46 research outputs found
Explore with Me: Peer Observation Decreases Risk-Taking but Increases Exploration Tendencies across Adolescence
It has been assumed that adolescents increase risk-taking tendencies when peers are present but findings on experimental
decision-making have been inconclusive. Most studies focus on risk-taking tendencies, ignoring the effects peer presence
can exert over other cognitive processes involved in decision-making, as well as any other underlying developmental and
individual differences. In the present study, the trial-by-trial choice behavior was analyzed in a task in which adolescents
adjust to dynamically changing risk probabilities. Using Bayesian modeling, the study aimed to infer about peer presence
effects on risk-taking tendencies but also on reactions to, exploration of, and learning from positive and negative outcomes
of risk-taking. 184 pre- to late adolescents (M = 14.09 years, min = 8.59, max = 18.97, SD = 2.95, 47% female) conducted
the Balloon Analog Risk Task under two conditions: Once alone and once in the presence of a (non-existent) peer observing
them virtually. Findings revealed that (a) peer observation reduced risk-taking but increased exploration tendencies and (b)
that individual differences modulated this effect. Especially female pre-adolescents increased their openness to explore
different choice outcomes when a peer observed their behavior. These results support the assumption that the occurrence and
direction of peer influences on risk-taking depend on a person-environment interaction, emphasizing the dynamic role peers
play in adolescent risk-taking
Action–effect learning in early childhood: does language matter?
Previous work showed that language has an important function for the development of action control. This study examined the role of verbal processes for action–effect learning in 4-year-old children. Participants performed an acquisition phase including a two-choice key-pressing task in which each key press (action) was followed by a particular sound (effect). Children were instructed to either (1) label their actions along with the corresponding effects, (2) verbalize task-irrelevant words, (3) or perform without verbalization. In a subsequent test phase, they responded to the same sound effects either under consistent or under inconsistent sound-key mappings. Evidence for action–effect learning was obtained only if action and effects were labeled or if no verbalization was performed, but not if children verbalized task-irrelevant labels. Importantly, action–effect learning was most pronounced when children verbalized the actions and the corresponding effects, suggesting that task-relevant verbal labeling supports the integration of event representations
Predictability effects in degraded speech comprehension are reduced as a function of attention
The aim of this study was to examine the role of attention in understanding linguistic
information even in a noisy environment. To assess the role of attention, we varied task
instructions in two experiments in which participants were instructed to listen to short
sentences and thereafter to type in the last word they heard or to type in the whole sentence.
We were interested in how these task instructions influence the interplay between top-down
prediction and bottom-up perceptual processes during language comprehension. Therefore,
we created sentences that varied in the degree of predictability (low, medium, and high) as
well as in the degree of speech degradation (four, six, and eight noise-vocoding channels).
Results indicated better word recognition for highly predictable sentences for moderate,
though not for high, levels of speech degradation, but only when attention was directed to the
whole sentence. This underlines the important role of attention in language comprehension
Feature Integration Across the Lifespan: Stickier Stimulus–Response Bindings in Children and Older Adults
Humans integrate the features of perceived events and of action plans into episodic event files. Here we investigated whether children (9–10 years), younger adults (20–31 years), and older adults (64–76 years) differ in the flexibility of managing (updating) event files. Relative to young adults, performance in children and older adults was more hampered by partial mismatches between present and previous stimulus–response relations, suggesting less efficient updating of episodic stimulus–response representations in childhood and old age. Results are discussed in relation to changes in cortical neurochemistry during maturation and senescence
Ratings of name agreement and semantic categorization of 247 colored clipart pictures by young German children
Developmental and longitudinal studies with children increasingly use pictorial stimuli in cognitive, psychologic,
and psycholinguistic research. To enhance validity and comparability within and across those studies, the use of
normed pictures is recommended. Besides, creating picture sets and evaluating them in rating studies is very time
consuming, in particular regarding samples of young children in which testing time is rather limited. As there is
an increasing number of studies that investigate young German children's semantic language processing with
colored clipart stimuli, this work provides a first set of 247 colored cliparts with ratings of German native
speaking children aged 4 to 6 years. We assessed two central rating aspects of pictures: Name agreement (Do
pictures elicit the intended name of an object?) and semantic categorization (Are objects classified as members of
the intended semantic category?). Our ratings indicate that children are proficient in naming and even better in
semantic categorization of objects, whereas both seems to improve with increasing age of young childhood.
Finally, this paper discusses some features of pictorial objects that might be important for children's name
agreement and semantic categorization and could be considered in future picture rating studies
Hedging Bets in Linguistic Prediction : Younger and Older Adults Vary in the Breadth of Predictive Processing
Language processing is predictive in nature, but it is unknown whether language users generate multiple predictions about upcoming content simultaneously or whether spreading activation from one pre-activated word facilitates other words downstream. Simultaneously, developmental accounts of predictive processing simultaneously highlight potential tension among spreading activation vs. multiple activation accounts.
We used self-paced reading to investigate if younger and older readers of German generate (multiple) graded predictions about the grammatical gender of nouns. Gradedness in predictions was operationalized as the difference in cloze probability between the most likely and second-most likely continuation that could complete a sentence. Sentences with a greater probabilistic difference were considered as imbalanced and more biased towards one gender. Sentences with lower probabilistic differences were considered to be more balanced towards multiple genders.
Both young and older adults engaged in predictive processing. However, only younger adults activated multiple predictions, with slower reading times (RTs) when gender representations were balanced, but facilitation when one gender was more likely than others. In contrast, older adults’ RTs did not pattern with imbalance but merely with predictability, showing that, while able to generate predictions based on context, older adults did not predict multiple gender continuations. Hence, our findings suggest that (younger) language users generate graded predictions about upcoming content, by weighing possible sentence continuations according to their difference in cloze probability. Compared to younger adults, older adults’ predictions are reduced in scope. The results provide novel theoretical insights into the developmental mechanisms involved in predictive processing
Even young children make multiple predictions in the complex visual world
Children can anticipate upcoming input in sentences with semantically constraining verbs. In the visual world, the sentence context
is used to anticipatorily fixate the only object matching potential
sentence continuations. Adults can process even multiple visual
objects in parallel when predicting language. This study examined
whether young children can also maintain multiple prediction
options in parallel during language processing. In addition, we
aimed at replicating the finding that children’s receptive vocabulary size modulates their prediction. German children (5–6 years,
n = 26) and adults (19–40 years, n = 37) listened to 32
subject–verb–object sentences with semantically constraining
verbs (e.g., ‘‘The father eats the waffle”) while looking at visual scenes of four objects. The number of objects being consistent with
the verb constraints (e.g., being edible) varied among 0, 1, 3, and
4. A linear mixed effects model on the proportion of target fixations
with the effect coded factors condition (i.e., the number of consistent objects), time window, and age group revealed that upon
hearing the verb, children and adults anticipatorily fixated the single visual object, or even multiple visual objects, being consistent
with the verb constraints, whereas inconsistent objects were fixated less. This provides first evidence that, comparable to adults,
young children maintain multiple prediction options in parallel.
Moreover, children with larger receptive vocabulary sizes
(Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) anticipatorily fixated potential
targets more often than those with smaller ones, showing that verbal abilities affect children’s prediction in the complex visual
world
Can Task-Switching Training Enhance Executive Control Functioning in Children with Attention Deficit/-Hyperactivity Disorder?
The key cognitive impairments of children with attention deficit/-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) include executive control functions such as inhibitory control, task-switching, and working memory (WM). In this training study we examined whether task-switching training leads to improvements in these functions. Twenty children with combined type ADHD and stable methylphenidate medication performed a single-task and a task-switching training in a crossover training design. The children were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group started with the single-task training and then performed the task-switching training and the other group vice versa. The effectiveness of the task-switching training was measured as performance improvements (relative to the single-task training) on a structurally similar but new switching task and on other executive control tasks measuring inhibitory control and verbal WM as well as on fluid intelligence (reasoning). The children in both groups showed improvements in task-switching, that is, a reduction of switching costs, but not in performing the single-tasks across four training sessions. Moreover, the task-switching training lead to selective enhancements in task-switching performance, that is, the reduction of task-switching costs was found to be larger after task-switching than after single-task training. Similar selective improvements were observed for inhibitory control and verbal WM, but not for reasoning. Results of this study suggest that task-switching training is an effective cognitive intervention that helps to enhance executive control functioning in children with ADHD
Effects of Aging and Dual-Task Demands on the Comprehension of Less Expected Sentence Continuations: Evidence From Pupillometry
Prior studies on language processing in aging have shown that older adults experience integration difficulties for contextually unpredictable target words (as indicated by low cloze probabilities in prior ratings), and that such comprehension difficulties are more likely to occur under more demanding processing conditions (e.g., dual-task situations). However, these effects have primarily been demonstrated for conditions when cloze probability of the linguistic stimuli was very low. The question we asked here was do dual-task demands also impair comprehension when target words provide a good, but not perfect, match with prior context? We used a dual-task design, consisting of a sentence comprehension and secondary motor tracking task. Critical target words were those which were not perfectly predictable based on context (words with a cloze probability of 0.7), as opposed to words that were near perfectly predictable based on context (cloze probabilities of 0.99). As a measure to index online processing difficulty for less expected target words, we took into account participants’ pupil size. Separate mixed effects models were fit for language comprehension, motor tracking, and pupil size, showing the following: (1) dual-task demands led to age-related comprehension difficulties when target words were less expected (as opposed to very highly expected), (2) integration difficulty in older adults was related to cognitive overload as less expected sentence continuations progressed over time, resulting in behavioral trade-offs between language comprehension and motor tracking, and (3) lower levels of working memory were predictive of whether or not older adults experienced cognitive overload when processing less expected words. In sum, more demanding processing conditions lead to comprehension impairments when words are highly unpredictable based on context, as many prior studies showed. Comprehension impairments among older individuals also occur for conditions when words provide a good, but not perfect, match with prior context. Higher working memory capacity can alleviate such impairments in older adults, thereby suggesting that only high-WM older adults have sufficient cognitive resources to pre-activate words that complete a sentence context plausibly, but not perfectly