An investigation into the pretend play shown by children with autism.

This research investigated whether the absence of pretend play typically shown by children with autism is the result of a global inability to pretend, or reflects a failure to utilise intact pretend play abilities. A first experiment found that children with autism were impaired in their ability to produce spontaneous pretend play, relative to a matched group of children with moderate learning difficulties. They were also impaired in their production of pretence in elicited play conditions, in which direct encouragement to play was provided by the experimenter. However. a second experiment revealed that these children were not impaired in their ability to carry out pretend instructions. Further, a third experiment showed that they were unimpaired in their ability to comprehend pretend acts which the experimenter demonstrated before them. These findings suggest that pretend play is something that children with autism can engage in, at a basic level at least. Consequently, two final experiments aimed to determine why children with autism do not utilise this capacity spontaneously. The firs~ of these tested an 'executive deficit' hypothesis, which suggests that a failure to pretend is caused by a failure to disengage from the functional salience of objects. The results of the experiment disconfumed this prediction. The second test examined whether children with autism have problems in generating pretend acts, and found that this was the case. It is therefore hypothesised that children with autism suffer from some form of generativity impairment, which impinges on their apparently intact ability for pretence. This suggestion fits in with the pattern of results obtained from all the studies, as children were only impaired when the idea for pretence was not provided. Possible cause of such an impairment are discussed. as are the implications of these findings for our understanding of the psychology of pretend play

Feedback training induces a bias for detecting happiness or fear in facial expressions that generalises to a novel task

AbstractMany psychological disorders are characterised by insensitivities or biases in the processing of subtle facial expressions of emotion. Training using expression morph sequences which vary the intensity of expressions may be able to address such deficits. In the current study participants were shown expressions from either happy or fearful intensity morph sequences, and trained to detect the target emotion (e.g., happy in the happy sequence) as being present in low intensity expressions. Training transfer was tested using a six alternative forced choice emotion labelling task with varying intensity expressions, which participants completed before and after training. Training increased false alarms for the target emotion in the transfer task. Hit rate for the target emotion did not increase once adjustment was made for the increase in false alarms. This suggests that training causes a bias for detecting the target emotion which generalises outside of the training task. However it does not increase accuracy for detecting the target emotion. The results are discussed in terms of the training’s utility in addressing different types of emotion processing deficits in psychological disorders

Multilab Direct Replication of Flavell, Beach, and Chinsky (1966): Spontaneous Verbal Rehearsal in a Memory Task as a Function of Age

Work by Flavell, Beach, and Chinsky indicated a change in the spontaneous production of overt verbalization behaviors when comparing young children (age 5) with older children (age 10). Despite the critical role that this evidence of a change in verbalization behaviors plays in modern theories of cognitive development and working memory, there has been only one other published near replication of this work. In this Registered Replication Report, we relied on researchers from 17 labs who contributed their results to a larger and more comprehensive sample of children. We assessed memory performance and the presence or absence of verbalization behaviors of young children at different ages and determined that the original pattern of findings was largely upheld: Older children were more likely to verbalize, and their memory spans improved. We confirmed that 5- and 6-year-old children who verbalized recalled more than children who did not verbalize. However, unlike Flavell et al., substantial proportions of our 5- and 6-year-old samples overtly verbalized at least sometimes during the picture memory task. In addition, continuous increase in overt verbalization from 7 to 10 years old was not consistently evident in our samples. These robust findings should be weighed when considering theories of cognitive development, particularly theories concerning when verbal rehearsal emerges and relations between speech and memory

Is verbal rehearsal strategic? An investigation into overt rehearsal of nameable pictures in 5- to 10-year-old children

Though verbal rehearsal is a frequently endorsed strategy for remem-bering short lists among adults, there is ambiguity around whenchildren deploy it, and what circumstantial factors encourage themto rehearse. We recoded data from a recent multilab replication ofa serial picture memory task in which children were observed forevidence of task-related speech or lip movements to extract finer-grained detail about how children spoke during the task. With thesedata, we aimed to better understand the manner in which childrenrehearse and the task scenarios which elicit overt rehearsal. Children inseveral countries from 5 to 10 years old were tasked with remember-ing 2–5 nameable pictures in serial order across a 15-second delay.Coders categorized children’s speech or lip movements as reflectingfixed rehearsal of the last-presented item only, cumulative rehearsal ofall the items presented so far, or some attempt at cumulative rehearsal.We found that most children, regardless of age, did not overtlyrehearse at all during presentation of the objects or during the delayperiod. However, children who sometimes overtly rehearsed recalledlonger lists of items than children who did not. Though rare, cumula-tive rehearsal was most frequently observed for list lengths close tothe participant’s demonstrated maximum recall length. Critically, onthe trials where overt rehearsal was observed, recall improved. Thisevidence supports previous suggestions that rehearsal strategy, andpossibly also its effectiveness, changes with task difficulty, and raisesfurther questions about how verbal rehearsal affects serial recall

Lexical access speed and the development of phonological recoding during immediate serial recall

A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR) of the development of verbal rehearsal during serial recall revealed that children verbalized at younger ages than previously thought, but did not identify sources of individual differences. Here, we use mediation analysis to reanalyze data from the 934 children ranging from 5 to 10 years old from the RRR for that purpose. From ages 5 to 7, the time taken for a child to label pictures (i.e. isolated naming speed) predicted the child’s spontaneous use of labels during a visually presented serial reconstruction task, despite no need for spoken responses. For 6- and 7-year-olds, isolated naming speed also predicted recall. The degree to which verbalization mediated the relation between isolated naming speed and recall changed across development. All relations dissipated by age 10. The same general pattern was observed in an exploratory analysis of delayed recall for which greater demands are placed on rehearsal for item maintenance. Overall, our findings suggest that spontaneous phonological recoding during a standard short-term memory task emerges around age 5, increases in efficiency during the early elementary school years, and is sufficiently automatic by age 10 to support immediate serial recall in most children. Moreover, the findings highlight the need to distinguish between phonological recoding and rehearsal in developmental studies of short-term memory

Multiorgan MRI findings after hospitalisation with COVID-19 in the UK (C-MORE): a prospective, multicentre, observational cohort study

Introduction: The multiorgan impact of moderate to severe coronavirus infections in the post-acute phase is still poorly understood. We aimed to evaluate the excess burden of multiorgan abnormalities after hospitalisation with COVID-19, evaluate their determinants, and explore associations with patient-related outcome measures. Methods: In a prospective, UK-wide, multicentre MRI follow-up study (C-MORE), adults (aged ≥18 years) discharged from hospital following COVID-19 who were included in Tier 2 of the Post-hospitalisation COVID-19 study (PHOSP-COVID) and contemporary controls with no evidence of previous COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid antibody negative) underwent multiorgan MRI (lungs, heart, brain, liver, and kidneys) with quantitative and qualitative assessment of images and clinical adjudication when relevant. Individuals with end-stage renal failure or contraindications to MRI were excluded. Participants also underwent detailed recording of symptoms, and physiological and biochemical tests. The primary outcome was the excess burden of multiorgan abnormalities (two or more organs) relative to controls, with further adjustments for potential confounders. The C-MORE study is ongoing and is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04510025. Findings: Of 2710 participants in Tier 2 of PHOSP-COVID, 531 were recruited across 13 UK-wide C-MORE sites. After exclusions, 259 C-MORE patients (mean age 57 years [SD 12]; 158 [61%] male and 101 [39%] female) who were discharged from hospital with PCR-confirmed or clinically diagnosed COVID-19 between March 1, 2020, and Nov 1, 2021, and 52 non-COVID-19 controls from the community (mean age 49 years [SD 14]; 30 [58%] male and 22 [42%] female) were included in the analysis. Patients were assessed at a median of 5·0 months (IQR 4·2–6·3) after hospital discharge. Compared with non-COVID-19 controls, patients were older, living with more obesity, and had more comorbidities. Multiorgan abnormalities on MRI were more frequent in patients than in controls (157 [61%] of 259 vs 14 [27%] of 52; p<0·0001) and independently associated with COVID-19 status (odds ratio [OR] 2·9 [95% CI 1·5–5·8]; padjusted=0·0023) after adjusting for relevant confounders. Compared with controls, patients were more likely to have MRI evidence of lung abnormalities (p=0·0001; parenchymal abnormalities), brain abnormalities (p<0·0001; more white matter hyperintensities and regional brain volume reduction), and kidney abnormalities (p=0·014; lower medullary T1 and loss of corticomedullary differentiation), whereas cardiac and liver MRI abnormalities were similar between patients and controls. Patients with multiorgan abnormalities were older (difference in mean age 7 years [95% CI 4–10]; mean age of 59·8 years [SD 11·7] with multiorgan abnormalities vs mean age of 52·8 years [11·9] without multiorgan abnormalities; p<0·0001), more likely to have three or more comorbidities (OR 2·47 [1·32–4·82]; padjusted=0·0059), and more likely to have a more severe acute infection (acute CRP >5mg/L, OR 3·55 [1·23–11·88]; padjusted=0·025) than those without multiorgan abnormalities. Presence of lung MRI abnormalities was associated with a two-fold higher risk of chest tightness, and multiorgan MRI abnormalities were associated with severe and very severe persistent physical and mental health impairment (PHOSP-COVID symptom clusters) after hospitalisation. Interpretation: After hospitalisation for COVID-19, people are at risk of multiorgan abnormalities in the medium term. Our findings emphasise the need for proactive multidisciplinary care pathways, with the potential for imaging to guide surveillance frequency and therapeutic stratification

Investigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on older adolescents' psychological wellbeing and self-identified cognitive difficulties

Abstract Background. The COVID‐19 pandemic coincides with growing concern regarding the mental health of young people. Older adolescents have faced a particular set of pandemic‐related challenges and demonstrate heightened vulnerability to affective disorders (particularly anxiety). Anxiety symptoms are associated with a range of cognitive difficulties. Older adolescents may therefore be susceptible to pandemic‐related declines in wellbeing and associated cognitive difficulties. Methods. At three timepoints, independent samples of young people aged 16–18 years (N = 607, 242, 618 respectively) completed an online survey. Data collection coincided with periods of lockdown (timepoints 1 and 3) and young people returning to school (timepoint 2). The survey assessed subjective impacts of the pandemic on overall wellbeing, anxiety and cognitive function. Results. Findings demonstrated the detrimental impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on older adolescents' psychological wellbeing—a finding that was consistent across samples. The majority of young people at each timepoint experienced heightened anxiety. Crucially, pandemic‐related anxiety was associated with self‐identified cognitive difficulties, a pattern of association that was evident at all three timepoints. The nature and extent of these difficulties were predictive of specific pandemic‐related concerns in this age group. Conclusions. Older adolescents' experiences of the pandemic are characterised by subjective declines in wellbeing and stable patterns of association between anxiety and self‐identified cognitive difficulties. Implications are discussed with reference to future research and intervention

Cognitive Development A Novel Approach

Data and analysis associated with Jarrold, Li, & Wang, "A Novel Approach to Measuring the Developmental Interactions Between Working Memory and Inhibitory Control in Young Children", Cognitive Developmen

No Own-Age Advantage in Children's Recognition of Emotion on Prototypical Faces of Different Ages

We test whether there is an own-age advantage in emotion recognition using prototypical younger child, older child and adult faces displaying emotional expressions. Prototypes were created by averaging photographs of individuals from 6 different age and sex categories (male 5-8 years, male 9-12 years, female 5-8 years, female 9-12 years, adult male and adult female), each posing 6 basic emotional expressions. In the study 5-8 year old children (n = 33), 9-13 year old children (n = 70) and adults (n = 92) labelled these expression prototypes in a 6-alternative forced-choice task. There was no evidence that children or adults recognised expressions better on faces from their own age group. Instead, child facial expression prototypes were recognised as accurately as adult expression prototypes by all age groups. This suggests there is no substantial own-age advantage in children's emotion recognition