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)     

Performance of adult aphasics on a sentence evaluation and revision task

Adult aphasics completed a sentence evaluation and revision task to test some aspects of their linguistic competence. Grammatical and ungrammatical sentences served as the stimuli. Ungrammatical sentences were characterized by violations of syntactic or semantic structure, or both. Aphasics evaluated correctly the grammaticality of most stimulus sentences. Incorrect evaluations were associated with sentences characterized by violations of syntactic structure. Aphasics' revisions of sentences that they judged to be ungrammatical were in the direction of appropriate grammatical structures. Omission of morphological endings was the most frequent sentence revision error. Aphasics' errors on both tasks could be accounted for by performance deficits such as inattentiveness to syntactic detail, auditory perceptual impairments, and inefficient lexical retrieval. These findings lend support to the argument that aphasia is best characterized as a performance rather than competence disruption.     

Adult age differences in task switching.

Age differences in 2 components of task-set switching speed were investigated in 118 adults aged 20 to 80 years using task-set homogeneous (e.g., AAAA…) and task-set heterogeneous (e.g., AABBAABB…) blocks. General switch costs were defined as latency differences between heterogeneous and homogeneous blocks, whereas specific switch costs were defined as differences between switch and nonswitch trials within heterogeneous blocks. Both types of costs generalized over verbal, figural, and numeric stimulus materials; were more highly correlated to fluid than to crystallized abilities; and were not eliminated after 6 sessions of practice, indicating that they reflect basic and domain-general aspects of cognitive control. Most important, age-associated increments in costs were significantly greater for general than for specific switch costs, suggesting that the ability to efficiently maintain and coordinate 2 alternating task sets in working memory instead of 1 is more negatively affected by advancing age than the ability to execute the task switch itself. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sex differences in group task performance.

115 female and 118 male psychology students worked individually or in 3-person same-sex groups on a production task (requiring the generation of ideas) or on a discussion task (requiring group members to reach consensus concerning their evaluation of an issue). Because the content of the tasks was carefully selected not to favor the interests or expertise of one sex over the other, no sex differences were expected when Ss worked individually. Results show no gender differences in individual production performance. Only the creativity of the discussion problems was affected by gender; males working individually generated more creative solutions than did females. Consistent with prior research, males in groups generated more solutions to the production problems than did females; females in groups generated higher quality solutions to the discussion problem than did males. (35 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in strategic behavior during a computation-based skill acquisition task.

The authors evaluated mechanistic and metacognitive accounts of age differences in strategy transitions during skill acquisition. Old and young participants were trained on a task involving a shift from performing a novel arithmetic algorithm to responding via associative recognition of equation–solution pairings. The strategy shift was manipulated by task instructions that either (a) equally focused on speed and accuracy, (b) encouraged retrieval use as a method toward fast responding, or (c) offered monetary incentives for fast retrieval-based performance. Monetary incentives produced a more rapid shift to retrieval relative to standard instructions; older adults showed a greater incentives effect on retrieval use than younger adults. Monetary incentives encouraged retrieval use and response time improvements despite accuracy costs (a speed–accuracy tradeoff). The pattern of results suggested a role of metacognitive and volitional factors in retrieval shift, indicating that an associative learning deficit cannot fully account for older adults’ delayed strategy shift. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anxiety and the use of strategies in the performance of a sentence-picture verification task.

An experiment was conducted to examine processing strategy differences in anxiety. The sentence–picture verification task was modified to incorporate a block of threat-related trials (involving a knife and a rifle) and a block of neutral trials (involving a truck and a chair). It was predicted that the high-trait, relative to low-trait, anxious individuals would prefer to use a linguistic strategy for threat-related as compared to neutral trials. In addition, the idea that an image-based strategy is more important for processing emotional material was examined. There was some support for both of these hypotheses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in the effects of goals on self-regulated sentence processing.

The authors examined age differences in adults' allocation of effort when reading text for either high levels of recall accuracy or high levels of efficiency. Participants read a series of sentences, making judgments of learning before recall. Older adults showed less sensitivity than the young to the accuracy goal in both reading time allocation and memory performance. Memory accuracy and differential allocation of effort to unlearned items were age equivalent, so age differences in goal adherence were not attributable to metacognitive factors. However, comparison with data from a control reading task without monitoring showed that learning gains among older adults across trial were reduced relative to those of the young by memory monitoring, suggesting that monitoring may be resource consuming for older learners. Age differences in the responsiveness to (information-acquisition) goals could be accounted for, in part, by independent contributions from working memory and memory self-efficacy. Our data suggest that both processing capacity ("what you have") and beliefs ("knowing you can do it") can contribute to individual differences in engaging resources ("what you do") to effectively learn novel content from text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in the use of simplification strategies in a complex decision-making task.

Used decision time results to assess the strategies that 90 undergraduates used in a complex decision-making task. Trend analyses revealed that the functions relating choice time to the number of choice alternatives in a set and the number of attributes comprising those alternatives contained linear (increasing) components. For some Ss, there was a quadratic effect of the number of attributes available to the decision maker on choice time, suggesting that these Ss adopted simplification strategies at high levels of task complexity. Reliable individual differences in these trend components were observed, consistent with individual differences in motivation and/or processing capacities. These differences were included in an information-processing model of decision behavior that captured the choice time data observed. Ss' ratings of apartments were used as a basis to assess the extent to which the use of simplification strategies resulted in preference reversals. Contrary to expectation, Ss whose choice times contained quadratic components demonstrated fewer preference reversals at high levels of information load. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in lapses of intention in the Stroop task

The study evaluated the hypothesis that older adults are more susceptible to lapses of intention (lapses) than are younger adults, and explored the factors contributing to these lapses. The findings of three experiments examining the pattern of intrusion errors in the Stroop task revealed that older adults were more likely to experience lapses than were younger adults, and that lapses tended to be of longer duration in older than younger adults. Lapses were observed under conditions of suboptimal controlled attentional processing, when task conditions required the allocation of this processing in the service of multiple behavioral goals, and during periods of slowed responding. The findings of these experiments are consistent with those from a growing number of studies indicating that older adults are more susceptible to lapses of intention than younger adults.     

Examining age differences in performance of a complex information search and retrieval task.

This study examined age differences in performance of a complex information search and retrieval task by using a simulated real-world task typical of those performed by customer service representatives. The study also investigated the influence of task experience and the relationships between cognitive abilities and task performance. One hundred seventeen participants from 3 age groups, younger (20–39 years), middle-aged (40–59 years), and older (60–75 years), performed the task for 3 days. Significant age differences were found for all measures of task performance with the exception of navigational efficiency and number of problems correctly navigated per attempt. There were also effects of task experience. The findings also indicated significant direct and indirect relations between component cognitive abilities and task performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sex differences in the strategies used by rats to solve a navigation task.

Rats were trained in a triangular-shaped pool to find a hidden platform, whose location was defined in terms of two sources of information, a landmark outside the pool and a particular corner of the pool. Subsequent test trials without the platform pitted these two sources of information against one another. This test revealed a clear sex difference. Females spent more time in an area of the pool that corresponded to the landmark, whereas males spent more time in the distinctive corner of the pool even though further tests revealed that both sexes had learned about the two sources of information by presenting cues individually. The results agree with the claim that males and females use different types of information in spatial navigation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A comparison of rats and mice in a swimming pool place task and matching to place task: some surprising differences

An ecological niche that requires competency in water has prepared rats for the swimming pool spatial tasks that they are administered in the laboratory. Their ability to eventually solve spatial tasks in a single trial makes them ideal subjects for evaluating neural contributions to spatial behavior and for addressing many other neuroscience problems. Swimming pool place tasks are also given to mice, but the spatial abilities of the animal has not been evaluated as extensively as have those of rats. In the present paper, place learning in a single place task and a matching to place task is comparatively assessed in groups of rats and mice. The rats were superior to the mice on both problems. Although the mice could learn a single place problem, their acquisition was slower and their asymptotic performance was inferior to that of rats. Mice also did not display one trial learning on the matching to place task as did rats. These species differences in swimming pool place learning are discussed with respect to both methodological considerations and to species differences in preparedness to learn. It is suggested that given the variability of the performance of mice across both strains and laboratories, rat performance could be used to provide a baseline for comparative purposes.     

Relation among error detection, sentence verification, and low-level reading skills of fourth graders.

The author explored the relation among low-level reading skills, sentence verification, and error detection in 4th graders. Literal text comprehension was measured with the Sentence Verification Technique (J. M. Royer, in press) procedure. A higher (strategic) level of text comprehension was assessed with the error detection paradigm. Thus low- and high-level text comprehension were correlated with low-level reading skill: decoding, lexical access, verbal working memory span, and each other. Although literal text comprehension and low-level reading measures were correlated, both were uncorrelated with error detection. A second study deomonstrated that 4th graders' error detection was best predicted by their tendency to generate inferences while reading. These data suggest that although literal text comprehension is dependent on low-level reading processes, strategic reading competence reflects the 4th grader's tendency to go beyond literal information in a text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceived differences in task competence and asymmetry of dyadic influence.

A "task, in which perceptions of differential task competence were induced, was followed by the… task of judging the magnitudes of 100 stimuli… . [The] induction of perceptions of differential prior task competence failed to produce a significant degree of asymmetry of influence during the subsequent task… . [A] second experiment was designed and conducted. The prior task was replaced by one of greater similarity to the subsequent task, and instructions were rewritten in order to emphasize this similarity… . [This] yielded a highly significant degree of asymmetry of influence. It is concluded that perceived task competence is an important determinant of the amount and direction of social influence, but that its effectiveness depends… on perceived task similarity." From Psyc Abstracts 36:04:4GE05C. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why do adult age differences increase with task complexity?

A total of 451 adults between 18 and 80 yrs of age participated in 2 studies conducted to investigate causes of the phenomenon that adult age differences in cognitive performance frequently increase with increased task complexity. All Ss performed 4 cognitive tasks at each of 3 levels of complexity. The strongest predictors of performance on the intermediate and complex versions of the tasks were performance on the simpler versions of the same tasks and a composite measure of working memory. It was concluded that one cause of the age-complexity phenomenon is that more complex cognitive tasks place greater demands on a working-memory resource that declines with increased age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Wisdom-related knowledge in a life review task: Age differences and the role of professional specialization.

Adopts life review as an avenue to access wisdom-related knowledge and examines the contribution of age and type of professional specialization to individual differences in wisdom-related knowledge. Women from 2 age groups/cohorts (young, M?=?32 yrs; old, M?=?71 yrs) and different professional specializations (human services vs nonhuman services) were asked to think aloud about the life review of a fictitious woman who was either young or old. Verbal protocols were scored on 5 wisdom-related criteria; factual and procedural knowledge about life, life-span contextualism, relativism of values, recognition, and management of uncertainty. Three major findings emerged. First, human-services professionals outperformed the control group. Second, old adults performed as well as young adults. Third, for older adults wisdom-related performance was enhanced by the match between their own age and the age of the fictitious character. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in the effects of sentence context and stimulus degradation during visual word recognition.

I investigated adult age differences in the efficiency of feature-extraction processes during visual word recognition. Participants were 24 young adults (M age?=?21.0 years) and 24 older adults (M age?=?66.5 years). On each trial, subjects made a word/nonword discrimination (i.e., lexical decision) regarding a target letter-string that was presented as the final item of a sentence context. The target was presented either intact or degraded visually (by the presence of asterisks between adjacent letters). Age differences in lexical decision speed were greater for degraded targets than for intact targets, suggesting an age-related slowing in the extraction of feature-level information. For degraded word targets, however, the amount of performance benefit provided by the sentence context was greater for older adults than for young adults. It thus appears that an age-related deficiency at an early stage of word recognition is accompanied by an increased contribution from semantic context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On priming by a sentence context.

Previous investigations of sentence context effects (SCEs) on word-naming time have uncovered a pattern of facilitation dominance. Another finding has been that words that are more difficult to recognize in isolation display larger SCEs than easier words. The present experiments with 384 undergraduates showed SCEs to be robust and eliminated several alternative explanations. Two experiments demonstrated the appropriateness of the neutral condition used to assess facilitation and inhibition. Another showed that SCEs did not depend on the procedure used. It was shown that manipulations that were designed to affect S strategies did not change the pattern of results. In 3 experiments, an interaction between stimulus quality and content condition was obtained. The interaction replicated across 2 forms of stimulus degradation, but only 1 form increased inhibition effects as well as facilitation effects. Other inconsistencies between previous SC experiments in the magnitude of the inhibition effects observed were resolved by showing that an SC produced more inhibition in the lexical decision task than in the naming task. It was demonstrated that the 2 tasks produced different amounts of inhibition when the same stimuli were used. Sentence integration processes that occurred after lexical access appeared to be responsible for some of the inhibition observed in lexical decision tasks. (85 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in, and consequences of, multiple- and variable-strategy use on a multitrial sort-recall task.

Second-, 3rd-, and 4th-grade children were given 5 sort-recall trials with different sets of categorizable items. The authors assessed multiple-strategy use on each trial and related intertrial changes in strategy use to levels of recall. Multiple-strategy use increased with age but was observed at all grades. Fourth graders who used more strategies had higher recall, with this pattern occurring only on later trials for 2nd and 3rd graders. Children of all ages showed substantial intertrial variability in using multiple strategies. Stable-strategy use (few strategy changes across trials) was related to high levels of recall, both for individual and group data, and was associated with the use of different numbers of strategies at different ages. Results were interpreted in light of new research and theory postulating that multiple- and variable-strategy use is the rule rather than the exception in development and that strategies do not always facilitate task performance (utilization deficiencies). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)