use of a Self-Help Manual in Marital Counselling

A small self-help manual composed of seven exercises for married couples was produced. Married couples from a Christian community were invited to participate in the use of the manual and to work through the exercises for at least two hours per week. Seven of the couples agreed to be interviewed at the close of the project and to share their experiences, insights and observations. Five of the seven couples reported finding the manual distinctly helpful. One couple found no benefit from the exercises but were sufficiently interested to complete the project. The remaining couple regarded the exercises as largely unhelpful and expressed reservations about their use. The results of this exploratory research suggest that the use of a self-help manual such as the one produced here is beneficial to some married couples. There are, however, limitations. These limitations are explored and discussed, and suggestions for further research are presented.     

Action representation deficits in adolescents with developmental dyslexia

Developmental dyslexia (DD), a severe and frequent disorder of reading acquisition, is characterized by a diversity of cognitive and motor deficits whose interactions still remain under debate. Although deficits in the automatization of sensorimotor control have been highlighted, internal action representation allowing prediction has never before been investigated. In this study, we considered action representation of 18 adolescents with pure DD and 18 age-matched typical readers. Participants actually and mentally performed a visually guided pointing task involving strong spatiotemporal constraints (speed/accuracy trade-off paradigm). While actual and mental movement times of typical readers were isochronous and both conformed to Fitts’ law, the movement times of dyslexics differed between conditions, and only the actual movement times conformed to Fitts’ law. Furthermore, the quality of motor imagery correlated with word reading abilities. This suggests that the process of action representation is impaired in pure DD and supports the sensorimotor perspective of DD. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

Collecting responses through Web page drag and drop

This article describes how to collect responses from experimental participants using drag and drop on a Web page. In particular, we describe how drag and drop can be used in a text search task in which participants read a text and then locate and categorize certain elements of the text (e.g., to identify the main claim of a persuasive paragraph). Using this technique, participants respond by clicking on a text segment and dragging it to a screen field or icon. We have successfully used this technique in both the argument element identification experiment that we describe here and a tutoring system that we created to teach students to identify source characteristics while reading historical texts (Britt, Perfetti, Van Dyke, &; Gabrys, 2000). The implementation described here exploits the capability of recent versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser to handle embedded XML documents and drag and drop events.     

Modal preferences in creative problem solving

Embodied cognitive science appeals to the idea that cognition depends on the body as well as on the brain. This study looks at whether we are more likely to engage just the brain or enlist the body for complex cognitive functioning such as creative problem solving. Participants were presented with a puzzle based on De Bono's lateral thinking puzzles. The puzzle consisted of rotating and joining two-dimensional shapes to make a three-dimensional one. In one condition, participants were given the choice of either solving the puzzle mentally or through manipulation of the images on a computer screen. In another condition, the subjects had to solve the puzzle first mentally and then report which mode they would have preferred to solve the puzzle. Two more conditions were applied with slight variations. In all conditions, an overwhelming majority of participants chose to solve the puzzle by manipulation, even though there was not a significant increase on performance. It appeared that participants were making a conscious choice for the body to play a feedback-driven role in creative cognitive processing. This strong preference for manual manipulation over just mental representation, regardless of the impact on performance, would seem to suggest that it is our natural tendency to involve the body in complex cognitive functioning. This would support the theory that cognition may be more than just a neural process, and that it is a dynamic interplay between body, brain and world. The experiential feedback of the body moving through space and time may be an inherently important factor in creative cognition.     

Enhanced recognition and recall of new words in 7- and 12-year-olds following a period of offline consolidation

Recent studies of adults have found evidence for consolidation effects in the acquisition of novel words, but little is known about whether such effects are found developmentally. In two experiments, we familiarized children with novel nonwords (e.g., biscal) and tested their recognition and recall of these items. In Experiment 1, 7-year-olds were then retested on either the same day or the following day to examine changes in performance after a short delay compared with a longer delay that included sleep. Experiment 2 used two age groups (7- and 12-year-olds), with all participants being retested 24h later. The 12-year-olds accurately recognized the novel nonwords immediately after exposure, as did the 7-year-olds in Experiment 2 (but not in Experiment 1), suggesting generally good initial rates of learning. Experiment 1 revealed improved recognition of the novel nonwords after both short (3- to 4-h) and longer (24-h) delays. In contrast, recall was initially poor but showed improvements only when children were retested 24h later, not after a 3- to 4-h delay. Similar improvements were observed in both age groups despite better overall performance in 12-year-olds. We argue that children, like adults, exhibit offline consolidation effects on the formation of novel phonological representations.     

Learning new meanings for old words: effects of semantic relatedness

Changes to our everyday activities mean that adult language users need to learn new meanings for previously unambiguous words. For example, we need to learn that a "tweet" is not only the sound a bird makes, but also a short message on a social networking site. In these experiments, adult participants learned new fictional meanings for words with a single dominant meaning (e.g., "ant") by reading paragraphs that described these novel meanings. Explicit recall of these meanings was significantly better when there was a strong semantic relationship between the novel meaning and the existing meaning. This relatedness effect emerged after relatively brief exposure to the meanings (Experiment 1), but it persisted when training was extended across 7?days (Experiment 2) and when semantically demanding tasks were used during this extended training (Experiment 3). A lexical decision task was used to assess the impact of learning on online recognition. In Experiment 3, participants responded more quickly to words whose new meaning was semantically related than to those with an unrelated meaning. This result is consistent with earlier studies showing an effect of meaning relatedness on lexical decision, and it indicates that these newly acquired meanings become integrated with participants' preexisting knowledge about the meanings of words.