The air gap phenomenon in children's landscape drawings

The “air gap” phenomenon was found to be very common in the free landscape drawings of middle and later childhood. Three experiments are reported in which the contextual cues for such drawings were systematically manipulated. When subjects were supplied with drawing sheets constructed to imply the absence of the air gap, the phenomenon was eliminated in most of their drawings. When supplied with sheets constructed to imply its presence, most subjects produced air gap drawings using contextually provided reference lines. There were no consistent transfer effects across different cuing orders. The susceptibility of the air gap phenomenon to modification by task manipulation suggests that it results from problems of production rather than from defects in the child's internal representation of the world.     

How a hobby can shape cognition: visual word recognition in competitive Scrabble players

Competitive Scrabble is an activity that involves extraordinary word recognition experience. We investigated whether that experience is associated with exceptional behavior in the laboratory in a classic visual word recognition paradigm: the lexical decision task (LDT). We used a version of the LDT that involved horizontal and vertical presentation and a concreteness manipulation. In Experiment 1, we presented this task to a group of undergraduates, as these participants are the typical sample in word recognition studies. In Experiment 2, we compared the performance of a group of competitive Scrabble players with a group of age-matched nonexpert control participants. The results of a series of cognitive assessments showed that the Scrabble players and control participants differed only in Scrabble-specific skills (e.g., anagramming). Scrabble expertise was associated with two specific effects (as compared to controls): vertical fluency (relatively less difficulty judging lexicality for words presented in the vertical orientation) and semantic deemphasis (smaller concreteness effects for word responses). These results suggest that visual word recognition is shaped by experience, and that with experience there are efficiencies to be had even in the adult word recognition system.     

Semantic classification of pictures and words

We provide new behavioural norms for semantic classification of pictures and words. The picture stimuli are 288 black and white line drawings from the International Picture Naming Project ([Székely, A., Jacobsen, T., D'Amico, S., Devescovi, A., Andonova, E., Herron, D., et al. (2004). A new on-line resource for psycholinguistic studies. Journal of Memory & Language, 51, 247–250]). We presented these pictures for classification in a living/nonliving decision, and in a separate version of the task presented the corresponding word labels for classification. We analyzed behavioural responses to a subset of the stimuli in order to explore questions about semantic processing. We found multiple semantic richness effects for both picture and word classification. Further, while lexical-level factors were related to semantic classification of words, they were not related to semantic classification of pictures. We argue that these results are consistent with privileged semantic access for pictures, and point to ways in which these data could be used to address other questions about picture processing and semantic memory.     

Is more always better? Effects of semantic richness on lexical decision, speeded pronunciation, and semantic classification

Evidence from large-scale studies (Pexman, Hargreaves, Siakaluk, Bodner, & Pope, 2008) suggests that semantic richness, a multidimensional construct reflecting the extent of variability in the information associated with a word's meaning, facilitates visual word recognition. Specifically, recognition is better for words that (1) have more semantic neighbors, (2) possess referents with more features, and (3) are associated with more contexts. The present study extends Pexman et al. (2008) by examining how two additional measures of semantic richness, number of senses and number of associates (Pexman, Hargreaves, Edwards, Henry, & Goodyear, 2007), influence lexical decision, speeded pronunciation, and semantic classification performance, after controlling for an array of lexical and semantic variables. We found that number of features and contexts consistently facilitated word recognition but that the effects of semantic neighborhood density and number of associates were less robust. Words with more senses also elicited faster lexical decisions but less accurate semantic classifications. These findings point to how the effects of different semantic dimensions are selectively and adaptively modulated by task-specific demands.     

The neural consequences of semantic richness: when more comes to mind, less activation is observed

Some concepts have richer semantic representations than others. That is, when considering the meaning of concepts, subjects generate more information (more features, more associates) for some concepts than for others. This variability in semantic richness influences responses in speeded tasks that involve semantic processing, such as lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks. It has been suggested that concepts with richer semantic representations build stronger attractors in semantic space, allowing faster settling of activation patterns and thus faster responding. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the neural activation associated with semantic richness by contrasting activation for words with high and low numbers of associates in a semantic categorization task. Results were consistent with faster semantic settling for words with richer representations: Words with a low number of semantic associates produced more activation than words with a high number of semantic associates in a number of regions, including left inferior frontal and inferior temporal gyri.     

The development of risk-taking in children

Since clear relationships exist between age, gender, and the occurrence of different kinds of accident, safety researchers and educators need to take account of recent work in developmental and environmental psychology, which is leading to a revised view of children’s environmental competence. Studies of the development of risk perception and risk-taking are first reviewed: these have identified three broad phases through which children proceed, culminating in an understanding of the interaction between their own perspective, that of other participants, and characteristics of the situation itself in the causation of accidents. This broad picture is in line with the reformulations of Piagetian stage theory which have occurred in recent years: rather than being “pre-operational” or “egocentric” in a global sense, young children’s main limitations seem to be in applying the principles of routines or drills from one setting to another, and studies of attention and memory show that the amount of information children are able to process improves with age, as does their resistance to distraction. Three aspects of individual differences seem to have an influence upon risk-taking, namelygender, reflection-impulsivity, andfamily structure, and the findings are reviewed in each case. As children get older they experience an increasingly wide variety of unfamiliar situations, and it is essential to understand the interaction between these age changes in environmental circumstances and mechanisms of developmental change in formulating programmes for safety education.     

Schizotypy and hemisphere function—IV : Story comprehension under binaural and monaural listening conditions

An experiment is reported examining the story-comprehension performance of normal Ss under left ear, right ear and binaural listening conditions, the results being related to scores on the schizotypy (STA) scale of a previously described questionnaire (STQ). Hypotheses were derived from the observations of other investigators that schizophrenics and the children of schizophrenics show impaired binaural relative to monaural and poor left ear performance on the task; a pilot study had indicated that this might also be the case in normal high STA scorers. Results of the main experiment failed to confirm predictions, though in male Ss several significant effects were observed. High schizotypals showed weakened asymmetry, reflected in better left ear relative to right ear performance, compared with low schizotypals; they also showed a smaller binaural/left ear difference. Some reasons for the discrepancy between these and previous findings using a similar task are considered and the results are discussed in relation to other studies of schizotypy and hemisphere function carried out in our laboratory.