Task effects on tactile temporal order judgments: When space does and does not matter.

The ability to report the temporal order of 2 tactile stimuli (1 applied to each hand) has been shown to decline when the arms are crossed over compared with when they are uncrossed. However, these effects have only been measured when temporal order was reported by stimulus location. It is unknown whether this spatial manipulation of the body affects all tactile temporal order judgments (TOJs) or only those judgments that are spatially defined. The authors examined the effect of crossing the arms on tactile TOJs when stimuli were identified by either spatial (location) or nonspatial (frequency or duration) attributes. Spatial TOJs were significantly impaired when the arms were in crossed compared with uncrossed postures, but there was no effect of posture when order was judged by nonspatial attributes. Task-dependent modulation of the effects of posture was also evident when response complexity was reduced to go/no-go responses. These results suggest that crossing the arms impairs tactile localization and thus spatial TOJs. However, the data also suggest that localization is not a necessary precursor when temporal order can be computed by nonspatial means. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The exposure of young children to accident risk as pedestrians

Pedestrian road accidents show a marked peak for children aged 5, 6 and 7 years with boys twice as involved as girls at these ages. Howarth et al (1974) described a framework in which measures of exposure were defined and related to the accident statistics to obtain estimates of absolute levels of risk for different categories of pedestrian in different traffic situations. The present paper describes a survey of children's exposure carried out to provide suitable data for this quantitative analysis. We interviewed a representative sample of Nottingham schoolchildren about their journeys in the previous 24 hours and recorded the number of roads crossed and the traffic densities of these roads. The measures of exposure obtained are presented in relation to the accompaniment of children on their journeys, the type of area in which they live, and time of day. Risk was assessed by relating exposure measures both to the national and local accident statistics. The analysis provides estimates of the risk to children of different ages and sex in their normal pattern of road crossing and in crossing roads of different traffic density and indicates that the accident statistics alone considerably underestimate the degree of risk to children under the age of eight. Interviews with a sample of the parents of the children suggest that children may provide a more accurate measure of their exposure than do their parents.     

Increased cognitive load leads to impaired mobility decisions in seniors at risk for falls.

Successful mobility requires appropriate decision-making. Seniors with reduced executive functioning—such as senior fallers—may be prone to poor mobility judgments, especially under dual-task conditions. We classified participants as “At-Risk” and “Not-At-Risk” for falls using a validated physiological falls-risk assessment. Dual-task performance was assessed in a virtual reality environment where participants crossed a simulated street by walking on a manual treadmill while listening to music or conversing on a phone. Those “At-Risk” experienced more collisions with oncoming cars and had longer crossing times in the Phone condition compared to controls. We conclude that poor mobility judgments during a dual-task leads to unsafe mobility for those at-risk for falls. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of experience in judging children's photographs.

3 groups of Ss—undergraduates, parents, professional psychologists—ranked photographs of 10 children on intelligence, sociability, activity, sensitivity, and mental health. In comparison with a child psychologist who had observed the children over a 2-year period, Ss, as groups, made consistent judgments of intelligence, sociability, and health; but, as individuals, their judgments were of low validity. Judgments of children's photographs are not related to practical experience or to professional training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The understanding of invariance by very young children.

Conducted 3 conservation experiments with a total of 164 3-6 yr. olds to determine whether young children understand the invariance of quantity. Results show that (a) even 3-yr-olds were able to transfer a quantity judgment over a perceptual transformation very well, (b) Ss only failed to make this kind of transfer when the judgments normally produced by the pre- and post-transformation displays were in direct conflict, and (c) training that some cues provide a more reliable basis for quantity judgments than others enabled Ss to transfer quantity judgments over perceptual transformations much more effectively than they had previously. It is concluded that very young children have a basic understanding of invariance, and that their real difficulty in quantity tasks is in distinguishing between a correct and an incorrect basis for quantity judgments. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Examining the impact of traffic environment and executive functioning on children's pedestrian behaviors.

The process of integrating visual information and planning a safe crossing is cognitively demanding for many young children. We assessed relations between traffic characteristics, aspects of children's executive functioning (EF), and pedestrian behavior, with the aim being to determine whether well-developed EF would predict safer pedestrian behaviors beyond the contributions of child demographic and traffic environment factors. Using the pretend road method, we studied a sample of 83 children aged 6–9 in a series of 5 crossing trials beside a real road in response to actual traffic conditions. Traffic characteristics and pedestrian behaviors were observed and measured across crossing trials. Both traffic characteristics and EF, most notably cognitive efficiency, were strongly related to children's pedestrian crossing behaviors. Traffic characteristics were also found to interact with children's ability to monitor their crossing performance. Examining developmental influences in pedestrian injury etiology broadens researchers' knowledge of and ability to prevent injuries by moving beyond describing what happens to children and examining why pedestrian injuries occur. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Foreknowledge, caring, and the side-effect effect in young children.

Children and adults often judge that the side effects of the actions of an uncaring story agent have been intentional if the effects are harmful but not if these are beneficial, creating an asymmetrical "side-effect" effect. The authors report 3 experiments involving 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 188) designed to clarify the role of foreknowledge and caring in judgments of intentionality. Many children showed the side-effect effect even if agents were explicitly described as lacking foreknowledge of the outcome. Similarly, when agents were described as possessing foreknowledge but their caring state was unspecified, children more often judged that the negative, compared with the positive, effects of agents' actions were brought about intentionally. Regardless of foreknowledge, children infrequently judged positive outcomes as intentional when agent caring was unspecified, and they gave few attributions of intentionality when agents were described as having a false belief about the outcome. These results testify to the robustness of the side-effect effect and highlight the extent to which children's intentionality judgments are asymmetrical. The findings suggest developmental continuity in the link between reasoning about morality and intentionality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Child-Centered Kinder Training for Teachers of Pre-School Children Deemed At-Risk.

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of child-centered kinder training on both at-risk children and their teachers using Landreth's 10-week filial training model. In this project, the teachers received 30 minutes of immediate feedback following their play sessions with individual children. Following the 10-week training, teachers participated in 13 group sessions to help them generalize the use of the skills into their classrooms. The findings indicate that changes occurred in both the children and the teachers. The children who participated in play sessions with their teachers improved in three of the four composite scales of the Behavior Assessment Scale for Children (Internalizing Problems, Behavioral Symptoms Index, and Adaptive Skills), when compared to a control group of children who did not have the play sessions. The teachers demonstrated better play therapy skills and higher levels of empathic responding with children in the playroom. In addition, teachers were able to generalize the skills into their classrooms when compared to teachers who had not received kinder training. The findings of this study indicate that child-centered kinder training is an effective strategy for both at-risk pre-school children and their teachers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Transfer of management training from alternative perspectives.

One hundred seven management training evaluations were meta-analyzed to compare effect sizes for the transfer of managerial training derived from different rating sources (self, superior, peer, and subordinate) and broken down by both study- and training-related variables. For studies as a whole, and interpersonal management skills training studies in particular, transfer effects based on trainees' self-ratings, and to a lesser extent ratings from their superiors, were largest and most varied across studies. In contrast, transfer effects based on peer ratings, and particularly subordinate ratings, were substantially smaller and more homogeneous. This pattern was consistent across different sources of studies, features of evaluation design, and within a subset of 14 studies that each included all 4 rating sources. Across most rating sources, transfer of training was greatest for studies conducted in nonmilitary settings, when raters were likely to have known whether the manager being rated had attended training, when criteria were targeted to training content, when training content was derived from an analysis of tasks and skill requirements, and when training included opportunities for practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mood, memory, and social judgments in children.

The influence of positive and negative moods on children's recall and recognition memory and impression-formation judgments was investigated in a two-list experimental design. A total of 161 schoolchildren, 8 to 10 years old, were presented with audiovisual information containing positive and negative details about 2 target children. Each presentation was preceded by happy or sad mood manipulations. One day later, the children were again placed in a happy or sad mood, and their recall and recognition memory and impression-formation judgments were assessed. Results showed that memory was better when (a) the children felt happy during encoding, retrieval, or both; (b) the material was incongruent with learning mood; (c) the 2 target characters were encountered in contrasting rather than in matching mood states; and (d) recall mood matched encoding mood. A happy mood increased the extremity of both positive and negative impression-formation judgments. Results are contrasted with experimental data obtained with normal or depressed adults, and implications are considered for contemporary theories of mood effects on cognition and for social-developmental research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's exposure to traffic and pedestrian injuries

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to estimate children's exposure to traffic (number of streets crossed) and to determine the role of exposure in pedestrian injury. METHODS: Questionnaires were distributed to a random sample of 4080 first- and fourth-grade children in 43 Montreal schools. RESULTS: When analyzed by police district, injury and exposure rates were positively correlated (r2 = 0.53). Crossings were similar by sex but increased with age and were inversely related to socioeconomic status. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that although children's exposure to traffic could be reduced by transporting them to school, a more reasonable prevention strategy involves environmental changes.     

Source-monitoring training facilitates preschoolers' eyewitness memory performance.

Preschool children are more susceptible to misleading postevent information than are older children and adults. One reason for young children's suggestibility is their failure to monitor the source of their memories, as in, for example, discriminating whether an event was seen live versus on television. The authors investigated whether source-monitoring training would decrease preschoolers' suggestibility. Thirty-six 3-4-year-olds observed target live and video events and were then given source-monitoring or recognition (control) training on nontarget events. Following training, all children answered 24 misleading and nonmisleading target-event questions. Children given source-monitoring training were more accurate than control group children in response to misleading and nonmisleading yes-no questions and in response to nonmisleading, open-ended questions. Implications for strategy development, dual representation, and child witness interviewing are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Face and tone of voice in the communication of deception.

An experiment with 60 senders and 9 judges (undergraduates) examined the contributions of face and tone of voice (TOV; filtered speech) to the communication of honest and deceptive messages. TOV was a better source of deception and leakage than the face. Judgments of the combined audiovisual channel (AVC) was better predicted from their TOV judgments when the message was deceptive and from their judgments of the face when the message was honest. When verbal content was available, the face became less important. Judges obtained more information from facial cues that were added to filtered speech than from those added to full voice. Judgments of the AVC without content were better predicted from judgments of filtered speech. The relative importance of face and TOV was also determined by the affect that was communicated. TOV was a better source of information about dominance and submission; the face revealed more information and was more highly correlated with the combined AVC for communication of liking and disliking. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The importance of gesture in children's spatial reasoning.

On average, men outperform women on mental rotation tasks. Even boys as young as 4 1/2 perform better than girls on simplified spatial transformation tasks. The goal of our study was to explore ways of improving 5-year-olds' performance on a spatial transformation task and to examine the strategies children use to solve this task. We found that boys performed better than girls before training and that both boys and girls improved with training, whether they were given explicit instruction or just practice. Regardless of training condition, the more children gestured about moving the pieces when asked to explain how they solved the spatial transformation task, the better they performed on the task, with boys gesturing about movement significantly more (and performing better) than girls. Gesture thus provides useful information about children's spatial strategies, raising the possibility that gesture training may be particularly effective in improving children's mental rotation skills. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

General and multicultural case conceptualization skills: A cross-sectional analysis of psychotherapy trainees.

The general and multicultural case conceptualization skills of 91 psychotherapy trainees were evaluated for complexity and expertness across 3 case scenarios. The cases varied in the extent to which culture was presented in the demographic information and presenting concerns. Whereas general case conceptualization skills were found to relate to clinical training, multicultural case conceptualization skills were found to relate to multicultural training. Across cases, advanced trainees demonstrated significantly greater complexity and expertness than beginners. Trainees consistently included more culturally relevant ideas when culture was explicitly stated in the case as a presenting problem, versus when culture was implied. Last, consistently significant differences in the case conceptualizations of White trainees and trainees of color were not found. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of serial rehearsal training on memory search.

Examined the effects of storage processing on short-term memory search. 32 moderate and 32 high IQ 4th-5th graders were given an S. Sternberg (1966, 1969) recognition memory task. Half of the Ss were trained to use a serial rehearsal strategy during target set storage, and half were given no specific strategy training. The training variable was crossed with rehearsal requirement (overt or covert) so that storage processing could be monitored directly. Dependent measures included S-paced study times, overt rehearsals, and reaction times. Results indicate IQ-related differences in the rate of memory search in the absence of differences in rehearsal during storage. In addition, serial rehearsal training facilitated memory search when rehearsal was covert, particularly for high IQ Ss. The data are discussed with regard to target set storage resulting from a serial rehearsal pattern and to the apparent inverse relationship between IQ and memory-search rate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Exposure influences expressive timing judgments in music.

This study is concerned with the question whether, and to what extent, listeners' previous exposure to music in everyday life, and expertise as a result of formal musical training, play a role in making expressive timing judgments in music. This was investigated by using a Web-based listening experiment in which listeners with a wide range of musical backgrounds were asked to compare 2 recordings of the same composition (15 pairs, grouped in 3 musical genres), 1 of which was tempo-transformed (manipulating the expressive timing). The results show that expressive timing judgments are not so much influenced by expertise levels, as is suggested by the expertise hypothesis, but by exposure to a certain musical idiom, as is suggested by the exposure hypothesis. As such, the current study provides evidence for the idea that some musical capabilities are acquired through mere exposure to music, and that these abilities are more likely enhanced by active listening (exposure) than by formal musical training (expertise). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Large group community-based parenting programs for families of preschoolers at risk for disruptive behaviour disorders: utilization, cost effectiveness, and outcome

A significant percentage of children with disruptive behavior disorders do not receive mental health assistance. Utilization is lowest among groups whose children are at greatest risk. To increase the availability, accessibility, and cost efficacy of parent training programs, this prospective randomized trial compared a large group community-based parent training program to a clinic-based individual parent training (PT) programs. All families of junior kindergartners in the Hamilton public and separate school boards were sent a checklist regarding problems at home. Those returning questionnaires above the 90th percentile were block randomly assigned to: (1) a 12-week clinic-based individual parent training (Clinic/Individual), (2) a 12-week community-based large group parent training (Community/Group), or (3) a waiting list control condition. Immigrant families, those using English as a second language, and parents of children with severe behaviour problems were significantly more likely to enroll in Community/Groups than Clinic/Individual PT. Parents in Community/Groups reported greater improvements in behaviour problems at home and better maintenance of these gains at 6-month follow-up. A cost analysis showed that, with groups of 18 families, Community/Groups are more than six times as cost effective as Clinic/Individual programs.     

Reference-Frame Misalignment and Cardinal Direction Judgments: Group Differences and Strategies.

In 3 experiments, the authors examined how misalignment of egocentric and exocentric reference frames affects cardinal direction judgments. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated large differences in the accuracy and speed with which 104 less experienced and 7 experienced navigators made cardinal direction judgments. Reference-frame misalignment was associated with large performance decrements. The extent of these decrements diminished as ability and experience increased: however, even experienced navigators showed decrements when reference frames were misaligned. In Experiment 3, the authors used 55 college students to examine the individual subtasks of a common strategy for cardinal direction judgments and to isolate the effects of reference-frame misalignment to a particular subtask of this strategy. The tasks and strategies studied in this article can be applied in the development of navigational training and interfaces. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)