Caregiver interactions with autistic children

Caregiver interactions with young autistic children were contrasted with those involving caregivers and developmentally matched mentally retarded and normal infants. Caregivers of autistic children were similar to other caregivers in their responsiveness to child nonverbal communication bids and in their engagement in mutually sustained play. Caregivers of autistic children were similar to caregivers of mentally retarded children in their greater use of control strategies. However, these two groups of caregivers differed in the particular strategies they used to shape their children's behavior. Caregivers of mentally retarded children pointed to objects while caregivers of autistic children spent more time physically holding their children on task. Individual differences within the autistic sample indicated that caregivers regulated their children's behavior less and showed more mutual play and positive feedback to more communicatively able autistic children. These findings suggest that caregivers respond differentially to the specific deficiencies shown by their children.     

Progressive relaxation exercises and human gastric acid output—A study using telemetric measurements

The effect of progressive muscle relaxation exercises on human gastric acid output was examined using a modification of the Heidelburg Capsule pH telemetering equipment. Fourteen healthy subjects practiced the exercises eight times before the post-exercise acidity measures were compared with control periods in the same session. No mean difference in acidity was observed. It is suggested that gastric acid secretion is more related to cognitive rather than somatic activity. Eleven of the 14 subjects reported feeling physically relaxed yet 7 of these increased acidity. Gastric acid secretion is vagally mediated through the parasympathetic nervous system. Muscle relaxation is associated with lowered sympathetic arousal. It is possible that the relaxation exercises led to increased parasympathetic arousal concomitant with sympathetic lowering since the two systems frequently act antagonistically. Progressive relaxation training does not appear to be an effective method of decreasing gastric acid output.     

Homesickness in preadolescent and adolescent girls: risk factors, behavioral correlates, and sequelae.

Examined homesickness in 117 girls ages 8 to 16 during a 2-week stay at summer camp. (Homesickness is the distress or impairment caused by an actual or anticipated separation from home. It is characterized by acute longing and preoccupying thoughts of home and attachment objects.) Elevated preseparation levels of homesickness, high expectations of homesickness, negative separation attitudes, low decision control, and little previous separation experience predicted in-camp levels of homesickness. During the separation, homesickness was associated with insecure interpersonal attitudes, negative initial impressions of the novel environment, high perceived distance from home, and low perceived control. Female surrogate caregivers rated homesick girls as having lower social status and more somatic complaints, social problems, and externalizing behavior than less homesick girls. Although the prevalence, intensity, and longitudinal course of homesickness in girls did not differ from analogous samples of boys, girls' profile of risk factors, correlates, and sequelae is unique in its mixed behavioral presentation and small correlations with age and experience.     

Eye movements blink the attentional blink

When presented with a sequence of visual stimuli in rapid succession, participants often fail to detect a second salient target, a phenomenon referred as the attentional blink (AB; Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992; Shapiro, Raymond, & Arnell, 1997). On the basis of a vast corpus of experiments, several cognitive theories suggest that the blink results from a discrete structuring of attention, sampling information from temporal episodes during which several items can access encoding process (Wyble, Bowman, & Nieuwenstein, 2009; Wyble, Potter, Bowman, & Nieuwenstein, 2011). The objective of this work is to explore the AB when multiple items are presented at the fovea during ocular movements. The authors reasoned that each fixation may cohesively form an episode and hence expected that the blink may vanish within a single fixation. In turn, they expected saccades to accentuate episodic borders and hence shorten the regime of interference when 2 targets are presented fovealy in successive fixations. Evidence is provided in favor of this hypothesis, showing that the blink vanishes when both targets are presented in the core of a single fixation (far from the saccadic boundaries) and that it recovers more rapidly in successive fixations. These studies support current views that episodes should have an effect on the AB and provide evidence that eye movements play an important role in the formation of episodes.     

Parsing Heuristic and Forward Search in First‐Graders' Game‐Play Behavior

Seventy‐three children between 6 and 7 years of age were presented with a problem having ambiguous subgoal ordering. Performance in this task showed reliable fingerprints: (a) a non‐monotonic dependence of performance as a function of the distance between the beginning and the end‐states of the problem, (b) very high levels of performance when the first move was correct, and (c) states in which accuracy of the first move was significantly below chance. These features are consistent with a non‐Markov planning agent, with an inherently inertial decision process, and that uses heuristics and partial problem knowledge to plan its actions. We applied a statistical framework to fit and test the quality of a proposed planning model (Monte Carlo Tree Search). Our framework allows us to parse out independent contributions to problem‐solving based on the construction of the value function and on general mechanisms of the search process in the tree of solutions. We show that the latter are correlated with children's performance on an independent measure of planning, while the former is highly domain specific.     

Field dependence and the role of visual frameworks in the perception of size

The extent to which apparent size is relationally determined has been studied by Rock and Ebenholtz and by Wenderoth, who came to widely differing conclusions as to the magnitude of this phenomenon. In both studies, a large range of individual differences was observed. In the present study, an attempt was made to account for variations in the influence of visual contexts on the perception of size by relating them to the cognitive style dimension of field dependence/independence. In two situations, relativelyfield-dependent observers made size judgments which were influenced by a frame surrounding the target figure, while relatively field-independent observers made size judgments which were influenced by a frame surrounding the target figure, while relatively field-independent observers tended to be less influenced by the frame, making their judgments approximate the retinal size of the target. The results suggest that assessment of the magnitude of the relational determination of apparent size must consider the cognitive style of the observers as well as situational variations.     

The taste of music

Zarlino, one of the most important music theorists of the XVI century, described the minor consonances as 'sweet' (dolci) and 'soft' (soavi) (Zarlino 1558/1983, in On the Modes New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). Hector Berlioz, in his Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration (London: Novello, 1855), speaks about the 'small acid-sweet voice' of the oboe. In line with this tradition of describing musical concepts in terms of taste words, recent empirical studies have found reliable associations between taste perception and low-level sound and musical parameters, like pitch and phonetic features. Here we investigated whether taste words elicited consistent musical representations by asking trained musicians to improvise on the basis of the four canonical taste words: sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. Our results showed that, even in free improvisation, taste words elicited very reliable and consistent musical patterns:'bitter' improvisations are low-pitched and legato (without interruption between notes), 'salty' improvisations are staccato (notes sharply detached from each other), 'sour' improvisations are high-pitched and dissonant, and 'sweet' improvisations are consonant, slow, and soft. Interestingly, projections of the improvisations of taste words to musical space (a vector space defined by relevant musical parameters) revealed that, in musical space, improvisations based on different taste words were nearly orthogonal or opposite. Decoding methods could classify binary choices of improvisations (i.e., identify the improvisation word from the melody) at performance of around 80%--well above chance. In a second experiment we investigated the mapping from perception of music to taste words. Fifty-seven non-musical experts listened to a fraction of the improvisations. We found that listeners classified with high performance the taste word which had elicited the improvisation. Our results, furthermore, show that associations of taste and music go beyond basic sensory attributes into the domain of semantics, and open a new venue of investigation to understand the origins of these consistent taste-musical patterns.     

Imitation from 12 to 24 months in autism and typical development: a longitudinal Rasch analysis

The development of imitation during the second year of life plays an important role in domains of sociocognitive development such as language and social learning. Deficits in imitation ability in persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from toddlerhood into adulthood have also been repeatedly documented, raising the possibility that early disruptions in imitation contribute to the onset of ASD and the deficits in language and social interaction that define the disorder. This study prospectively examined the development of imitation between 12 and 24 months of age in 154 infants at familial risk for ASD and 78 typically developing infants who were all later assessed at 36 months for ASD or other developmental delays. The study established a developmental measure of imitation ability and examined group differences over time, using an analytic Rasch measurement model. Results revealed a unidimensional latent construct of imitation and verified a reliable sequence of imitation skills that was invariant over time for all outcome groups. Results also showed that all groups displayed similar significant linear increases in imitation ability between 12 and 24 months and that these increases were related to individual growth in both expressive language and ratings of social engagement but not in fine motor development. The group of children who developed ASD by age 3 years exhibited delayed imitation development compared with the low-risk typical outcome group across all time-points, but were indistinguishable from other high-risk infants who showed other cognitive delays not related to ASD.     

Do not fear your opponent: suboptimal changes of a prevention strategy when facing stronger opponents

The time spent making a decision and its quality define a widely studied trade-off. Some models suggest that the time spent is set to optimize reward, as verified empirically in simple-decision making experiments. However, in a more complex perspective compromising components of regulation focus, ambitions, fear, risk and social variables, adjustment of the speed-accuracy trade-off may not be optimal. Specifically, regulatory focus theory shows that people can be set in a promotion mode, where focus is on seeking to approach a desired state (to win), or in a prevention mode, focusing to avoid undesired states (not to lose). In promotion, people are eager to take risks increasing speed and decreasing accuracy. In prevention, strategic vigilance increases, decreasing speed and improving accuracy. When time and accuracy have to be compromised, one can ask which of these 2 strategies optimizes reward, leading to optimal performance. This is investigated here in a unique experimental environment. Decision making is studied in rapid-chess (180 s per game), in which the goal of a player is to mate the opponent in a finite amount of time or, alternatively, time-out of the opponent with sufficient material to mate. In different games, players face strong and weak opponents. It was observed that (a) players adopt a more conservative strategy when facing strong opponents, with slower and more accurate moves, and (b) this strategy is suboptimal: Players increase their winning likelihood against strong opponents using the policy they adopt when confronting opponents with similar strength.     

Possibilities and limits of mind-reading: A neurophilosophical perspective

Access to other minds once presupposed other individuals’ expressions and narrations. Today, several methods have been developed which can measure brain states relevant for assessments of mental states without 1st person overt external behavior or speech. Functional magnetic resonance imaging and trace conditioning are used clinically to identify patterns of activity in the brain that suggest the presence of consciousness in people suffering from severe consciousness disorders and methods to communicate cerebrally with patients who are motorically unable to communicate. The techniques are also used non-clinically to access subjective awareness in adults and infants. In this article we inspect technical and theoretical limits on brain–machine interface access to other minds. We argue that these techniques hold promises of important medical breakthroughs, open up new vistas of communication, and of understanding the infant mind. Yet they also give rise to ethical concerns, notably misuse as a consequence of hypes and misinterpretations.