The challenge of fairy tales : eliciting a critical gendered response in young children

The purpose of this qualitative study was to determine how fairy tale discussions and activities affect children’s responses to literary gendered stereotypes. The children in this investigation were aged between four and six years. Notably, much of the earlier research in this area was carried out over thirty years ago with articulate 7- to 11-year-olds; this study aimed to identify the potential for imaginative transformations in the younger formative group and contribute towards their theoretical and practical knowledge base in the Early Years. A participatory Mosaic approach was adopted to enable the children in small, single-sex and mixed gender groupings, to express their interpretations, experiences and understanding about the story messages as fully and naturally as possible. Information on their family and school cultures was gathered through questionnaires and interviews with parents and teachers in three town state schools and a private Waldorf Steiner kindergarten. The study determined that cultural influences were even stronger and more exaggerated than in the past, with boys using dominant and powerful language, whilst girls used mostly diminishing and understating words. Similar to earlier studies, the children were initially resistant to alternative and subversive gender models; in spite of the stereotypical responses identified, I noted that some children, and boys in particular, were beginning to be receptive to different gendered perspectives following the discussions and activities. This research has shown the urgent need to provide a greater diversity of role models in books at school, and in training and support for adults, particularly fathers, in respect of critical storytelling strategies. But most significantly, this study’s findings have broken new ground in this area and shown that despite cultural pressure to conform to gendered patterns of behaviour, young children can be encouraged to think critically and positively about their own gendered identity and cultural messages

A brighter future? Quantifying the rebound effect in energy efficient lighting

This paper quantifies the direct rebound effects associated with the switch from incandescent lamps (ILs) or halogen bulbs to more energy efficient compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) or light emitting diodes (LEDs) using a large nationally representative survey of German households. The direct rebound effect is measured as the elasticity of useful lighting demand with respect to changes in energy efficient lamps. In particular, the rebound effect is decomposed into changes in lamp luminosity and burn time. On average, more efficient replacement bulbs are 23% brighter and burn about 6.5 minutes per day longer than replaced bulbs. For the most frequent (modal) bulb switch, i.e. the replacement of the main bulb in the living or dining room, luminosity increases by 10% and burn time increases by 9 minutes per day. For the average bulb, the associated total direct rebound effect is estimated at 6.3%. The larger part (around 60%) of this rebound effect results from increases in bulb luminosity. For the modal bulb the total direct rebound effect is smaller at 2.6%, with around 60% attributable to an increase in burn time. Average and modal bulb differences suggest that the magnitude to the rebound effect may decrease with intensity of initial bulb use. The magnitude of the direct rebound and the relative contributions of changes in luminosity and burn time also tend to differ by initial bulb type and by replacement bulb type. Finally, about a third of the bulb switches entail a negative rebound effect, i.e. energy savings are larger than expected if luminosity and burn time remained unchanged, highlighting significant heterogeneity in household responses to the adoption of energy efficient bulbs

The neural basis of belief-attribution across the lifespan: False-belief reasoning and the N400 effect

The current study examined how social cognition – specifically, belief-state processing – changes across the lifespan, using a large sample (N = 309) of participants aged 10-86 years. Participants completed an event-related brain potential study in which they listened to stories involving a character who held either a true- or false-belief about the location of an object, and then acted in a manner consistent or inconsistent to this belief-state. Analysis of the N400 revealed that when the character held a true-belief, inconsistent outcomes led to a more negative-going N400 waveform than consistent outcomes. In contrast, when the character held a false-belief, consistent outcomes led to a more negative-going N400 waveform than inconsistent outcomes, indicating that participants interpreted the character’s actions according to their own more complete knowledge of reality. Importantly, this egocentric bias was not modulated by age in an early time window (200-400ms post-stimulus onset), meaning that initial processing is grounded in reality, irrespective of age. However, this egocentric effect was correlated with age in a later time window (400-600ms post-stimulus onset), as older adults continued to consider the story events according to their own knowledge of reality, but younger participants had now switched to accommodate the character’s perspective. In a final 600-1000ms time window, this age modulation was no longer present. Interestingly, results suggested that this extended egocentric processing in older adults was not the result of domain-general cognitive declines, as no significant relationship was found with executive functioning (inhibitory control and working memory)

The developmental trajectories of executive function from adolescence to old age

Executive functions demonstrate variable developmental and aging profiles, with protracted development into early adulthood and declines in older age. However, relatively few studies have specifically included middle-aged adults in investigations of age-related differences in executive functions. This study explored the age-related differences in executive function from late childhood through to old age, allowing a more informed understanding of executive functions across the lifespan. Three hundred and fifty participants aged 10 to 86 years-old completed a battery of tasks assessing the specific roles of inhibitory control, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and planning. Results highlighted continued improvement in working memory capacity across adolescence and into young adulthood, followed by declines in both working memory and inhibitory control, beginning from as early as 30-40 years old and continuing into older age. Analyses of planning abilities showed continued improvement across adolescence and into young adulthood, followed by a decline in abilities across adulthood, with a small (positive) change in older age. Interestingly, a dissociation was found for cognitive flexibility; switch costs decreased, yet mixing costs increased across the lifespan. The results provide a description of the developmental differences in inhibitory control, working memory, cognitive flexibility and planning, above any effects of IQ or SES, and highlight the importance of including middle-aged adults in studies seeking to establish a more comprehensive picture of age-related differences in executive function

Age of avatar modulates the altercentric bias in a visual perspective-taking task: ERP and behavioural evidence

Despite being able to rapidly and accurately infer their own and other peoples’ visual perspectives, healthy adults experience difficulty ignoring the irrelevant perspective when the two perspectives are in conflict; they experience egocentric and altercentric interference. We examine for the first time how the age of an observed person (adult versus child avatar) influences adults’ visual perspective-taking, particularly the degree to which they experience interference from their own or the other person’s perspective. Participants completed the avatar visual perspective-taking task, in which they verified the number of discs in a visual scene according to either their own or an on-screen avatar’s perspective (Experiments 1 and 2) or only from their own perspective (Experiment 3), where the two perspectives could be consistent or in conflict. Age of avatar was manipulated between (Experiment 1) or within (Experiments 2 and 3) participants, and interference was assessed using behavioural (Experiments 1-3) and ERP (Experiment 1) measures. Results revealed that altercentric interference is reduced or eliminated when a child avatar was present, suggesting that adults do not automatically compute a child avatar’s perspective. We attribute this pattern to either enhanced visual processing for own-age others or an inference on reduced mental awareness in younger children. The findings argue against a purely attentional basis for the altercentric effect, and instead support an account where both mentalising and directional processes modulate automatic visual perspective-taking, and perspective-taking effects are strongly influenced by experimental context

Short-term physical training enhances mirror system activation to action observation

The mirroring of actions is performed by a specialized system of neurons found in the sensorimotor cortex, termed the mirror neuron system. This system is considered an important mechanism that facilitates social understanding. We present a pre-registered experiment that used EEG to investigate whether short-term training via physical rehearsal or observational learning elicit distinct changes in mirror neuron activity for unfamiliar hand actions, and whether these training effects are influenced by degree of familiarity (i.e. the frequency of action repetitions during training). Sixty adults completed a pre- and post-training EEG action observation task. Half of the participants completed 30 minutes of execution training (i.e. observing and performing unfamiliar hand actions), and half completed observation-only training (i.e. observing unfamiliar hand actions being performed). Post-training familiarity was manipulated by varying the number of training repetitions for each hand action (from 0 to 50 repetitions). Results revealed that sensorimotor cortex activity to the observation of hand actions increased following execution training, but did not change when training was simply observational. Moreover, frequency of training repetitions did not modulate sensorimotor cortex activation after training, suggesting that short-term physical rehearsal enhances general processes involved in action understanding, rather than specific motor representations

Training executive functions using an adaptive procedure over 21 days (10 training sessions) and an active control group

The degree to which executive function (EF) abilities (including working memory (WM), inhibitory control (IC), and cognitive flexibility (CF)) can be enhanced through training is an important question, however research in this area is inconsistent. Previous cognitive training studies largely agree that training leads to improvements in the trained task, but the generalizability of this improvement to other related tasks remains controversial. In this paper, we present a pre-registered experiment that used an adaptive training procedure to examine whether EFs can be enhanced through cognitive training, and directly compared the efficacy and generalisability across sub-components of EF using training programs that target WM, IC or CF vs. an active control group. Participants (n=160) first completed a battery of tasks that assessed EFs, then were randomly assigned to one of four training groups, and completed an adaptive procedure over 21 days (10 training sessions) that targeted a specific sub-component of EF (or was comparatively engaging and challenging, but did not train a specific EF). At post-test, participants returned to the lab to repeat the battery of EF tasks. Results revealed robust direct training effects (i.e. on trained task), but limited evidence to support near (i.e. same EF, different task) and far (i.e. different EF and task) transfer effects. Where indirect training benefits emerged, the effects were more readily attributable to the overlapping training/assessment task routines, rather than more general enhancements to the underlying cognitive processes or neural circuits

Exploring the role of Self/Other Perspective-Shifting in Theory of Mind with Behavioural and EEG Measures

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to compute and attribute mental states to oneself and other people. This study sought to assess the extent of differentiation between ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in ToM processes, and, of particular importance, the key role of perspective-shifting between ‘Self’ and ‘Other’. Utilizing a newly established false-belief paradigm in a matched design, healthy adult participants completed the task whilst behavioural measures (response times, error rates) and electrophysiological (EEG) recordings were taken. Results revealed that self-oriented belief- attribution was faster and less error-prone than other-oriented belief-attribution, and demonstrated a key role of perspective-shifting. Perspective shifts from Self-to-Other resulted in longer response times and more errors than shifts from Other-to-Self. In contrast, no difference between self and other probes was found in no perspective-shift trials. Reflecting this, EEG recordings showed a significant interaction between Perspective-Shifting and Probe Type at an early onset across right parieto/occipito-lateral areas (250 ms post-stimulus onset), and across frontal-central areas from 500 ms post-stimulus onset, indicating the key role of these areas in ToM engagement. Results demonstrate that ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ can be distinguished at a behavioural level, and highlight the critical role of ‘Perspective-Shifting’ in ToM processes