“Cerebellar challenge” for adolescents at risk of school failure : evaluation of a school-based “whole person” intervention

Forty adolescents at risk of school failure, including 18 with a diagnosis of dyslexia, were assessed on measures of physical, cognitive and affective well-being. Overall both groups of participants showed marked signs of anxiety together with at risk performance on a range of cognitive and physical measures, with the dyslexic participants significantly more adversely affected on almost all measures. Half of the participants then undertook an 8 weeks internet-based “cerebellar challenge” programme within their school environment, with the remainder having equivalent time in the existing “School Support as Usual” (SSAU) activities. Compared with their initial performance, and with the SSAU group, the intervention group showed significant improvement on measures of motor performance, declarative learning, procedural learning, and mental health, both for those with dyslexia and those without. The findings are interpreted in terms of increased self-efficacy and improvements in cerebellar and hippocampal function. Given its scaleability, the intervention may prove valuable for many adolescents at risk of school failure

Gender-based personality traits in physically aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial behaviours

Background: The current study aimed to understand the role of callousness, affective dissonance, and two subtypes of sensation seeking personality traits – 1) disinhibition and 2) thrill and adventure seeking – in physically aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial behaviours (ASB) among educated youth and to explore the gender differences in them. Participants and procedure: An online survey was sent to a large sample of students at a UK university. Initially, a sample of N = 539 participants was collected but after screening out the data, N = 429 participants were included for analyses based on the sam-pling criteria. Results: Callousness, disinhibition, and affective dissonance significantly predicted both antisocial behaviour subtypes. We found multidimensional nature of callousness in predicting antisocial behaviours, and an intriguing relationship be-tween thrill and adventure seeking and affective dissonance. Interesting gender differences emerged. Conclusions: This study has implications for the understanding of the competitive roles of gender-based psychopathological per-sonality traits in terms of callousness and affective dissonance and sensation seeking tendencies in physically ag-gressive and non-aggressive antisocial behaviours

Predicting dyslexia using prereading skills:the role of sensorimotor and cognitive abilities

Background: It is well established that phonological awareness, print knowledge and rapid naming predict later reading difficulties. However, additional auditory, visual and motor difficulties have also been observed in dyslexic children. It is examined to what extent these difficulties can be used to predict later literacy difficulties. Method: An unselected sample of 267 children at school entry completed a wide battery of tasks associated with dyslexia. Their reading was tested 2, 3 and 4 years later and poor readers were identified (n = 42). Logistic regression and multiple case study approaches were used to examine the predictive validity of different tasks. Results: As expected, print knowledge, verbal short-term memory, phonological awareness and rapid naming were good predictors of later poor reading. Deficits in visual search and in auditory processing were also present in a large minority of the poor readers. Almost all poor readers showed deficits in at least one area at school entry, but there was no single deficit that characterised the majority of poor readers. Conclusions: Results are in line with Pennington’s (2006) multiple deficits view of dyslexia. They indicate that the causes of poor reading outcome are multiple, interacting and probabilistic, rather than deterministic. Keywords: Dyslexia; educational attainment; longitudinal studies; prediction; phonological processing

Feature distributions and experimental evaluation in a connectionist model of semantic memory

This paper describes evaluative work carried out with a connectionist model of semantic memory investigated by Rumelhart, and later by McClelland et al. Two critical issues were investigated, the nature of the semantic associations learned by the model, and the ability of an adapted version of the model to simulate human priming data. Analysis of the correspondence between the semantic associations developed in the network and those expected from human data indicated two sources of concern. First, the semantic associations learned were susceptible to small changes in the training set. Second, surprising semantic relations were found (e.g. ‘animal’ was more similar to the plants in the model). Priming was studied by adding a cascade mechanism to the basic model. Certain aspects of the training data and model architecture made direct simulation of standard human semantic priming difficult, since primes and targets necessarily consisted of a concept and a relation term, e.g. prime ‘oak is’ — target ‘tree is’. Responses consisted of activation of appropriate features for the target term. Two interesting findings emerged. First, dissimilar primes slowed performance compared to unprimed processing. Second, the major causal factor in the priming effects obtained was due to the correspondence between relation terms rather than similarity of concepts. In light of these findings, we discuss the value, for connectionist modelling, of training data that encodes distribution information derived from the study of human semantic memory

Sequential reduction of UV-B radiation in the field alters the pigmentation of an Antarctic leafy liverwort

UV-B radiation (280–315 nm), incident on the leafy liverwort Cephaloziella varians growing at Rothera Point on the Western Antarctic Peninsula, was manipulated in late austral spring 1998 by screens consisting of a novel combination of Plexiglas panes and polyester sheets. The screens transmitted approximately 79, 68, 48, 41 and 31% of daily UV-B radiation dose. Plants from under and outside the screens were sampled seven times over 35 days. Correlative analyses indicated that concentrations of an anthocyanin-like pigment located in leaf tips were positively associated with UV-B transmission at the last two samplings, that concentrations of total chlorophylls were negatively associated with UV-B transmission at the final sampling, and that those of UV-B screening pigments were positively correlated with transmission at three intermediate samplings. Plants exposed to low UV-B transmission levels were visibly greener than those exposed to high transmission levels after approximately 23 days. The closest relationships between the treatment and concentrations of UV-B screening pigments were associated with increased ambient biologically weighted UV-B dose received by plants in the 5.5 h before each sampling, which coincided with the passage of the ozone hole over Rothera Point. As C. varians emerged from melting snow and ice, concentrations of the anthocyanin-like pigment and chlorophyll respectively increased and decreased faster in plants exposed to high transmission levels of UV-B, relative to those exposed to low UV-B transmission levels