Two years later: Effect of question repetition and retention interval on the eyewitness testimony of children and adults.

Examined witnesses' memories for an event experienced 2 yrs earlier. Ss in 4 age groups (6-, 8-, and 10-yr-olds and adults; N?=?79) answered repeated questions about an ambiguous incident that occurred as part of an earlier study (D. A. Poole and L. T. White; see record 1992-08648-001). Surprisingly, the effects of question repetition were similar to the patterns observed 2 yrs ago. There were important differences in the testimonies of children and adults, however, that were not observed in the initial study: Children were less consistent than adults across sessions on yes–no questions, less accurate in response to open-ended questions, and more likely to fabricate answers to a question about a man's occupation. Some children also confused the actions of 2 research assistants. These results indicate the need for additional research on qualitative and quantitative changes in children's testimonies over long delays. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Does audiovisual speech offer a fountain of youth for old ears? An event-related brain potential study of age differences in audiovisual speech perception.

The current study addressed the question whether audiovisual (AV) speech can improve speech perception in older and younger adults in a noisy environment. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to investigate age-related differences in the processes underlying AV speech perception. Participants performed an object categorization task in three conditions, namely auditory-only (A), visual-only (V), and AVspeech. Both age groups revealed an equivalent behavioral AVspeech benefit over unisensory trials. ERP analyses revealed an amplitude reduction of the auditory P1 and N1 on AVspeech trials relative to the summed unisensory (A + V) response in both age groups. These amplitude reductions are interpreted as an indication of multisensory efficiency as fewer neural resources were recruited to achieve better performance. Of interest, the observed P1 amplitude reduction was larger in older adults. Younger and older adults also showed an earlier auditory N1 in AVspeech relative to A and A + V trials, an effect that was again greater in the older adults. The degree of multisensory latency shift was predicted by basic auditory functioning (i.e., higher hearing thresholds were associated with larger latency shifts) in both age groups. Together, the results show that AV speech processing is not only intact in older adults, but that the facilitation of neural responses occurs earlier in and to a greater extent than in younger adults. Thus, older adults appear to benefit more from additional visual speech cues than younger adults, possibly to compensate for more impoverished unisensory inputs because of sensory aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Forward transfer of different reading strategies evoked by testlike events in mathematics text.

80 undergraduates read 6 passages that were supplemented by questions asking for formal definitions (Definition), calculating a value (Calculating), applying a conceptual model to a problem (Model), all 3 (All), or no questions (None). Results on tests containing all 3 question types given after Passages 7 and 8 indicate an overall superiority of Group All over Group None; a Treatment * Question Type interaction in which Group Model excelled on all questions, but Groups Calculating and Definition did not; and no difference between Ss who had answered questions and those who simply read them in earlier passages. Implications for the acquisition processes are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inefficient postural responses to unexpected slips during walking in older adults

BACKGROUND: Slips account for a high percentage of falls and subsequent injuries in community-dwelling older adults but not in young adults. This phenomenon suggests that although active and healthy older adults preserve a mobility level comparable to that of young adults, these older adults may have difficulty generating efficient reactive postural responses when they slip. This study tested the hypothesis that active and healthy older adults use a less effective reactive balance strategy than young adults when experiencing an unexpected forward slip occurring at heel strike during walking. This less effective balance strategy would be manifested by slower and smaller postural responses, altered temporal and spatial organization of the postural responses, and greater upper trunk instability after the slip. METHODS: Thirty-three young adults (age range=19-34 yrs, mean=25+/-4 yrs) and 32 community-dwelling older adults (age range=70-87 yrs, mean=74+/-14 yrs) participated. Subjects walked across a movable forceplate which simulated a forward slip at heel strike. Surface electromyography was recorded from bilateral leg, thigh, hip, and trunk muscles. Kinematic data were collected from the right (perturbed) side of the body. RESULTS: Although the predominant postural muscles and the activation sequence of these muscles were similar between the two age groups, the postural responses of older adults were of longer onset latencies, smaller magnitudes, and longer burst durations compared to young adults. Older adults also showed a longer coactivation duration for the ankle, knee, and trunk agonist/antagonist pairs on the perturbed side and for the knee agonist/antagonist pair on the nonperturbed side. Behaviorally, older adults became less stable after the slips. This was manifested by a higher incidence of being tripped (21 trials in older vs 5 trials in young adults) and a greater trunk hyperextension with respect to young adults. Large arm elevation was frequently used by older adults to assist in maintaining trunk stability. In an attempt to quickly reestablish the base of support after the slips, older adults had an earlier contralateral foot strike and shortened stride length. CONCLUSION: The combination of slower onset and smaller magnitude of postural responses to slips in older adults resulted in an inefficient balance strategy. Older adults needed secondary compensatory adjustments, including a lengthened response duration and the use of the arms, to fully regain balance and prevent a fall. The shorter stride length and earlier contralateral foot strike following the slip indicate use of a more conservative balance strategy in older adults.     

Memorial consequences of forced confabulation: age differences in susceptibility to false memories

Numerous studies have demonstrated that exposure to misinformation about a witnessed event can lead to false memories in both children and adults. The present study extends this finding by identifying forced confabulation as another potent suggestive influence. Participants from 3 age groups (1st grade, 3rd/4th grade, and college age) viewed a clip from a movie and were "forced" to answer questions about events that clearly never happened in the video they had seen. Despite evidence that participants would not have answered these questions had they not been coerced into doing so, 1 week later participants in all age groups came to have false memories for the details they had knowingly fabricated earlier. The results also showed that children were more prone to this memory error than were adults.     

Induction of immunologic refractoriness in adults by meningococcal C polysaccharide vaccination

Thirty-four adults were vaccinated with 1/50 of the usual dose of meningococcal polysaccharide vaccine (1 microg of A, C, Y, and W135 polysaccharides, given intramuscularly). This dose was selected as a probe to assess B cell memory. The probe elicited meningococcal C bactericidal antibody responses in all 18 adults who had been vaccinated 4 years earlier with an investigational meningococcal A and C oligosaccharide-protein conjugate vaccine and in the majority of the 11 subjects vaccinated for the first time. In contrast, the responses of the 5 adults given a full dose of licensed polysaccharide vaccine 4 years earlier were <1/10 of those of the other 2 groups. Thus, adults previously given a full dose of meningococcal polysaccharide vaccine show evidence of immunologic refractoriness to group C polysaccharide, whereas refractoriness is not observed after conjugate vaccination. These findings have implications for the use of meningococcal polysaccharide vaccine when the risk of disease is low.     

Adults' failure on misleading weight-conservation tests: A developmental analysis.

Conducted 5 studies on adults' responses to weight conservation questions, constructed to give Ss a choice of 2 alternative answers, neither of which was correct. The results of 2 initial studies showed that adults readily acquiesced to the misleading implications of the questions. The results of 3 other studies showed there was more nonconservation when misleading questions were directed at the body than at external referents and the importance of task demands and of familiarity with Piaget. In general, the results were consistent with the hypothesis that adults possess different theories or ways of conceptualizing weight that can be ordered on a developmental dimension ranging from the more egocentric to the more abstract and technical. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The interplay of memory and judgment processes in effects of aging on hindsight bias.

Hindsight bias is the phenomenon that after people are presented with the correct answer to a question, their judgment regarding their own past answer to this question is biased toward the correct answer. In three experiments, younger and older adults gave numerical responses to general-knowledge questions and later attempted to recall their responses. For some questions, the correct answer was provided during recall (Experiment 1) or before recall (Experiments 2 and 3). Multinomial model-based analyses show age differences in both recollection bias and reconstruction bias when the correct judgment was in working memory during the recall phase. The authors discuss implications for theories of cognitive aging and theories of hindsight bias. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging, metamemory, and high-confidence errors: A misrecollection account.

Two experiments showed that older adults were worse than younger adults at judging the accuracy of their responses on source identification (i.e., who said what) and cued-recall tests. It is important to note that this age-related metamonitoring impairment occurred even after older and younger adults were matched on overall source accuracy and cued-recall accuracy. By contrast, older and younger adults showed comparable metamonitoring capacities when assessing the likely accuracy of old-new recognition judgments and responses to questions about general knowledge. These experiments are consistent with the misrecollection account of cognitive aging, which suggests that age-related memory impairments are due to older adults' vulnerability to making high-confidence errors when answering questions that require memory for specific details about recently learned events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of sex role stereotypes in black and white elementary school girls.

Examined the effect of race on degree of stereotyping. 20 1st- and 20 3rd-grade girls (half from each grade were black and half were white) answered 20 questions about characteristics usually considered typical of one or the other of the sexes. Both races gave equally stereotyped responses to questions about children, but blacks gave fewer stereotyped responses than whites to questions about adults. The bearing of the results on theories of the development of sex role stereotypes is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Synchrony effects in inhibitory control over thought and action.

Two experiments explore whether synchrony between peak circadian arousal periods and time of testing influences inhibitory efficiency for younger and older adults. Experiment 1 assesses inhibitory control over no-longer-relevant thoughts, and Experiment 2 assesses control over unwanted but strong responses, as well as performance on neuropsychological tasks that index frontal function. Inhibitory control is greatest at optimal times for both age groups and is generally greater for younger than for older adults. Performance on 2 neuropsychological measures (Stroop and Trails) also changes over the day, at least for older adults, and is correlated with inhibitory indexes, suggesting that for older adults changes in inhibition may be mediated by circadian variations in frontal functioning. By contrast, access to well-learned responses is not vulnerable to synchrony or age effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Replicability and 40-year predictive power of childhood ARC types.

We examined 3 questions surrounding the undercontrolled, overcontrolled, and resilient—or Asendorpf–Robins–Caspi (ARC)—personality types originally identified by Block (1971). In analyses of the teacher personality assessments of over 2,000 children in 1st through 6th grade in 1959–1967 and follow-up data on general and cardiovascular health outcomes in over 1,100 adults recontacted 40 years later, we found bootstrapped internal replication clustering suggesting that Big Five scores were best characterized by a tripartite cluster structure corresponding to the ARC types. This cluster structure was fuzzy rather than discrete, indicating that ARC constructs are best represented as gradients of similarity to 3 prototype Big Five profiles; ARC types and degrees of ARC prototypicality showed associations with multiple health outcomes 40 years later. ARC constructs were more parsimonious but, depending on the outcome, comparable or slightly worse classifiers than the dimensional Big Five traits. Forty-year incident cases of heart disease could be correctly identified with 67% accuracy by childhood personality information alone and stroke incidence with over 70% accuracy. Findings support the theoretical validity of ARC constructs, their treatment as continua of prototypicality rather than discrete categories, and the need for further understanding the robust predictive power of childhood personality for midlife health. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The time course of attentional and oculomotor capture reveals a common cause.

Eye movements are often misdirected toward a distractor when it appears abruptly, an effect known as oculomotor capture. Fundamental differences between eye movements and attention have led to questions about the relationship of oculomotor capture to the more general effect of sudden onsets on performance, known as attentional capture. This study explores that issue by examining the time course of eye movements and manual localization responses to targets in the presence of sudden-onset distractors. The results demonstrate that for both response types, the proportion of trials on which responses are erroneously directed to sudden onsets reflects the quality of information about the visual display at a given point in time. Oculomotor capture appears to be a specific instance of a more general attentional capture effect. Differences and similarities between the two types of capture can be explained by the critical idea that the quality of information about a visual display changes over time and that different response systems tend to access this information at different moments in time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-generated validity and other effects of measurement on belief, attitude, intention, and behavior.

Drawing from recent developments in social cognition, cognitive psychology, and behavioral decision theory, we analyzed when and how the act of measuring beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors affects observed correlations among them. Belief, attitude, or intention can be created by measurement if the measured constructs do not already exist in long-term memory. The responses thus created can have directive effects on answers to other questions that follow in the survey. But even when counterparts to the beliefs, attitudes, and intentions measured already exist in memory, the structure of the survey researcher's questionnaire can affect observed correlations among them. The respondent may use retrieved answers to earlier survey questions as inputs to response generation to later questions. We present a simple theory predicting that an earlier response will be used as a basis for another, subsequent response if the former is accessible and if it is perceived to be more diagnostic than other accessible inputs. We outline the factors that determine both the perceived diagnosticity of a potential input, the likelihood that it will be retrieved, and the likelihood that some alternative (and potentially more diagnostic) inputs will be retrieved. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Picture naming of cognate and non-cognate nouns in bilingual aphasia

Previous research has found differences in the speed and accuracy of responses involving concrete cognate nouns and non-cognate nouns in a range of written and "on-line" tasks using neurologically unimpaired, bilingual adults. The present study investigated whether cognateness affects verbal confrontation naming performance in balanced French/English bilinguals (N = 15 aphasic and 15 non-aphasic subjects). Subjects met selection criteria for equal proficiency, regular use, and early acquisition of both languages. Results of a picture naming test show that cognate pictures were more often correctly named in both languages than were non-cognates. Some error types and self-correction behaviors also varied with cognate status. There were similarities between the results of this study and those of previous studies of monolingual naming. Some error types and self-correction strategies appear to be unique to bilingual speakers. Theoretical questions and treatment applications arising from these findings are outlined.     

"Don't know" responding to answerable and unanswerable questions during misleading and hypnotic interviews.

"Don't know" (DK) responses to interview questions are conceptually heterogeneous, and may represent uncertainty or clear statements about the contents of memory. A study examined the subjective intent of DK responses in relation to the objective status of information queried, in the context of memory distorting procedures. Participants viewed a video and responded to answerable and unanswerable questions phrased in misleading or nonmisleading formats, while hypnotized or not hypnotized. Subjective meanings of DK responses were queried, and a recognition measure assessed the contents of memory. Lower DK and accuracy rates were consistently associated with unanswerable and misleading questions. One-third of DK responses were statements that the information had no not presented. When these were recoded, accuracy estimates for answerable questions decreased and more so for hypnotized participants. These results demonstrate that DK responses convey different types of information, thus accuracy estimates in studies that permit DK responses may be misestimated. Robust risks associated with asking unanswerable questions and asking questions at all were observed. Implications for working with DK responses during interviews are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the uncertainty of conservation: Responses to misleading conservation questions.

Previous research has demonstrated that preadolescent children and adults will often fail to give logically correct answers when presented with misleading weight conservation questions. Study 1 showed that misleading weight conservation questions produced nonconservation responses, even after Ss had just conserved on initial misleading number conservation tests. This result suggests that the failures on the misleading weight items were not simply due to simple acquiescence or reinterpretation of the questions. In additional studies, children and adults failed misleading number conservation questions, although the failures occurred under different conditions. The results were interpreted from the standpoint of H. Werner's (1948, 1957) theory of development and show the importance of suggestibility and context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of three variables on children's concepts of physical causality.

"This study investigated the effects of 3 variables on children's concepts of physical casuality. It was found that: (1) The nature of the causal thinking of withdrawn children is at a significantly less mature level than the causal thinking of normal children. (2) Questions about phenomena whose causal agents are not accessible to direct experience yielded significantly more nonnaturalistic responses than did questions about phenomena whose causal agents are more ascessible. (3) Questions worded so as to suggest the possible operation of 'animistic,' 'supernatural,' or 'dynamic' forces yielded more such nonnaturalistic types of responses than questions less suggestively worded." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affective Reactivity in Language: The Role of Psychophysiological Arousal.

Several studies have found that individuals with schizophrenia and their relatives, as well as healthy controls, exhibit greater language disturbance when discussing affectively negative as compared to positive or neutral topics. The goal of this study was to test the hypothesis that negative emotion impairs language production, at least in part by increasing physiological arousal. The authors had 35 healthy adults produce speech in response to affectively negative, positive, and neutral questions while the authors recorded heart rate and skin conductance. Participants displayed greater amounts of reference errors, higher heart rates, and a higher frequency of nonspecific skin conductance responses when discussing affectively negative as compared to positive or neutral topics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Story of Some : Everyday Pragmatic Inference by Children and Adults.

The statement, some elephants have trunks, is logically true but pragmatically infelicitous. Whilst some is logically consistent with all, it is often pragmatically interpreted as precluding all. In Experiments 1 and 2, we show that with pragmatically impoverished materials, sensitivity to the pragmatic implicature associated with some is apparent earlier in development than has previously been found. Amongst 8-year-old children, we observed much greater sensitivity to the implicature in pragmatically enriched contexts. Finally, in Experiment 3, we found that amongst adults, logical responses to infelicitous some statements take longer to produce than do logical responses to felicitous some statements, and that working memory capacity predicts the tendency to give logical responses to the former kind of statement. These results suggest that some adults develop the ability to inhibit a pragmatic response in favour of a logical answer. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of pragmatic inference. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)