Attention bias to emotional faces varies by IQ and anxiety in Williams syndrome

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) often experience significant anxiety. A promising approach to anxiety intervention has emerged from cognitive studies of attention bias to threat. To investigate the utility of this intervention in WS, this study examined attention bias to happy and angry faces in individuals with WS (N=46). Results showed a significant difference in attention bias patterns as a function of IQ and anxiety. Individuals with higher IQ or higher anxiety showed a significant bias toward angry, but not happy faces, whereas individuals with lower IQ or lower anxiety showed the opposite pattern. These results suggest that attention bias interventions to modify a threat bias may be most effectively targeted to anxious individuals with WS with relatively high IQ

Professional Learning Communities as drivers of educational change: the case of Learning Rounds

Many researchers claim that there is a compelling weight of evidence for the effectiveness of PLCs in promoting teachers’ learning and pupil achievement. However, others raise fundamental questions about their nature and purpose. Some of the uncertainties about the nature and purpose of PLCs relate to the ways in which the macro-context of neo-liberalism has shaped the practices of PLCs in particular ways. The fundamental questions raised about PLCs relate to the type of change they are intended to produce, the model of community they are based on and whether the right conditions and skills are in place for them to contribute to change. Some researchers argue that we need to pay more attention to shortcomings within existing PLCs and their internal dynamics. Others argue that little research focuses on the specific interactions of teachers inside PLCs. The research reported here goes ‘inside the teacher community’ of Learning Rounds to explore what the shortcomings of some examples of this model in practice add to what we know about how to assist PLCs to produce change in education

Memory for pictures: Sometimes a picure is not worth a single word

Although there are some phenomena in memory that are poorly understood, it is generally accepted that an item studied as a picture will be better remembered than an item studied as a word. </p

Spurious recollection from a dual-process framework: The role of partial matching

<p>Good models account for memory successes and failure; memory failures help constrain cognitive theories (e.g., Bui, Friedman, McDonough, & Castel, 2013; Diana, Peterson, & Reder, 2004; McTighe, Cowell, Winters, Bussey, & Saksida, 2010; Pohl, 2004), which can be useful for future models. Spurious recollection, also known as “illusory recollection” (e.g., Bixter & Daniel, 2013; Gallo, 2010; Gallo & Roediger, 2003), “phantom recall” (e.g., Brainerd, Payne, Wright, & Reyna, 2003; Brainerd, Wright, Reyna & Mojardin, 2001; Stahl & Klauer, 2009), “false recollection” (for a review see Arndt, 2012), “false memory” (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2005), or “misrecollection” (e.g., Dodson, Bawa, & Krueger, 2007; Dodson, Bawa, & Slotnick, 2007), is memory failure where one claims to ‘Remember’ a spurious study episode, importantly claiming to recollect specific study details. This chapter proposes an account of spurious recollection via the Source of Activation Confusion (SAC) model (Park, Reder, & Dickison, 2005; Reder et al., 2000; Reder, Paynter, Diana, Ngiam, & Dickison, 2007; Reder & Schunn, 1996).</p

Drug-induced amnesia hurts recognition, but only for memories that can be unitized.

Midazolam is a drug that creates temporary anterograde amnesia. In a within-subjects, double-blind experiment, participants studied a list of stimuli after receiving an injection of midazolam in one session and after receiving saline in another session. The lists consisted of three types of stimuli: words, photographs, and abstract pictures. Recognition memory was tested at the end of each session. Memory was reliably poorer in the midazolam condition than the saline condition, but this amnesic effect was significantly smaller for pictorial stimuli than for words and almost nonexistent for abstract pictures. We argue that the less familiar the stimulus, the less likely it is to be associated with an experimental context. These data bolster our claim that unitization increases the chances of episodic binding and that drug-induced amnesia prevents episodic binding regardless of unitization.</p

Midazolam does not inhibit association formation, just its storage and strengthening

Rationale Although there have been many studies examining the effects of benzodiazepines on memory performance, their effects on working memory are equivocal and little is known about whether they affect the efficacy of practice of already learned material. Objectives The objectives in two experiments were to examine (a) whether midazolam impairs performance on a working memory task designed to minimize mnemonic strategies such as rehearsal or chunking of information to be recalled and (b) the effect of midazolam on repeated practice of paired associates that were learned before drug administration. Materials and methods Both experiments involved subcutaneous administration of 0.03 mg of saline or midazolam per kilogram of bodyweight in within-subject, placebo-controlled designs, involving 23 subjects in (a) and 31 in (b). Results The drug had no effect on the ability to recall the digits in serial order even though the encoding task prevented the digits from being rehearsed or maintained in an articulatory buffer. Paired associates that were learned before the injection showed a benefit of subsequent practice under saline but not under midazolam. Conclusions The results suggest that (a) midazolam does not affect the formation of new associations in short-term memory provided that the presentation rate is not too fast to form these associations when sedated, despite the evidence that the drug blocks long-term memory (LTM) retention of associations; and (b) the potential for over-learning with practice of learned associations in LTM is adversely affected by midazolam such that repeated exposures do not strengthen new learning.</p