Ventromedial prefrontal damage and memory for context: Perceptual versus semantic features.

Memory for context is known to rely on episodic binding and strategic retrieval processes. It is unclear, however, whether memory for different contextual features taps the same cognitive and neural mechanisms. Here, the authors compare memory for a perceptual feature (i.e., the format in which an item had been presented) and for a semantic feature (i.e., the concept with which an item had been paired) in 13 patients with lesions in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, including patients with and without confabulation, and 13 healthy controls. Participants studied picture–word pairs and received an old–new recognition test that included intact pairs, rearranged pairs, format pairs (studied pairs in which the picture–word format of each item was switched), old–new pairs, and new–new pairs. Hit rates for intact pairs were similar for all participant groups. Compared with controls, patients, especially those with confabulation, had higher false-alarm rates for format pairs but comparable false-alarm rates for rearranged pairs. The authors propose that distinct monitoring processes are engaged during retrieval of perceptual and semantic context, with only the former crucially dependent on ventromedial prefrontal cortex. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differences in preschool children's conceptual strategies when thinking about animate entities and artifacts.

Two-, 3-, and 4-year-old children viewed 10 stimulus sets. Each set contained a sample picture (e.g., a dog), a basic-level taxonomic match (e.g., another dog), a thematic match (e.g., a bone), and an irrelevant match (e.g., a pen). The children were asked to choose a match that "goes with" each sample. Sample pictures were either animate entities or artifacts. The children's choice behavior indicated that a shift occurs between 3 and 4 years of age from a taxonomic bias to a thematic bias and that, at both ages, animate sample stimuli enhance the children's tendency to adopt thematic conceptual strategies. These data are consistent with recent suggestions that thematic thinking presupposes basic-level taxonomic thinking during early conceptual development and that this developmental progression occurs more rapidly in some domains of knowledge than in others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual use of nonaccidental properties.

Reviews the literature about the nonaccidental properties (NAPs) cotermination, straightness, and parallelism to trace their historical roots, to list the properties that function as NAPs, and to discuss the psychological evidence for their detection and use. Four experiments are reviewed, and four are fully described that were designed to test the perceptual use of skewed symmetry, which results from orthographic projection of planar bilateral or mirror symmetry. Despite the large symmetry advantage obtained in all experiments, skewed symmetry is only perceived as bilateral symmetry-in-depth in cases of closed polygons or dot patterns with higher-order types of symmetry. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Instructional design for accelerating children's concept learning.

Used an instructional design based on task analysis procedures to develop written lessons to accelerate the attainment of subject-matter concepts by 64 3rd and 118 4th graders. In Study 1 on equilateral triangle, a variation of the Solomon 4-group design was employed to determine the effects of the pretest. Performance of the 4th graders on a posttest and 2-mo follow-up measure showed that groups receiving the lessons performed significantly better than groups receiving placebo lessons at 2 levels of advanced concept mastery. Study 2 was a replication with 3rd graders. These data suggest that the analysis of the concept to be taught and of the cognitive operations involved in attaining the concept at a specific level of mastery enables one to identify instructional strategies that promote enduring concept attainment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual and memorial constructs in children's judgments of quantity: A law of across-representation invariance.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 117(1) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (see record 2008-10685-001). The sentence found on p. 381, right-hand column, line 15, was printed incorrectly. The corrected statement is provided in the erratum.] Children at three different ages made judgments of physically presented (perceptual estimation) or symbolically represented (memorial estimation) rectangles. Height and width were integrated according to different, age-dependent algebraic rules. Memorial data obeyed the same integration rules that operated in the original perceptual judgments even when younger children and older children used completely different combination models. Valuation operations were the same in perception and memory for the youngest group (6-year-olds) but became discriminably different at older ages (for the 8- and 10-year-olds). Three additional experiments on judgments of volume, liquid quantity, and visual length yielded strong cross-validation support for the general invariance claim (with respect to integration rule theory) but less strong support for the specific invariance claim (with respect to valuation function for the 6-year-old subjects). Results are interpreted as demonstrating lawful and long-enduring ecological constraints on internal representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the ambiguity of concept use in commentaries.

In this article, we respond in general and specific terms to the commentaries written on our target article (Slaney & Racine, 2011). In so doing, we revisit the motivation for our initial article and attempt to clarify certain aspects of our argument. Given that we were taken by some to be trying to undermine the Representational Theory of Mind (RTM), we discuss RTM in some detail. We also discuss Wittgenstein's methods and their relevance to the issues raised in our article and in the commentaries. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the use of scaling and clustering in the study of semantic deficits.

In the past decade, several studies have used scaling and clustering techniques to document semantic storage deficits in patients with Alzheimer's disease and in schizophrenia. In this article the authors argued that many of the conclusions drawn from these studies are unjustified by the data. They reviewed the methodology used in these studies and presented data from simulation studies to further investigate the validity of their conclusions. The authors elaborate on the criteria needed to exclude alternative accounts of the data and present empirical data from patients with Alzheimer's disease and normal control participants to demonstrate that analyses of the patients' proximity data do not provide unambiguous evidence for a generalized semantic storage deficit. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developmental origin of the animate–inanimate distinction.

The authors examine recent theoretical perspectives of the development of the animate–inanimate distinction in infancy. From these theoretical views emerge 7 characteristic properties, each related to physical or psychological causality, that distinguish animates from inanimates. The literature is reviewed for evidence of infants' ability to perceive and understand each of these properties. Infants associate some animate properties with people by 6 months, but they do not associate the appropriate properties to the broad category of animates and inanimates until at least the middle of the 2nd year. The authors offer a theoretical proposal whereby infants acquire knowledge about the properties of different object kinds through a sensitive perceptual system and a domain general associative learning mechanism that extracts correlations among dynamic and static features. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prior knowledge and functionally relevant features in concept learning.

Empirical learning models have typically focused on statistical aspects of features (e.g., cue and category validity). In general, these models do not address the contact between people's prior knowledge that lies outside the category and their experiences of the category. A variety of extensions to these models are examined, which combine prior knowledge with empirical learning. Predictions of these models were compared in 4 experiments. These studies contrasted the cue and category validity of features with people's prior knowledge about the relevance of features to the functions of novel artifacts. The findings suggest that the influences of knowledge and experience are more tightly integrated than some models would predict. Furthermore, relatively straightforward ways of incorporating knowledge into an empirical learning algorithm appear insufficient (e.g., use of knowledge to weight features by general relevance or to individually weight features). Other extensions to these models are suggested that focus on the importance of intermediary features, coherence, and conceptual roles. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual salience of acoustic features of Japanese monkey coo calls.

Smooth early high (SEH) and smooth late high (SLH) coo calls differ in the temporal location of a frequency inflection and are generally used in different situations. Coo quality is also influenced by additional features, such as relative harmonic level, which may have communicative significance. The authors used multidimensional scaling to analyze the perceptual similarity of SEH and SLH coos. Neither the temporal position of the frequency inflection nor caller identity could explain the coo groupings. Only the temporal relationships of the relative harmonic levels consistently differed between stimulus clusters. Relative level manipulations were conducted on synthetic coo replicas, resulting in substantial stimulus space reorganization. Although temporal position of the frequency inflection may provide the basis for coo classification, the authors suggest that relative harmonic amplitude can also influence response properties. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related changes in children's use of external representations.

This study explored children's use of external representations. Experiment 1 focused on representations of self. Self-recognition was assessed by a mark test as a function of age (3 vs. 4 years), delay (5 s vs. 3 min), and media (photographs vs. drawings). Four-year-olds outperformed 3-year-olds; children performed better with photographs than drawings; and there was no effect of delay. In Experiment 2, 3- and 4-year-olds used a delayed video image to locate a sticker on themselves (self task) or a stuffed animal (other task). The 2 tasks were positively correlated with age and vocabulary partialed out. Experiment 3 used a search task to assess whether children have particular difficulty using external representations that conflict with their expectations: 3- and 4-year-olds were informed of an object's location verbally or through video; on half of the trials, this information conflicted with children's initial belief. Three-year-olds performed worse than 4-year-olds on conflict trials, indicating that assessments of self and other understanding may reflect children's ability to reason about conflicting external representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of time course and context on the facilitation of semantic features in the cerebral hemispheres.

Two divided visual field priming experiments were designed to determine the nature of lexical retrieval in the cerebral hemispheres by studying the facilitation of semantic features of unambiguous nouns. Unambiguous nouns have a single meaning, yet semantic features associated with these nouns may vary in the degree to which they are compatible with this single meaning (e.g., LAMB–WOOL as compared with LAMB–CHOPS). Results suggest that the left hemisphere selects both strongly and weakly associated semantic features that are compatible with the dominant representation of the noun. Dominance compatibility, rather than association strength, seems to be the more important factor for deciding what features are maintained in the left hemisphere. In contrast, the right hemisphere maintains more varied information, including features that are less compatible with the dominant representation (Experiment 1) and context information (Experiment 2). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Penetrating the geometric module: Catalyzing children's use of landmarks.

We used a reference memory paradigm to examine whether 4- and 5-year-old children could be trained to use landmark features to relocate targets after disorientation. In Experiment 1, half of the children were pretrained in a small equilateral triangle-shaped room. Each of the three walls was a different color, and the target was always in the middle of the yellow wall. These children and a control group were tested in a small rectangular room with three white walls and one yellow wall; the target was placed in one of the corners. Children with pretraining responded more frequently to the correct corner than to the diagonally congruent corner on their first set of four trials in the rectangular room, whereas the children in the control group used geometric cues exclusively. Three additional groups of children (Experiment 2) showed that the use of landmark features--both salient and subtle--can be learned in as few as four practice trials in a small rectangular room. The data support the view that both geometry and landmark features are adaptively combined in the same representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Flexibility in children's use of spatial and categorical organizational strategies in recall.

Two studies investigated flexibility in children's use of spatial and categorical clustering strategies in recall. In Study 1, 10-, 12-, 14-, and 16-yr-olds and adults recalled the furniture from their home. 10-yr-olds organized furniture categorically, and 16-yr-olds and adults organized items spatially. 12- and 14-yr-olds exhibited equal levels of spatial and categorical organization. Study 2 investigated how encoding experiences and the recall task influenced the degree of spatial and categorical organization in 10- and 12-yr-olds' recall. When recalling objects, 10- and 12-yr-olds exhibited higher levels of categorical than spatial organization. When recalling objects and their locations, 12-yr-olds exhibited more spatial than categorical organization. Results are discussed in terms of age and task influences on flexibility of strategy use. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Concomitant effects of visual, motor, and verbal experiences in young children's concept development.

Studied young children's concept development under 5 experimental conditions consisting of visual experience, visual plus motor training, visual plus verbal-orienting instruction, visual plus motor plus verbal, and a control. The stimuli were geometric blocks differentiated according to shape, color, size, and thickness. 50 3- and 50 5-yr-olds were tested on a variety of assessment and transfer measures based on discriminating and remembering positive concept instances and classifying concept instances. The verbal- and motor-training variables had the most facilitating effect. In addition, combined treatments had a relatively greater effect on the 5-yr-olds' performances at the higher level of concept attainment than at lower levels, as compared with the 3-yr-olds' performances. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sex and contextual effects on children's use of interference competition.

Prior research with children and nonhuman animals suggests that females engage in interference competition, in which 1 individual reduces another's chances of gaining access to a resource, only when resources are scarce, whereas males use it ore widely. This study was designed to compare males' and females' use of interference competition in games in which resources were scarce or plentiful. Forty groups of 4 same-sex children from kindergarten or Grade 4 played the 2 games on 2 days. Grade 4 girls used less interference competition when resources were plentiful than when they were scarce. Results are useful for generating a contextually based model of the development of sex differences in competitive behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developmental differences in episodic retrieval: The role of differences in concept representations in semantic memory.

Developmental differences in the relative salience of features in concept representations in semantic memory and their contributions to differences in cued recall were examined in two experiments. For second graders, fifth graders, and college students, acquisition encoding of cue–target noun pair information was constrained by means of defining-, characteristic-, category-, and incidental-feature orienting questions. At retrieval, the encoding of cue information alone was constrained (Experiment 1) within subjects by means of the same (e.g., defining at acquisition and defining at retrieval) or related (e.g., defining at acquisition and characteristic at retrieval) retrieval questions or was unconstrained (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the acquisition presentation duration was manipulated (1 s or 5 s) in order to examine the spread of feature activation within concepts. The results showed that recall varied with feature salience, with the salience greatest for defining features. In addition, the results suggested that the relative salience of defining features was at least as great for the children as for the adults. The results offer no support for Keil and Batterman's (1984) hypothesis of a shift from characteristic to defining features in the development of word meaning representation in memory. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bilingual aphasia: semantic organization, strategy use, and productivity in semantic verbal fluency

A semantic verbal fluency task (Animals, Foods) was administered to 16 aphasic, bilingual adults in French and English. Each subject was tested twice in each language. The two goals of the study were to compare performance across languages and to determine the effect of a deliberate grouping strategy on productivity. All subjects claimed approximately equal prestroke abilities in both languages. The number of words subjects produced was not significantly different in the two languages. Semantic organization across languages was also similar on Test 1. On Test 2, 8 subjects were instructed to group items by subcategory and 8 simply repeated the task. There was no consistent between-group difference in number of correct words or in the semantic organization of responses. Implications for the clinical use of verbal fluency tests and for further research into bilingual lexicosemantic systems are discussed.     

The significance of children's age in estimating the effect of maternal time use on children's well-being

The women's initiative launched by the United Nations Decade for Women has sparked unresolved controversy over the consequences of mothers' increased participation in economically productive activities on children's well-being. Clearly, in many developing countries, poor mothers face stringent time constraints requiring trade-offs in time allocated to various activities, including child caregiving. However, the impact of these trade-offs on children's well-being remains unclear. The effect of maternal time use on children's nutrition and health status requires more rigorous examination. In particular, the role of children's age in this relationship is critical. Although children's requirement for maternal care varies with factors such as their age (a proxy for stage of psychobiological and sociocultural development), season of year and family size and structure, children's age has not been highlighted in the debate or in the relevant research. This paper documents children's age as a critical factor in the relationship between maternal patterns of time use and the well-being of children 18-30 months of age in peri-urban Egypt. It describes differences in maternal patterns of daily time use according to children's age and illustrates the differential associations between maternal daily activity patterns and children's well-being by children's age. Quantitative data collected on 161 mother-toddler pairs included information on maternal daily time allocation, children's dietary energy intake and diarrheal morbidity, maternal hemoglobin, and household and individual sociodemographics. Data were stratified by children's age at 24 months and were analyzed cross-sectionally using multiple linear and logistic regression. Results indicated that the age of two is critical in Kalama. At this age, toddlers begin to receive less time-intensive care freeing mothers for economic and self production. With respect to children's well-being prior to age two, frequency of feeding was positively related to their energy intake and more time spent in household sanitation activities reduced children's risk of diarrhea (during the diarrhea season). After two years of age, the maternal behaviors measured did not affect children's energy intake; however, children's diarrheal risk was reduced (during the diarrhea season) when mothers held them more and allocated more time to household sanitation year-round. We recommend that other investigators carefully examine the relationships between children's well-being according to developmentally-defined child age intervals and maternal patterns of time use. Results will help to resolve concern over the effect of maternal participation in economically productive activities on children's well-being.     

Preschool children's use of space: Sex differences in outdoor play.

Observed 3-5 yr old children's free-play activities over a 2-yr period. Boys played outdoors consistently more than did girls, and girls spent more time indoors at craft tables and in the kitchen. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)