Behandlung einer bipolaren affektiven Störung im Rahmen einer psychiatrisch-stationären Mutter-Kind-Einheit

psychopraxis. neuropraxis - Zeiten von Schwangerschaft und Geburt stellen eine Phase von erhöhter Vulnerabilität für psychische Erkrankungen dar. Nach der Entbindung können...     

Indexing individual objects in infant working memory

Currently there are disputes in the infancy literature concerning when infants are first able to individuate physical objects by their features or properties. This issue has taken on new significance following claims that individuation by feature is linked to the emergence of object kind concepts toward the end of the first year. Needham (2001, this issue) presents evidence that infants as young as 4.5 months old can individuate objects by feature. We locate this controversy within the framework of brain mechanisms that index or track individual objects, drawing upon theories of attention and working memory developed in the study of adults. We find that Needham's work contributes to two issues: categorization and the effect of object history on the individuation of objects in a complex display.     

A new method for calibrating perceptual salience across dimensions in infants: the case of color vs. luminance

We report a new method for calibrating differences in perceptual salience across feature dimensions, in infants. The problem of inter-dimensional salience arises in many areas of infant studies, but a general method for addressing the problem has not previously been described. Our method is based on a preferential looking paradigm, adapted to determine the relative salience of two stimuli. We report here on the case of stimuli differing in color and luminance, though the method has wider potential. We were able to determine on a psychophysical curve the point at which a color contrast was equally salient to infants as a given luminance contrast. We then used these calibrated, 'iso-salient' stimuli in an object memory study. Results showed that 6.5-month-old infants noticed a color, but not a luminance, change while tracking an occluded object. Our method should have numerous applications in the study of bottom-up effects on infant attention and visual working memory.     

Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder are more successful at visual search than typically developing toddlers

Plaisted, O'Riordan and colleagues (Plaisted, O'Riordan & Baron-Cohen, 1998; O'Riordan, 2004) showed that school-age children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are faster at finding targets in certain types of visual search tasks than typical controls. Currently though, there is very little known about the visual search skills of very young children (1-3-year-olds) - either typically developing or with ASD. We used an eye-tracker to measure looking behavior, providing fine-grained measures of visual search in 2.5-year-old toddlers with and without ASD (this representing the age by which many children may first receive a diagnosis of ASD). Importantly, our paradigm required no verbal instructions or feedback, making the task appropriate for toddlers who are pre- or nonverbal. We found that toddlers with ASD were more successful at finding the target than typically developing, age-matched controls. Further, our paradigm allowed us to estimate the number of items scrutinized per trial, revealing that for large set size conjunctive search, toddlers with ASD scrutinized as many as twice the number of items as typically developing toddlers, in the same amount of time.     

Disease and social theory: A problem of conversation

The paper offers a critical examination of ‘introspection’ and ‘stoicism’ as two apparently opposing responses to pain, and examines their adequacy as theoretical postures vis-a-vis the life-world. Following Wittgenstein, who suggests that introspection is fundamentally at fault, the paper moves to consider the ‘theoretic’ stoicism of Durkheim as a possible alternative for inquiry. It comes to the conclusion, however, that stoicism, just as introspection fails to develop a strong theoretical interest in pain when it refuses to make the problem pain poses for discourse conversational.     

Visual context integration is not fully developed in 4-year-old children

Long-range horizontal interactions supporting contour integration were found to be weaker in children than in adults (Kovács et al, 1999 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 96 12204-12209). In the present study, integration on a larger scale, between a target and its context was investigated. Contextual modulation of the percept of a local target can be directly measured in the case of geometric illusions. We compared the magnitude of a size contrast illusion (Ebbinghaus illusion or Titchener circles) in children and adults. 4-year-old children and adults performed 2AFC size comparisons between two target disks in the classical Ebbinghaus illusion display and in two other modified versions. We found that the magnitude of the illusion effect was significantly smaller in children than in adults. Our interpretation is that context integration is not fully developed in 4-year-old children. Closer-to-veridical-size estimations by children demonstrate that the perception of the local target is less affected by stimulus context in their case. We suggest that immature cortical connectivity is behind the reduced contextual sensitivity in children.     

Delayed Match Retrieval: a novel anticipation‐based visual working memory paradigm

We tested 8‐ and 10‐month‐old infants’ visual working memory (VWM) for object‐location bindings – what is where – with a novel paradigm, Delayed Match Retrieval, that measured infants’ anticipatory gaze responses (using a Tobii T120 eye tracker). In an inversion of Delayed‐Match‐to‐Sample tasks and with inspiration from the game Memory, in test trials, three face‐down virtual ‘cards’ were presented. Two flipped over sequentially (revealing, e.g. a swirl pattern and then a star), and then flipped back face‐down. Next, the third card was flipped to reveal a match (e.g. a star) to one of the previously seen, now face‐down cards. If infants looked to the location where the (now face‐down) matching card had been shown, this was coded as a correct response. To encourage anticipatory looks, infants subsequently received a reward (a brief, engaging animation) presented at that location. Ten‐month‐old infants performed significantly above chance, showing that their VWM could hold object‐location information for the two cards. Overall, 8‐month‐olds’ performance was at chance, but they showed a robust learning trend. These results corroborate previous findings (Kaldy & Leslie, 2005; Oakes, Ross‐Sheehy & Luck, 2006) and point to rapid development of VWM for object‐location bindings. However, compared to previous paradigms that measure passive gaze responses to novelty, this paradigm presents a more challenging, ecologically relevant test of VWM, as it measures the ability to make online predictions and actively localize objects based on VWM. In addition, this paradigm can be readily scaled up to test toddlers or older children without significant modification.     

Preschoolers have better long‐term memory for rhyming text than adults

The dominant view of children's memory is that it is slow to develop and is inferior to adults’. Here we pitted 4‐year‐old children against adults in a test of verbatim recall of verbal material. Parents read a novel rhyming verse (and an integrated word list) as their child's bedtime story on ten consecutive days. A group of young adults listened to the verse, matching the exposure of children. All participants subsequently performed a free‐recall of the verse, verbatim. (Parents and young adults knew they would be tested; children did not.) Four‐year‐olds significantly outperformed both their parents and the young adults. There were no significant differences in the ability to recall the gist of the verse, nor the integrated word list, allaying concerns about differences in engagement or motivation. Verbatim recall of verse is a skill amenable to practice, and children, we argue, by virtue of the prominence of verse in their culture and their reliance on oral transmission, have honed this skill to exceed adults’.     

Unimpaired attentional disengagement in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder

A prominent hypothesis holds that ‘sticky’ attention early in life in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) limits their ability to explore and learn about the world. Under this hypothesis, the core clinical symptoms of ASD – restricted interests, repetitive behaviors and impaired social/communication abilities – could all result from impaired attentional disengagement during development. However, the existence of disengagement deficits in children with ASD is controversial, and a recent study found no deficit in 5‐ to 12‐year‐olds with ASD. Nonetheless, the possibility remains that disengagement is impaired earlier in development in children with ASD, altering their developmental trajectory even if the attentional deficit itself is remediated or compensated for by the time children with ASD reach school age. Here, we tested this possibility by characterizing attentional disengagement in a group of toddlers just diagnosed with ASD (age 21 to 37 months). We found strikingly similar performance between the ASD and age‐matched typically developing (TD) toddlers, and no evidence of impaired attentional disengagement. These results show that even at a young age when the clinical symptoms of ASD are first emerging, disengagement abilities are intact. Sticky attention is not a fundamental characteristic of ASD, and probably does not play a causal role in its etiology.