Auditory imagery shapes movement timing and kinematics: Evidence from a musical task.

The role of anticipatory auditory imagery in music-like sequential action was investigated by examining timing accuracy and kinematics using a motion capture system. Musicians responded to metronomic pacing signals by producing three unpaced taps on three vertically aligned keys at the given tempo. Taps triggered tones in two out of three blocked feedback conditions, where key-to-tone mappings were compatible or incompatible in terms of spatial and pitch height. Results indicate that, while timing was most accurate without tones, movements were smaller in amplitude and less forceful (i.e., acceleration prior to impact was lowest) when tones were present. Moreover, timing was more accurate and movements were less forceful with compatible than with incompatible auditory feedback. Observing these effects at the first tap (before tone onset) suggests that anticipatory auditory imagery modulates the temporal kinematics of regularly timed auditory action sequences, like those found in music. Such cross-modal ideomotor processes may function to facilitate planning efficiency and biomechanical economy in voluntary action. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of expectancy of a threatening event on time perception in human adults.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of a threatening stimulus in human adults in a temporal bisection task. In Experiment 1, for two anchor duration conditions (400/800 vs. 800/1600 ms), the participants completed trials in which the probe duration was followed by an aversive stimulus or a nonaversive stimulus. The results showed that the duration was judged longer when the participants expected an aversive rather than a nonaversive stimulus. In Experiment 2, the effect of the temporal localization of the aversive stimulus was also tested, with the aversive stimulus being presented at the beginning or at the end of the probe duration. The results revealed a temporal overestimation in each condition compared to the trials in which no aversive stimulus was presented. Furthermore, the temporal overestimation was greater when the expectation for the forthcoming threatening stimulus was longer. This temporal overestimation is explained in terms of a speeding-up of the neural timing system in response to the increase in the arousal level produced by the expectation of a threatening stimulus. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development's tortoise and hare: Pubertal timing, pubertal tempo, and depressive symptoms in boys and girls.

Although the sequence of pubertal maturation remains consistent across most individuals, the timing and tempo of development fluctuate widely. While past research has largely focused on the sequelae of pubertal timing, a faster tempo of maturation might also present special challenges to children for acclimating to new biological and social milestones. Using latent growth curve modeling, the present study investigated how pubertal tempo and pubertal timing predicted depressive symptoms over a 4-year period in a sample of children recruited from New York City area public schools. Rate of intraindividual change in parent-reported Tanner stages was used as an index of pubertal tempo, and more advanced Tanner development at an earlier chronological age was used as an index of pubertal timing. For girls (N = 138, M = 8.86 years old at Time 1), pubertal timing emerged as the most salient factor, and the tempo at which girls progressed through puberty was not significant. In boys (N = 128, M = 9.61 years old at Time 1), both timing and tempo of development were significant; notably, however, the effects of pubertal tempo were stronger than those of timing. These findings highlight the need to consider multiple sources of individual variability in pubertal development and suggest different pubertal challenges for boys and girls. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Models of visuospatial and verbal memory across the adult life span.

The authors investigated the distinctiveness and interrelationships among visuospatial and verbal memory processes in short-term, working, and long-term memories in 345 adults. Beginning in the 20s, a continuous, regular decline occurs for processing-intensive tasks (e.g., speed of processing, working memory, and long-term memory), whereas verbal knowledge increases across the life span. There is little differentiation in the cognitive architecture of memory across the life span. Visuospatial and verbal working memory are distinct but highly interrelated systems with domain-specific short-term memory subsystems. In contrast to recent neuroimaging data, there is little evidence for dedifferentiation of function at the behavioral level in old compared with young adults. The authors conclude that efforts to connect behavioral and brain data yield a more complete understanding of the aging mind. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Systems in development: Motor skill acquisition facilitates three-dimensional object completion.

How do infants learn to perceive the backs of objects that they see only from a limited viewpoint? Infants’ 3-dimensional object completion abilities emerge in conjunction with developing motor skills—independent sitting and visual–manual exploration. Infants at 4.5 to 7.5 months of age (n = 28) were habituated to a limited-view object and tested with volumetrically complete and incomplete (hollow) versions of the same object. Parents reported infants’ sitting experience, and infants’ visual–manual exploration of objects was observed in a structured play session. Infants’ self-sitting experience and visual–manual exploratory skills predicted looking at the novel, incomplete object on the habituation task. Further analyses revealed that self-sitting facilitated infants’ visual inspection of objects while they manipulated them. The results are framed within a developmental systems approach, wherein infants’ sitting skill, multimodal object exploration, and object knowledge are linked in developmental time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Editorial: A time of transition.

With the next year marking the 30th anniversary of the first issue of Developmental Psychology the current editor reflects upon her time as editor for the journal. There has been a sustained pattern of growth since the journal began. It quickly established a reputation as a primary archival outlet for the publication of scientific information about human development across the life span. Because the focus is on development rather than specific domains of psychology, virtually all substantive areas of psychology are covered. A number of special issues and sections have been published during this editorship. In addition to the cross-cultural issue edited by Kenneth Rubin, there have been two others. One featured research on sexual orientation and human development, edited by Charlotte Patterson. The other was on transitions and adjustment in adolescence. The position as editor of Developmental Psychology has presented a number of challenges, opportunities, and learning experiences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The production and perception of randomness.

This article contains a discussion of the elusive nature of the concept of randomness, a review of findings from experiments with randomness production and randomness perception tasks, and a presentation of theoretical treatments of people's randomization capabilities and limitations. The importance of task instructions and the difficulty of interpreting results when instructions are vague or ambiguous are stressed. The widely held view that people are incapable of generating or recognizing randomness is shown to lack the strong experimental support that has sometimes been claimed for it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

New perspectives on the effects of action on perceptual and cognitive development.

This special section was motivated by a resurgence in the view that it is impossible to investigate perceptual and cognitive development without considering how it is affected by, and intertwined with, infants' and children's action in the world. This view has long been foundational to the field, yet contemporary investigations of the effects of acting on cognition and perception have been limited. The research showcased in this section indicates that this trend is changing as researchers consider anew the ways in which cognition derives structure from action. The work presented here illustrates the breadth of these potential effects across ages and domains of development, and it highlights the breadth of methods that can be recruited to investigate them. This new research focus provides insight for the mechanisms by which action affects perception and cognition and at the same time reveals that much remains to be learned. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in boys' and girls' timing and tempo of puberty: Modeling development with nonlinear growth models.

Pubertal development is a nonlinear process progressing from prepubescent beginnings through biological, physical, and psychological changes to full sexual maturity. To tether theoretical concepts of puberty with sophisticated longitudinal, analytical models capable of articulating pubertal development more accurately, we used nonlinear mixed-effects models to describe both the timing and tempo of pubertal development in the sample of 364 White boys and 373 White girls measured across 6 years as part of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Individual differences in timing and tempo were extracted with models of logistic growth. Differential relations emerged for how boys' and girls' timing and tempo of development were related to physical characteristics (body mass index, height, and weight) and psychological outcomes (internalizing problems, externalizing problems, and risky sexual behavior). Timing and tempo are associated in boys but not girls. Pubertal timing and tempo are particularly important for predicting psychological outcomes in girls but only sparsely related to boys' psychological outcomes. Results highlight the importance of considering the nonlinear nature of puberty and expand the repertoire of possibilities for examining important aspects of how and when pubertal processes contribute to development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Changes in executive control across the life span: Examination of task-switching performance.

A study was conducted to examine changes in executive control processes over the life span. More specifically, changes in processes responsible for preparation and interference control that underlie the ability to flexibly alternate between two different tasks were examined. Individuals (N?=?152) ranging in age from 7 to 82 years participated in the study. A U-shaped function was obtained for switch costs (i.e., the time required to switch between tasks compared with a repeated-task baseline), with larger costs found for young children and older adults. Switch costs were reduced with practice, particularly for children. All age groups benefited from increased preparation time, with larger benefits observed for children and older adults. Adults benefited to a greater extent than children when the interval between the response to one task and the cue indicating which task to perform next was lengthened, which suggested faster decay of interference from the old task set for adults than for children. A series of hierarchical analyses indicated that the age-related variance in task-switching performance is independent, at least in part, from the age-related variance in other cognitive processes such as perceptual speed and working memory. The results are discussed in terms of the development and decline of executive control processes across the life span. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Environmental contingency in life history strategies: The influence of mortality and socioeconomic status on reproductive timing.

Why do some people have children early, whereas others delay reproduction? By considering the trade-offs between using one's resources for reproduction versus other tasks, the evolutionary framework of life history theory predicts that reproductive timing should be influenced by mortality and resource scarcity. A series of experiments examined how mortality cues influenced the desire to have children sooner rather than later. The effects of mortality depended critically on whether people grew up in a relatively resource-scarce or resource-plentiful environment. For individuals growing up relatively poor, mortality cues produced a desire to reproduce sooner—to want children now, even at the cost of furthering one's education or career. Conversely, for individuals growing up relatively wealthy, mortality cues produced a desire to delay reproduction—to further one's education or career before starting a family. Overall, mortality cues appear to shift individuals into different life history strategies as a function of childhood socioeconomic status, suggesting important implications for how environmental factors can influence fertility and family size. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual representation as a mechanism of lexical ambiguity resolution: An investigation of span and processing time.

In 2 experiments, the authors investigated the ability of high- and low-span comprehenders to construe subtle shades of meaning through perceptual representation. High- and low-span comprehenders responded to pictures that either matched or mismatched a target object's shape as implied by the preceding sentence context. At 750 ms after hearing the sentence describing the target object, both high- and low-span comprehenders had activated a contextually appropriate perceptual representation of the target object. However, only high-span comprehenders had perceptually represented the contextually appropriate meaning immediately upon hearing the sentence, whereas low-span comprehenders required more processing time before the perceptual representation was activated. The results are interpreted in a framework of co-occurring lexical representations and perceptual-motor representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The development of attentional networks: Cross-sectional findings from a life span sample.

Using a population-based sample of 263 individuals ranging from 6 to 89 years of age, we investigated the gains and losses in the abilities to (a) use exogenous cues to shift attention covertly and (b) ignore conflicting information across the life span. The participants’ ability to shift visual attention was tested by a typical Posner-type orienting task with valid and invalid peripheral cues. To tap conflict resolution, we asked participants to perform a color version of the Eriksen-type flanker task. The observed cross-sectional age differences in our data indicate that the ability to deal with conflicting information and the ability to covertly orient attention show different cross-sectional age gradients during childhood and that only conflict resolution mechanisms show a marked negative age difference in old age. Moreover, the data suggest that although the overall performance of the participants can, in part, be accounted for by individual differences in information processing speed, performance in the orienting and conflict task depends on factors related to the specific development of the two attentional systems in question. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Synchronizing self and object movement: How child and adult cyclists intercept moving gaps in a virtual environment.

Two experiments examined how 10- and 12-year-old children and adults intercept moving gaps while bicycling in an immersive virtual environment. Participants rode an actual bicycle along a virtual roadway. At 12 test intersections, participants attempted to pass through a gap between 2 moving, car-sized blocks without stopping. The blocks were timed such that it was sometimes necessary for participants to adjust their speed in order to pass through the gap. We manipulated available visual information by presenting the target blocks in isolation in Experiment 1 and in streams of blocks in Experiment 2. In both experiments, adults had more time to spare than did children. Both groups had more time to spare when they were required to slow down than when they were required to speed up. Participants' behavior revealed a multistage interception strategy that cannot be explained by the use of a monotonic control law such as the constant bearing angle strategy. The General Discussion section focuses on possible sources of changes in perception-action coupling over development and on task-specific constraints that could underlie the observed interception strategy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion experience and expression across the adult life span: Insights from a multimodal assessment study.

This investigation represents a multimodal study of age-related differences in experienced and expressed affect and in emotion regulatory skills in a sample of young, middle-aged, and older adults (N = 96), testing formulations derived from differential emotions theory. The experimental session consisted of a 10-min anger induction and a 10-min sadness induction using a relived emotion task; participants were also randomly assigned to an inhibition or noninhibition condition. In addition to subjective ratings of emotional experience provided by participants, their facial behavior was coded using an objective facial affect coding system; a content analysis also was applied to the emotion narratives. Separate repeated measures analyses of variance applied to each emotion domain indicated age differences in the co-occurrence of negative emotions and co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions across domains, thus extending the finding of emotion heterogeneity or complexity in emotion experience to facial behavior and verbal narratives. The authors also found that the inhibition condition resulted in a different pattern of results in the older versus middle-aged and younger adults. The intensity and frequency of discrete emotions were similar across age groups, with a few exceptions. Overall, the findings were generally consistent with differential emotions theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age, suicide, science, and clinical psychology: A review of A. Leenaars (Ed.), Life span perspectives of suicide.

Reviews the book, Life span perspectives of suicide edited by A. Leenaars (see record 1991-97542-000). There is an ever-growing literature on suicide, much of which seems redundant. Accordingly, I look for novel data and true theoretical progress in the context of modern science. This volume promises a unique focus on developmental variations in suicidal behaviour, which should be quite timely. The editor and author of several chapters, Antoon Leenaars, is a highly respected activist in suicide prevention. Among the 20 chapters with 21 authors, the quality varies from enlightening to very disappointing. While this volume has some very strong chapters that meet scientific criteria while providing fresh insights and stimulus for research, some of the chapters unfortunately leave me with serious scientific concerns. I would like to see integration of new data with modern science, rather than conjecture through outdated hypothetical constructs. In particular, much of the chapter on suicide in middle adulthood by Balance and Leenaars reads like a list of Freud's concepts, as if there had been no progress in the psychology of middle adulthood during the last half century. Another concern is that clinical and scientific judgements sometimes become confused in this volume, as is often true of suicide research. Leenaars approaches suicide evaluatively, repeatedly stating that it is tragic and to be eradicated. However noble, when matters of fact are under discussion, this violates the longstanding scientific tradition of objectivity. Finally, none of the authors has made any reference whatsoever to biological theories of aging and senescence, when so much insight could be gained. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The development of memory efficiency and value-directed remembering across the life span: A cross-sectional study of memory and selectivity.

Although attentional control and memory change considerably across the life span, no research has examined how the ability to strategically remember important information (i.e., value-directed remembering) changes from childhood to old age. The present study examined this in different age groups across the life span (N = 320, 5–96 years old). A selectivity task was used in which participants were asked to study and recall items worth different point values in order to maximize their point score. This procedure allowed for measures of memory quantity/capacity (number of words recalled) and memory efficiency/selectivity (the recall of high-value items relative to low-value items). Age-related differences were found for memory capacity, as young adults recalled more words than the other groups. However, in terms of selectivity, younger and older adults were more selective than adolescents and children. The dissociation between these measures across the life span illustrates important age-related differences in terms of memory capacity and the ability to selectively remember high-value information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

A meta-analysis of normal and disordered personality across the life span.

Debate continues about whether personality, both normal and disordered, can change significantly or is mainly stable across the life span. One issue that receives little attention is the degree to which personality stability coefficients may be influenced by attenuation due to measurement error. The current meta-analysis examines the data from recent research on personality stability, reporting both uncorrected and corrected stability coefficients. Attenuation due to measurement error was found to cause a significant reduction in personality stability coefficients, raising the possibility that some studies may conflate personality change with measurement error. Overall, corrected stability coefficients suggested that the stability of personality across adulthood is high, with only modest change. By contrast, personality during childhood is significantly more changeable. Both normal personality and personality disorders were highly stable across the life span, and patients in therapy experienced no more personality change than did nonpatients. Cross-cultural comparisons suggested relatively similar levels of personality stability cross-culturally, although personality stability among people in South Pacific nations is slightly lower than among those in the United States, Canada, or European nations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Life reflection: A social–cognitive analysis of life review.

Life review and reminiscence are 2 concepts used to describe the phenomenon of people reflecting on their lives. Rather than used synonymously, these 2 concepts need to be distinguished on the basis of a social–cognitive process analysis. For that purpose, life reflection is introduced as a new term. Evidence shows that life reflection is a social–cognitive process that begins in adolescence and continues across the life span. It serves different functions across the life span, but at all ages it contributes to self-insight and a self-critical perspective. Striving for new insights about oneself and about life in general is challenging and taxing. Reflecting together with a trusted person, thus, may facilitate the process. A study testing and supporting some of these propositions is reported. Results are discussed in the context of lifespan theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Biocultural orchestration of developmental plasticity across levels: The interplay of biology and culture in shaping the mind and behavior across the life span.

The author reviews reemerging coconstructive conceptions of development and recent empirical findings of developmental plasticity at different levels spanning several fields of developmental and life sciences. A cross-level dynamic biocultural coconstructive framework is endorsed to understand cognitive and behavioral development across the life span. This framework integrates main conceptions of earlier views into a unifying frame, viewing the dynamics of life span development as occurring simultaneously within different time scales (i.e., moment-to-moment microgenesis, life span ontogeny, and human phylogeny) and encompassing multiple levels (i.e., neurobiological, cognitive, behavioral, and sociocultural). Viewed through this metatheoretical framework, new insights of potential interfaces for reciprocal cultural and experiential influences to be integrated with behavioral genetics and cognitive neuroscience research can be more easily prescribed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)