Do illustrations enhance preschoolers' memories for stories? Age-related change in the picture facilitation effect

This study investigated whether illustrations facilitate story recall in preschoolers (N=58) 46 to 63 months of age. Each child was exposed to either a verbal story narrative with illustrations (Verbal and Picture condition), the narrative alone (Verbal Only condition), the narrative with uninformative illustrations (Verbal and Irrelevant Picture condition), or the illustrations alone (Picture Only condition). Children recalled the story immediately and after a 1-week delay. With increasing age, the Verbal and Picture group increasingly outperformed the other verbal groups, particularly when recalling central details conveyed by both narrative and illustrations. Performance did not vary among the three verbal groups at lower values of age, whereas the Verbal and Picture group recalled more than the other verbal groups at the older ages. Regardless of age, all verbal groups outperformed the Picture Only group, suggesting that preschoolers are unlikely to spontaneously generate a narrative from pictures alone.     

Channeling identity: A study of storytelling in conversations between introverted and extraverted friends

This narrative study examined the process of personal storytelling between college-age friends who were similarly introverted or extraverted. Participants were 19 introverted and 20 extraverted same-sex pairs (49% female) who had been friends for an average of 18 months. Stories emerged spontaneously during 10-min catch-up conversations. Extraverted friends more often told stories that changed the topic, and more often co-constructed story plots. Introverted friends more often told stories that were embedded in a developing theme, and constructed story plots solo. With regard to content, extraverted friends told stories about romance more so than introverted friends, whose stories more often concerned family/hometown, and older events. The findings suggest that the traits of extraversion and introversion channel the identity-making process.     

The contradictions of islandness: The small island of St Helena and the emotions of transnationalism

This paper investigates the emotions of transnationalism, when coming from the small, remote British Overseas Territory of St Helena. This paper captures how St Helenian islanders migrate for new opportunities and to escape island monotony. Even though dispersed, the St Helenian islanders retain a strong sense of attachment and belonging to their island, often establishing emotional and material ties in two hemispheres. This paper thus captures the emotions of feeling torn and the contradictory emotions of islandness. This research draws from 68 in-depth interviews with St Helenian islanders between 2006 and 2008, following the return of British citizenship in 2002, but before the island had a functioning airport in 2017. This research captured the emotions of transnationalism when travel was expensive, complex and arduous, due to a fickle British national identity as well as the island's dependence on one single ship. At the point of publishing this research however, the UK was negotiating deals for Brexit and international air travel was limited due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. Mobility for this transnational small island community, thus remains uncertain and complicated, due to their post-colonial national identity and geographical isolation.     

Transnationalism as a motif in family stories

Family stories have long been recognized as a vehicle for assessing components of a family's emotional and social life, including the degree to which an immigrant family has been willing to assimilate. Transnationalism, defined as living in one or more cultures and maintaining connections to both, is now increasingly common. A qualitative study of family stories in the family of those who appear completely "American" suggests that an affiliation with one's home country is nevertheless detectable in the stories via motifs such as (1) positively connotated home remedies, (2) continuing denigration of home country "enemies," (3) extensive knowledge of the home country history and politics, (4) praise of endogamy and negative assessment of exogamy, (5) superiority of home country to America, and (6) beauty of home country. Furthermore, an awareness of which model--assimilationist or transnational--governs a family's experience may help clarify a clinician's understanding of a family's strengths, vulnerabilities, and mode of framing their cultural experiences.     

A Social Stories intervention package for students with autism in inclusive classroom settings

A Social Stories intervention package was used to teach 2 students with autism to read Social Stories, answer comprehension questions, and engage in role plays. Appropriate social behaviors increased and inappropriate behaviors decreased for both participants, and the effects were maintained for up to 10 months. This intervention package appears to be useful in inclusive classroom environments and does not require intensive supervision of the child's behavior.     

The importance of differentiation in young children’s acquisition of expertise

In a short-term longitudinal study, stories told about novel creatures conveyed information varying in its capability for differentiating. Depending on the context, a bodily feature could be functionally undifferentiated (FUF), meaning that its subtypes (e.g., eyes of two forms) shared a generic function (“seeing”), or functionally differentiated (FDF), meaning that each subtype’s function was unique to it (e.g., only a “hooded eye” could “see in a sandstorm”). 5- to 6-year-olds who heard 8 stories, but not those who heard only 4, cited FDFs more than FUFs in a pair-justification test of judged similarity; and their delayed recall of specific story events was greater when FDFs rather than FUFs were involved. In the absence of direct instruction, young children show sensitivity to the degree of differentiation afforded by feature-function relations.     

itsme: Interaction Design Innovating Workstations

Background  In the last 30 years, there has been little innovation in workstations. The desktop metaphor has become the standard user interface, with its pros (e.g., ease of learning) and cons (e.g., interaction constraints for skilled users, lack of context awareness). Objectives  In this paper, we present itsme, an Italian initiative to design the next-generation workstation. Interaction design is the basis of the project, as well as the involvement of a wide community of contributing users. Results  The early design phases of the project led to the definition of a new metaphor for personal computing, based on stories and venues. The metaphor is being adopted for the development of a novel front-end for the Linux operating system, aimed at fulfilling the needs and desires of knowledge workers.

The flow of narrative in the mind unmoored: An account of narrative processing

Verbal narratives provide incomplete information and can be very long, yet readers and hearers often effortlessly fill in the gaps and make connections across long stretches of text, sometimes even finding this immersive. How is this done? In the last few decades, event-indexing situation modeling and complementary accounts of narrative emotion have suggested answers. Despite this progress, comparisons between real-life perception and narrative experience might underplay the way narrative processing modifies our world model, as well as the role of the emotions that do not relate to characters. I reframe narrative experience in predictive processing and neural networks, capturing continuity between fiction, perception, and states like dreaming and imagination, enabled by the flexible instantiation of concepts. In this framework, narrative experience is more clearly revealed as a creative experience that can share some of the phenomenology of dreams.