Antecedents and outcomes of coping behaviors among unemployed and reemployed individuals

Four experiments examined young children's understanding of the inverse relation between the number of parts into which a quantity is to be divided and the size of each part. In Experiment 1 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children tended to judge, incorrectly, that bigger shares would result from sharing with more, rather than fewer, recipients. In Experiment 2, 5-year-olds correctly recognized the inverse effect of additional recipients when the sharing was based on subtraction rather than on equal partitioning. In Experiment 3, a modification of the equal-sharing task from Experiment 1 designed to reduce cognitive complexity successfully elicited correct performance from 7-year-olds but not from 5-year-olds. However, 5-year-olds markedly improved when they were given a chance to compare the outcomes of sharing with different numbers of recipients. Experiment 4 corroborated and extended this evidence of learning.     

When three is less than two: Early developments in children's understanding of fractional quantities.

Four experiments examined young children's understanding of the inverse relation between the number of parts into which a quantity is to be divided and the size of each part. In Experiment 1, 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children tended to judge, incorrectly, that bigger shares would result from sharing with more, rather than fewer, recipients. In Experiment 2, 5-year-olds correctly recognized the inverse effect of additional recipients when the sharing was based on subtraction rather than on equal partitioning. In Experiment 3, a modification of the equal-sharing task from Experiment 1 designed to reduce cognitive complexity successfully elicited correct performance from 7-year-olds but not from 5-year-olds. However, 5-year-olds markedly improved when they were given a chance to compare the outcomes of sharing with different numbers of recipients. Experiment 4 corroborated and extended this evidence of learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Spatial analysis: An examination of preschoolers' perception and construction of geometric patterns.

An extensive series of construction-based studies have shown that children as young as 3 yrs of age engage in active spatial analytic processing and that the character of this analysis changes with development. The present study was intended to demonstrate that this kind of analysis is not limited to situations that require reproduction. Children 3.5–5 yrs of age were asked to judge which of several possible sets of parts matched a configured target form. They were also asked to copy the target forms. Comparison of performance on the 2 tasks demonstrated that the same developmental trends seen in the copying task were exhibited in the perceptual judgment task. This was true for both simple linear and more varied forms. Thus, this task provides important converging evidence that in perceptual judgment as well as construction tasks children engage in active analysis of the visual display. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Forward and backward repetition blindness in speed and accuracy.

Repetition blindness (RB) was investigated in a new paradigm in which effects could stem from items preceding or following a target. Speeded-response tasks were used in which 3 critical items (C1, C2, and C3) were sequentially presented on each trial. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were asked to judge whether C2 (the target) was present on each trial. Forward RB was examined in Experiment 1 via manipulation of whether C1 and C2 were repeated and backward RB was probed in Experiment 2 via manipulation of whether C2 and C3 were repeated. RB was successfully demonstrated in both experiments: Target presence judgments were slower and less accurate with repeated conditions than with unrepeated conditions. Experiment 3 involved a semantic categorization task in which participants had to judge whether C2 was a letter or a digit. Manipulating forward and backward repetition produced reliable effects on both reaction times and accuracy. The results are consistent with the idea that RB is due to failure in token individualization rather than type refractory problems or failure in memory retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What counts as by? Young children's use of relative distance to judge nearbyness.

The authors investigated how 3- and 4-year-old children and adults use relative distance to judge nearbyness. Participants judged whether several blocks were by a landmark. The absolute and relative distance of the blocks from the landmark varied. In Experiment 1, judgments of nearbyness decreased as the distance from the landmark increased, particularly for 4-year-olds and adults. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds and adults were more likely to judge objects at an intermediate distance as by the landmark when intervening objects were absent than when intervening objects were present. In Experiment 3, participants of all ages were more likely to judge objects at a short distance as by the landmark when intervening objects were absent. Reliance on relative distance to judge nearbyness becomes more systematic and applicable to larger spatial extents across development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Families of the baby boom: Parents' division of labor and children's adjustment.

Assessed lesbian couples' division of labor, their satisfaction with division of labor and with their relationships, and their children's psychosocial adjustment. The 26 participating families were headed by lesbian couples, each of whom had at least 1 child between 4 and 9 yrs of age. Parents' relationship satisfaction was generally high but was unrelated to measures of parental division of labor or of children's adjustment. Although both parents reported sharing household tasks and decision making equally, biological mothers reported greater involvement in child care, and nonbiological mothers reported spending longer hours in paid employment. Parents were more satisfied and children were more well-adjusted when labor involved in child care was more evenly distributed between the parents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The emergence of coherence over the course of decision making.

Previous research has indicated that decision making is accompanied by an increase in the coherence of assessments of the factors related to the decision alternatives. In the present study, the authors investigated whether this coherence shift is obtained before people commit to a decision, and whether it is obtained in the course of a number of other processing tasks. College students were presented with a complex legal case involving multiple conflicting arguments. Participants rated agreement with the individual arguments in isolation before seeing the case and after processing it under various initial sets, including playing the role of a judge assigned to decide the case. Coherence shifts were observed when participants were instructed to delay making the decision (Experiment 1), to memorize the case (Experiment 2), and to comprehend the case (Experiment 3). The findings support the hypothesis that a coherence-generating mechanism operates in a variety of processing tasks, including decision making. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When all signs point to you: Lies told in the face of evidence.

Young children's ability to tell a strategic lie by making it consistent with the physical evidence of their transgression was investigated along with the sociocognitive correlates of such lie-telling behaviors. In Experiment 1, 247 Chinese children between 3 and 5 years of age (126 boys) were left alone in a room and asked not to lift a cup to see the contents. If children lifted up the cup, the contents would be spilled and evidence of their transgression would be left behind. Upon returning to the room, the experimenter asked children whether they peeked and how the contents of the cup ended up on the table. Experiment 1 revealed that young children are able to tell strategic lies to be consistent with the physical evidence by about 4 or 5 years of age, and this ability increases in sophistication with age. Experiment 2, which included 252 Chinese 4-year-olds (127 boys), identified 2 sociocognitive factors related to children's ability to tell strategic lies. Specifically, both children's theory-of-mind understanding and inhibitory control skills were significantly related to their ability to tell strategic lies in the face of physical evidence. The present investigation reveals that contrary to the prevailing views, even young children are able to tell strategic lies in some contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of language and task on children's patterns of sentence verification and denial.

Japanese-speaking and English-speaking children differ in performance on sentence-verification and denial tasks (M. M. Akiyama, see PA, Vol 71:14618 and PA, Vol 72:16907). Although the Japanese and Korean languages are similar, Korean-speaking children performed like English speakers on such tasks. In Experiment 1, 32 monolingual Korean and 24 English speakers with a mean age of 4 years, 5 months were asked to respond "right" or "wrong" on a sentence–picture or a sentence–knowledge verification task. Both language groups found true negatives the hardest sentences to verify in both tasks. In Experiment 2, 16 Korean speakers aged 4–7 years were asked to deny statements. Like English speakers, they produced more affirmative denials than negative ones. The common performances of Korean-speaking and English speaking children were accounted for by considering differences in pragmatics and the types of negative constructions found in the 3 languages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's use of the common ground in interpreting ambiguous referential utterances.

Common ground is contextual information shared by a listener and speaker that enables the listener to convert an ambiguous utterance to an informative communication. Four experiments examined young children's understanding of the common ground in interpreting ambiguous referential utterances. Kindergarten and 2nd-grade children and college students were read short vignettes containing statement, joint activity, status common ground, and an ambiguous or informative utterance about a display of 4–6 object drawings. The subjects were asked (a) whether the listener knew which object to pick (Experiment 1), (b) to pick an object themselves or choose "none" (Experiment 2), (c) the source of the listener's knowledge in the context or utterance (Experiment 3), and (d) whether a designated object was the "right one," the one the speaker "meant," or the one the speaker "could have meant" (Experiment 4). Even the kindergarten children used statement information effectively in interpreting ambiguous utterances, and all groups had difficulty using status information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why dogs have puppies and cats have kittens: the role of birth in young children's understanding of biological origins

Three studies examined young children's understanding of the biologically causal role of birth in determining animal properties and species kind identity. In Studies 1 and 2, 4- to 7-year-olds and adults were told stories in which a baby was born to an animal of one species (e.g., a horse) but was adopted and raised by an animal of another species (e.g., a cow). In Study 1, children were asked to judge which parent the baby would resemble on a set of physical properties and beliefs. The majority of children were unable to say that the baby would resemble the birth parent on physical properties but share the beliefs of the adoptive parent. These results indicate that children were not using domain-specific causal understandings to reason about the origins of these properties. In Study 2, however, when asked to explicitly predict the kind of the baby, even 5-year-olds were able to reliably judge that the baby would be of the same species kind as the birth parent rather than the adoptive parent. This result suggests that children do understand at some level that birth determines species kind. Study 3 examined further the extent to which knowledge about birth influenced children's inferences about properties. Five-year-olds were asked to judge whether a baby would share a set of physical and nonphysical properties with its mother or its father. The results showed that children who knew the factual information about where babies come from (i.e., inside mommies' tummies) were more likely to attribute the mother's properties to the baby than the father's, regardless of whether the properties were physical or nonphysical. But this finding was true only if the property of one of the parents was not inherently more desirable or true than that of the other parent. In sum, the results of these 3 studies indicate that knowledge of birth does play a role in children's inferential reasoning, even for 5-year-olds, but that that role is not domain-specific. The implications for children's understanding of biological inheritance are discussed.     

The effect of grammatical gender on object categorization.

In 3 experiments, we investigated the effect of grammatical gender on object categorization. Participants were asked to judge whether 2 objects, whose names did or did not share grammatical gender, belonged to the same semantic category by pressing a key. Monolingual speakers of English (Experiment 1), Italian (Experiments 1 and 2), and Spanish (Experiments 2 and 3) were tested in their native language. Italian and Spanish participants responded faster to pairs of stimuli sharing the same gender, whereas no difference was observed for English participants. In Experiment 2, the pictures were chosen in such a way that the grammatical gender of the names was opposite in Italian and Spanish. Therefore, the same pair of stimuli gave rise to different patterns depending on the gender congruency of the names in the languages. In Experiment 3, Spanish speakers performed the same task under an articulatory suppression condition, showing no grammatical gender effect. The locus where meaning and gender interact can be located at the level of the lexical representation that specifies syntactic information: Nouns sharing the same grammatical gender activate each other, thus facilitating their processing and speeding up responses, either to semantically related pairs or to semantically unrelated pairs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing relational and item-specific information: Effects of aging and division of attention.

64 young adults (aged 18–21 yrs) and 32 older Ss (aged 65–83 yrs) encoded items from categorizable lists under incidental learning conditions. Two orienting tasks were used: a category sorting task and a pleasantness rating task. The number of items/category was varied (between 2 and 14) within each list. In addition, 24 young adults performed the orienting tasks while simultaneously engaged in an attention-demanding secondary task (divided-attention condition). Recall declined with both age and division of attention, while recall clustering was greatest for the older Ss and least for the young divided-attention Ss. The effects of category size and orienting task on recall did not vary across groups. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reversing roles: A cognitive strategy for undoing memory deficits associated with token status.

Tested whether having tokens (Ts) adopt the role of judge reduces cognitive deficits; examined several hypotheses to explain these deficits. In 3 experiments, Ss were asked to remember as many as possible of opinions exchanged in a group interaction with 3 actors. Experiment 1 demonstrated that judging majority members helped gender Ts improve their memory and ruled out self-denigration as a mediator of token deficits. Experiment 2 indicated that judging others was effective regardless of whether the others were said to know about it or not, ruling out insulation from evaluative scrutiny as a viable mediator for the judge role. Experiment 3 suggested the judge role restores completely the Ts' cognitive capacities and ruled out heightened responsibility as an explanation for the improved memory on judges. This work suggests that Ts may perform better if they can restructure cognitively their social environments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A longitudinal study of children’s performance on simple multiplication and division problems.

The authors investigated the performance on simple multiplication and division problems of 8-year-old children longitudinally to determine the developmental trajectories of both operations. Twice a year, during 2 consecutive school years, children performed a multiplication and division verification task and a number-matching task. All effects that were observed in multiplication performance (problem size, 5, and tie effect and Tie × Size interaction) were also observed in division performance. The developmental trajectories of these effects are described. The authors observed strong developmental parallels between both operations. These results are in line with strongly interconnected memory networks for multiplication and division facts, at least in young children. The results of the number-matching task showed that the interference effect developed differently for multiplication and division, indicating that automatic activation spreading from division operands to division answers is not at work in children of that age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sex role orientation and division of labor early in marriage.

Examined the division of labor by newlyweds, including the extent to which spouses participated in the labor force and involved themselves in household work. 120 husbands (mean age 24.3 yrs) and wives (mean age 21.9 yrs) completed the Attitudes Toward Women Scale, the Personal Attributes Questionnaire, and a measure assessing their perceived skill in carrying out 26 household tasks. Data on household task participation were gathered via 9 separate phone interviews. Tasks were classified into 2 groups based on whether they were performed more often by the men or by the women. Husbands' and wives' sex-role attitudes were related to the extent to which wives, but not husbands, participated in the labor force. The more traditional the couple was in terms of their relative employment hours, the less the husband, relative to his wife, was involved in female sex-typed household tasks. No such connection was found for male sex-typed tasks. Spouses' perceived skill at performing tasks traditionally assigned to the spouse of the opposite sex was significantly related to how traditional they were in housework participation. Findings suggest that gender-related attitudes and skills of newlyweds influence the way their relationships come to be structured with regard to economic and instrumental activities. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Knowing what to remember and forget: a developmental study of cue memory in intentional forgetting

These experiments are the first to investigate children's encoding and use of information about a memory cue in Bjork's (1972) intentional forgetting task. In Experiment 1, children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 and college students were given cues to either remember or forget after the presentation of each picture. Recall and recognition tests of pictures and cues followed. The procedure in Experiment 2 was identical to that in Experiment 1 except that the list of presentation pictures was altered for some children (Grades 3 and 4) and adolescents (Grades 8 and 9) so that remember and forget cues were associated with particular taxonomic categories. In Experiment 3, the testing component was modified so that children (Grades 2, 3, and 4) and college students were asked to recall only the cue associated with each picture. The results indicated that (1) children as young as second graders encode the cue associated with each picture, although to a lesser extent than do college students, (2) much improvement in intentional forgetting is still occurring during adolescence, (3) only adults adequately cluster their recall by cue, (4) associating remember and forget cues with items from different categories does not increase the differentiation between cues, and (5) eliminating picture recall and recognition has minimal effects on the magnitude of cue judgments. These results suggest that children's difficulties on intentional forgetting tasks stem, at least in part, from their poorer encoding of information about whether an item should be remembered or forgotten.     

Effects of aging and task difficulty on divided attention performance.

We report two experiments that compare the performance of young and older adults on perceptual-motor tasks involving division of attention. Previous studies have shown older people to be especially penalized by divided attention situations, but the generality of this finding was recently challenged by Somberg and Salthouse (1982). The present study was conducted to investigate the possibility that age differences in dual-task performance are amplified by an increase in the difficulty of the constituent tasks, where difficulty was manipulated by varying the central, cognitive nature of the tasks (Experiment 1) or the degree of choice involved (Experiment 2). With the present tasks, strong evidence was found for an age-related decrement in divided attention performance. Contrary to our original expectations, however, it does not seem that division of attention presents some especial difficulty to older people. Rather, division of attention is one of several equivalent ways to increase overall task complexity. In turn, age differences are exaggerated as tasks are made more complex. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Limitations on preschool children's knowledge about counting: Using counting to compare two sets.

Possible limitations on preschool children's understanding of counting were examined by asking twenty 3-year-olds and twenty 4-year-olds to judge the appropriateness of counting carried out by a puppet. The puppet was asked to count either to find out how many objects were present altogether or to find out whether every object in one subset could have a corresponding object from the other subset. Within each counting task, half of the time the puppet counted all of the objects together and half of the time it counted the two subsets separately. Children at both ages showed some differentiation between the two counting tasks and performed at an above-chance level on the how-many task but not on the compare-sets task. The most common individual response pattern among the 3-year-olds was to judge both kinds of counts to be appropriate on both tasks, whereas the most common individual response pattern among the 4-year-olds was to judge counting of all the objects together to be appropriate and counting of the two subsets separately to be inappropriate on both tasks. The fact that children managed to differentiate appropriately between the two counting tasks despite using these basically undifferentiated strategies suggests that correct judgment processes coexisted with their predominant strategies and competed with them to determine performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Wanting to be it: children's understanding of intentions underlying pretense

How children understand the mental state of pretense has recently become an active area of inquiry, with some research suggesting that young children do not understand that pretending is based on mentally representing some alternate state of affairs. Because intention is thought to be understood earlier than mental representation generally, these experiments tested whether children understand pretense intentions at an earlier age than they understand pretense mental representations. Children were told about a character's intentions and conflicting actions, and were asked about the character's pretense. Across 5 experiments, children did not demonstrate appreciation that intention is crucial to pretense. Various methodological factors that might have compromised the results were examined, but to no effect.