How much and how fast: rapid processing of spoken language in later adulthood

Speech processing involves rapid decoding and construction of meaning from a transitory acoustic signal. Because older adults have been found to be slower in performing many cognitive tasks, we hypothesized that they may have difficulty in immediate recall for speech of increasing input rate. Two experiments are reported in which both older and younger participants listened to and immediately recalled sentences that were systematically varied in speech rate and number of propositions. Although recall performance of the older adults showed a disproportionate decline when speech rate was increased, older adults, as well as the younger adults, were able to recall sentences of increasing propositional densities. We also found that the tendency to recall a greater proportion of main ideas than details (the levels effect) was enhanced by increased propositional density, and depressed by increased speech rate and increased age. These results are discussed in terms of an age-related change in the rate at which information can be processed in working memory.     

Towers of Hanoi and London: contribution of working memory and inhibition to performance

The Tower of Hanoi and Tower of London have become well-established executive function tasks that presumably tap cognitive skills mediated by the frontal cortex. It has been assumed that the two tower tasks are more or less interchangeable and that both measure working memory and inhibition processes. These assumptions were tested in a study involving 37 normal college volunteers (M age = 20 years). Participants were administered the Tower of Hanoi (TOH), Tower of London-Revised (TOL-R), two working memory tests, and two tests of inhibition. The two tower tasks correlated significantly (r = .39), but only moderately. The working memory and inhibition variables explained over one-half of the variance in TOL-R performance; however, there was a relatively weaker contribution of inhibition to TOH performance.     

Zones of Proximal Emotional Development — Psychotherapy Within a Neuroaffective Perspective

This article outlines a conceptual framework for assessing personal and emotional functions of a person’s zone of proximal emotional development. The framework is based on the integrative theory Neuroaffective Developmental Psychology (NADP), which brings together attachment theory, neuropsychology, developmental psychology, and trauma theory. Within the NADP framework, this article describes a way of understanding children’s normal emotional mental organization and of examining how this mental organization may be developed or disturbed by relational issues. It also describes how a child’s mental organization can be disturbed and thus, without intervention, disturb the child’s personality development on a lifelong basis. The article presents three case vignettes, describing three children growing into adolescence with three different attachment patterns and suggested individually tailored intervention plans for each of them, relevant and useful for clinicians working with vulnerable children and families. Because the nervous system retains its plasticity throughout life, attachment is not necessarily an unchangeable pattern. That is why we as clinicians should develop psychotherapeutic methods and a research-based way of determining “what works for whom” by assessing the zone of individual proximal emotional development. The text outlines the characteristics of NADP and how it can be used to structure an intervention plan.     

Performance Management at the Wheel: Driving Employee Engagement in Organizations

Based on a study conducted in a large corporation (XINC, a pseudonym) and other research, it appears that performance management can be used to increase levels of employee engagement. We begin this article with a discussion of employee engagement, define engaged employees as those who feel involved, committed, passionate, and empowered, and demonstrate those feelings in work behavior. We then discuss an expanded view of performance management, conceptualizing it as five major activities that serve to organize relevant behaviors shown to be either direct or indirect predictors of employee engagement in the study at XINC. These major activities include setting performance and development goals, providing ongoing feedback and recognition, managing employee development, conducting mid-year and year-end appraisals, and building a climate of trust and empowerment. In turn, we briefly discuss how each of these major activities contributes to employee engagement, suggest which activities benefit from further research, and recommend possible studies. Although there is evidence for performance management as a driver of employee engagement, we conclude there is a need for additional research that clarifies for managers which of these activities have the strongest impact on employee engagement.     

Expertise in pictorial perception: eye-movement patterns and visual memory in artists and laymen

In two sessions with free scanning and memory instructions, eye-movement patterns from nine artists were compared with those of nine artistically untrained participants viewing 16 pictures representing a selection of categories from ordinary scenes to abstraction: 12 pictures were made to accommodate an object-oriented viewing mode (selection of recognisable objects), and a pictorial viewing mode (selection of more structural features), and 4 were abstract. The artistically untrained participants showed preference for viewing human features and objects, while the artists spent more scanning time on structural/abstract features. A group by session interaction showed a change of viewing strategy in the artists, who viewed more objects and human features in the memory task session. A verbal test of recall memory showed no overall difference in the number of pictures remembered, but the number of correctly remembered pictorial features was significantly higher for artists than for the artistically untrained viewers, irrespective of picture type. No differences in fixation frequencies/durations were found between groups across sessions, but a significant task-dependent-group by session interaction of fixation frequency/duration showed that the artistically untrained participants demonstrated repetition effects in fewer, longer fixations with repeated viewing, while the opposite pattern obtained for the artists.     

Age differences in learning from text: Evidence for functionally distinct text processing systems

We investigated the influence of sentence elaboration on self‐regulated learning in order to examine age differences in resource allocation to the construction of textbase‐ and discourse‐level representations. Older and younger adults learned about a topic by reading a series of sentences varying in elaboration (from simple factoids to highly elaborated text) and manner of presentation (progressive change in elaboration vs. random change in elaboration). Younger readers were more likely to recall information from factoids; older adults, from highly elaborated text. Relative to young, older readers showed an advantage in the progressive presentation condition, which minimised frequent changes between textbase‐ and discourse‐level processing. Older adults showed poorer memory monitoring for factoids and less elaborated discourse relative to young, but when passages were highly elaborated or presented progressively, age differences were eliminated. Results support the idea that textbase‐ and discourse‐level encoding arise from functionally distinct systems whose regulation depends on text properties and reader age. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.