Spatial exploration and navigation in Down syndrome and Williams syndrome.

We know little about the ability to explore and navigate large-scale space for people with intellectual disability (ID). In this cross-syndrome study, individuals with Down syndrome (DS), individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) and typically developing children (TD; aged 5-11 years) explored virtual environments with the goal of learning where everything was within the environment (Experiment 1) or to find six stars (Experiment 2). There was little difference between the WS and DS groups when the goal was simply to learn about the environment with no specific destination to be reached (Experiment 1); both groups performed at a level akin to a subset of TD children of a similar level of non-verbal ability. The difference became evident when the goal of the task was to locate targets in the environment (Experiment 2). The DS group showed the weakest performance, performing at or below the level of a subset of TD children at a similar level of non-verbal ability, whilst the WS group performed at the level of the TD subset group. The DS, WS and TD group also demonstrated different patterns of exploration behavior. Exploration behaviour in DS was weak and did not improve across trials. In WS, exploration behavior changed across trials but was atypical (the number of revisits increased with repeated trials). Moreover, transdiagnostic individual difference analysis (Latent Profile Analysis) revealed five profiles of exploration and navigation variables, none of which were uniquely specific to DS or to WS. Only the most extreme profile of very poor navigators was specific to participants with DS and WS. Interestingly, all other profiles contained at least one individual with DS and at least one individual with WS. This highlights the importance of investigating heterogeneity in the performance of individuals with intellectual disability and the usefulness of a data-driven transdiagnostic approach to identifying behavioral profiles.

No gesture too small: An investigation into the ability of gestural information to mislead eyewitness accounts by 5- to 8-year-olds.

The accuracy of eyewitness interviews has legal and clinical implications within the criminal justice system. Leading verbal suggestions have been shown to give rise to false memories and inaccurate testimonies in children, but only a small body of research exists regarding non-verbal communication. The present study examined whether 5- to 8-year-olds in the UK could be misled about their memory of an event through exposure to leading gestural information, which suggested an incorrect response, using a variety of question and gesture types. Results showed that leading gestures significantly corrupted participants' memory compared to the control group (MD = 0.60, p < 0.001), with participants being misled by at least one question nearly three-quarters of the time. Questions about peripheral details, and gestures that were more visible and expressive, increased false memory further, with even subtle gestures demonstrating a strong misleading influence. We discuss the implications of these findings for the guidelines governing eyewitness interviews.

Anxiety and Spatial Navigation in Williams Syndrome and Down Syndrome.

Individuals with Down Syndrome (DS) and individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) present with poor navigation and elevated anxiety. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between these two characteristics. Parent report questionnaires measured navigation abilities and anxiety in WS (N = 55) and DS (N = 42) as follows. Anxiety: Spence Children's Anxiety Scale and a novel measure of navigation anxiety. Navigation: Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Scale (SBSOD) and a novel measure of navigation competence. Most individuals were not permitted to travel independently. A relationship between navigation anxiety and SBSOD scores (but not navigation competence) was observed for both groups.

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 sampling 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 between 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 personality traits in terms of callousness and affective dissonance and sensation seeking tendencies in physically aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial behaviours.

Manipulated exposure to television-style healthy food advertising and children's healthy food intake in nurseries.

The detrimental impact of currently disproportionate amounts of digital food advertising for processed foods high in sugar, salt, and fat (HSSF) on children's food intake and dietary health is well-documented. The potential of digital healthy food advertising to encourage healthy eating in children is much less researched. A pre-test post-test control group design was used to compare the effect of specifically designed, television-style advertisements for healthy food versus toys on 172 three-to seven-year-old children's exclusively healthy food intake (vegetable, fruit, whole-grain) in five nurseries in Germany. Within- and between-group comparisons demonstrated the effectiveness of healthy food advertising exposure to increase children's healthy food intake. Three exposures to a 1-min-advertisement for healthy food were sufficient to increase children's healthy food intake by as much as three portions. Children in the control condition ate less healthy foods following viewing of a control advertisement (a matched toy advertisement). We concluded that digital healthy food advertising is likely to increase children's healthy food intake sufficiently to help children meet daily recommended amounts of vegetables, fruit, or whole-grain bread, and that this encouragement may be required as decreases in healthy food intake were found when healthy foods were merely available.

Description of Routes in People With Intellectual Disability.

The ability to describe routes was assessed in participants with intellectual disability (ID) and participants without ID matched on chronological age (CA) or on mental age (MA). In two experiments, participants learned a route through a virtual environment until they reached a learning criterion. They were then asked to externalize their spatial knowledge in a verbal description task, a landmark recognition task, or a map completion task. Results revealed that participants with ID mainly described the route as a succession of actions ("turn left"), and participants in the CA group prescribed actions referring to a landmark ("turn left at the swing"). Yet, results from the other tasks showed that people with ID had good landmark knowledge of the environment.

Using virtual environments to investigate wayfinding in 8- to 12-year-olds and adults.

Wayfinding is the ability to learn and recall a route through an environment. Theories of wayfinding suggest that for children to learn a route successfully, they must have repeated experience of it, but in this experiment we investigated whether children could learn a route after only a single experience of the route. A total of 80 participants from the United Kingdom in four groups of 20 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults were shown a route through a 12-turn maze in a virtual environment. At each junction, there was a unique object that could be used as a landmark. Participants were "walked" along the route just once (without any verbal prompts) and then were asked to retrace the route from the start without any help. Nearly three quarters of the 12-year-olds, half of the 10-year-olds, and a third of the 8-year-olds retraced the route without any errors the first time they traveled it on their own. This finding suggests that many young children can learn routes, even with as many as 12 turns, very quickly and without the need for repeated experience. The implications for theories of wayfinding that emphasize the need for extensive experience are discussed.

Encouraging 5-year olds to attend to landmarks: a way to improve children's wayfinding strategies in a virtual environment.

Wayfinding is defined as the ability to learn and remember a route through an environment. Previous researchers have shown that young children have difficulties remembering routes. However, very few researchers have considered how to improve young children's wayfinding abilities. Therefore, we investigated ways to help children increase their wayfinding skills. In two studies, a total of 72 5-year olds were shown a route in a six turn maze in a virtual environment and were then asked to retrace this route by themselves. A unique landmark was positioned at each junction and each junction was made up of two paths: a correct path and an incorrect path. Two different strategies improved route learning performance. In Experiment 1, verbally labeling on-route junction landmarks during the first walk reduced the number of errors and the number of trials to reach a learning criterion when the children retraced the route. In Experiment 2, encouraging children to attend to on-route junction landmarks on the first walk reduced the number of errors when the route was retraced. This was the first study to show that very young children can be taught route learning skills. The implications of our results are discussed.

The development of route learning in Down syndrome, Williams syndrome and typical development: investigations with virtual environments.

The ability to navigate new environments has a significant impact on the daily life and independence of people with learning difficulties. The aims of this study were to investigate the development of route learning in Down syndrome (N = 50), Williams syndrome (N = 19), and typically developing children between 5 and 11 years old (N = 108); to investigate use of landmarks; and to relate cognitive functions to route-learning ability in these groups. Overall, measures of attention and long-term memory were strongly associated with route learning, even once non-verbal ability was controlled for. All of the groups, including 5- to 6-year-old TD children, demonstrated the ability to make use of all landmark types to aid route learning; those near junctions, those further from junctions, and also distant landmarks (e.g. church spire, radio mast). Individuals with WS performed better than a matched subset of TD children on more difficult routes; we suggest that this is supported by relatively strong visual feature recognition in the disorder. Participants with DS who had relatively high levels of non-verbal ability performed at a similar level to TD participants.

Route knowledge and configural knowledge in typical and atypical development: a comparison of sparse and rich environments.

BACKGROUND: Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) and individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) have poor navigation skills, which impact their potential to become independent. Two aspects of navigation were investigated in these groups, using virtual environments (VE): route knowledge (the ability to learn the way from A to B by following a fixed sequence of turns) and configural knowledge (knowledge of the spatial relationships between places within an environment). METHODS: Typically developing (TD) children aged 5 to 11 years (N = 93), individuals with DS (N = 29) and individuals with WS (N = 20) were presented with a sparse and a rich VE grid maze. Within each maze, participants were asked to learn a route from A to B and a route from A to C before being asked to find a novel shortcut from B to C. RESULTS: Performance was broadly similar across sparse and rich mazes. The majority of participants were able to learn novel routes, with poorest performance in the DS group, but the ability to find a shortcut, our measure of configural knowledge, was limited for all three groups. That is, 59 % TD participants successfully found a shortcut, compared to 10 % participants with DS and 35 % participants with WS. Differences in the underlying mechanisms associated with route knowledge and configural knowledge and in the developmental trajectories of performance across groups were observed. Only the TD participants walked a shorter distance in the last shortcut trial compared to the first, indicative of increased configural knowledge across trials. The DS group often used an alternative strategy to get from B to C, summing the two taught routes together. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings demonstrate impaired configural knowledge in DS and in WS, with the strongest deficit in DS. This suggests that these groups rely on a rigid route knowledge based method for navigating and as a result are likely to get lost easily. Route knowledge was also impaired in both DS and WS groups and was related to different underlying processes across all three groups. These are discussed with reference to limitations in attention and/or visuo-spatial processing in the atypical groups.

Inconsistent findings for the eyes closed effect in children: the implications for interviewing child witnesses.

A child who alleges that they have been the victim of a crime will be interviewed by police officers. During a police interview it is important that the interviewer obtains the most accurate testimony possible from the child. Previous studies have shown that if children have their eyes closed during an interview they sometimes report more correct information. This paper includes two studies. In Experiment 1 156 children experienced an event and were then questioned about it. Half the children answered with their eyes open and half with their eyes closed. The participants with eyes closed provided more correct information. In Experiment 2 152 children answered questions in different conditions including eyes open and eyes closed conditions. In contrast to Experiment 1 there was no beneficial effect for the eyes closed condition. These inconsistent results are discussed with reference to actual police interviews. It is suggested that until there has been more research into eyes closed procedures caution should be taken in recommending such procedures for police interviews with children.

Wayfinding behaviour in Down syndrome: a study with virtual environments.

The aim of this study was to assess wayfinding abilities in individuals with Down syndrome (DS). The ability to learn routes though a virtual environment (VE) and to make a novel shortcut between two locations was assessed in individuals with DS (N=10) and control participants individually matched on mental age (MA) or chronological age (CA). The results showed that most of the participants with DS were able to learn routes through the VE, even though they needed more trials than the CA controls to reach the learning criterion. However, they did not show flexible wayfinding behaviour because they were unable to find a shortcut between two known locations (unlike the CA controls). The results suggest that most individuals with DS can acquire knowledge about specific routes, but are unable to integrate that knowledge into a configurational understanding of the environment.

Learning new faces in typical and atypical populations of children.

Recognizing an individual as familiar is an important aspect of our social cognition, which requires both learning a face and recalling it. It has been suggested that children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) have deficits and abnormalities in face processing. We investigated whether the process by which unfamiliar faces become familiar differs in typically developing (TD) children, children with ASD, and children with developmental delay. Children were familiarized with a set of moving novel faces presented over a three-day period. Recognition of the learned faces was assessed at five time points during the three-day period. Both immediate and delayed recall of faces was tested. All groups showed improvements in face recognition at immediate recall, which indicated that learning had occurred. The TD population showed slightly better performance than the two other groups, however no difference was specific to the ASD group. All groups showed similar levels of improvements with time. Our results are discussed in terms of learning in ASD.

The effect of delay and individual differences on children's tendency to guess.

Few researchers have investigated the factors that influence children's tendency to indicate correctly when they do not know the answer to a question. In this study, 5- to 8-year-olds witnessed a staged event in their classroom and were subsequently interviewed about that event either the following day or after 5 months. Some of the questions were answerable based on the information in the event, and some were unanswerable such that children would have had to guess to provide an answer. Individual-difference measures were taken of children's verbal ability and self-perceptions. Delay, verbal ability, and children's self-perceptions all affected whether children correctly indicated when they did not know the answer to a question.

Children's recognition of advertisements on television and on Web pages.

In this paper we consider the issue of advertising to children. Advertising to children raises a number of concerns, in particular the effects of food advertising on children's eating habits. We point out that virtually all the research into children's understanding of advertising has focused on traditional television advertisements, but much marketing aimed at children is now via the Internet and little is known about children's awareness of advertising on the Web. One important component of understanding advertisements is the ability to distinguish advertisements from other messages, and we suggest that young children's ability to recognise advertisements on a Web page is far behind their ability to recognise advertisements on television.

Short-term memory, executive control, and children's route learning.

The aim of this study was to investigate route-learning ability in 67 children aged 5 to 11years and to relate route-learning performance to the components of Baddeley's model of working memory. Children carried out tasks that included measures of verbal and visuospatial short-term memory and executive control and also measures of verbal and visuospatial long-term memory; the route-learning task was conducted using a maze in a virtual environment. In contrast to previous research, correlations were found between both visuospatial and verbal memory tasks-the Corsi task, short-term pattern span, digit span, and visuospatial long-term memory-and route-learning performance. However, further analyses indicated that these relationships were mediated by executive control demands that were common to the tasks, with long-term memory explaining additional unique variance in route learning.

Colour as an environmental cue when learning a route in a virtual environment: typical and atypical development.

Typically developing (TD) 6-year-olds and 9-year-olds, and older children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) navigated through brick-wall mazes in a virtual environment. Participants were shown a route through three mazes, each with 6 turns. In each maze the floor of each path section was a different colour such that colour acted as an environmental cue. The colours employed were either easy to verbalise (focal colours) or difficult to verbalise (non-focal colours). We investigated whether participants would verbally code the colour information in the focal colour condition only, and whether this facilitated route-learning. All groups could learn the routes; the WS group required more learning trials to learn the route and achieved lower memory scores than both of the TD groups. Despite this, all groups showed the same pattern of results. There was no effect of condition on the ability to learn the maze. However, when asked which colours featured in each route, higher memory scores were achieved for the focal colour (verbalisable) than the non-focal colour (non-verbalisable) condition. This suggests that, in both young children and individuals with WS, once a route has been learnt, the nature of the environmental cues within it can impact an individual's representation of that route.

How useful are landmarks when learning a route in a virtual environment? Evidence from typical development and Williams syndrome.

The ability to learn a route through a virtual environment was assessed in 19 older children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) and 40 typically developing (TD) children aged 6-9 years. In addition to comparing route-learning ability across groups, we were interested in whether participants show an adult-like differentiation between "useful" and "less useful" landmarks when learning a route and the relative salience of landmark position versus landmark identity. Each virtual environment consisted of a brick wall maze with six junctions. There were 16 landmarks in the maze, half of which were on the correct path and half on incorrect paths. Results showed that both groups could learn each route to criterion (two successful completions of a route without error). During the learning phase, the WS group produced more errors than the TD group and took longer to reach criterion. This was predominantly due to the large number of perseverative errors (i.e., errors that were made at the same choice point on consecutive learning trials) made by the WS group relative to the TD children. We suggest that this reflects a difficulty in inhibiting erroneous responses in WS. During the test phase, the TD group showed stronger recall of landmarks adjacent to junctions (more useful landmarks) than of landmarks along path sections (less useful landmarks) independent of each individual's level of nonverbal ability. This pattern was also evident in the WS group but was related to level of nonverbal maturation; the differentiation between recall of junction and path landmarks increased as nonverbal ability increased across WS participants. Overall, the results demonstrate that individuals with WS can learn a route but that the development of this ability is atypical.

Helping children correctly say "I don't know" to unanswerable questions.

Adults ask children questions in a variety of contexts, for example, in the classroom, in the forensic context, or in experimental research. In such situations children will inevitably be asked some questions to which they do not know the answer, because they do not have the required information ("unanswerable" questions). When asked unanswerable questions, it is important that children indicate that they do not have the required information to provide an answer. These 2 studies investigated whether preinterview instructions (Experiment 1) or establishing a memory narrative (Experiment 2) helped children correctly indicate a lack of knowledge to unanswerable questions. In both studies, 6- and 8-year-olds participated in a classroom-based event about which they were subsequently interviewed. Some of the questions were answerable, and some were unanswerable. Results showed that preinterview instructions increased the number of younger children's appropriate "don't know" responses to unanswerable questions, without decreasing correct responses to answerable questions. This suggests that demand characteristics affect children's tendency correctly to say "I don't know." The opportunity to provide a narrative account increased children's appropriate "don't know" responses to unanswerable yes/no questions, and increased the number of younger children's correct responses to answerable questions. This suggests that cognitive factors also contribute to children's tendency correctly to say "I don't know." These results have implications for any context where adults need to obtain information from children through questioning, for example, a health practitioner asking about a medical condition, in classroom discourse, in the investigative interview, and in developmental psychology research.

How do individuals with Williams syndrome learn a route in a real-world environment?

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) show a specific deficit in visuo-spatial abilities. This finding, however, derives mainly from performance on small-scale laboratory-based tasks. This study investigated large-scale route learning in individuals with WS and two matched control groups (moderate learning difficulty group [MLD], typically developing group [TD]). In a non-labelling and a labelling (verbal information provided along the route) condition, participants were guided along one of two unfamiliar 1-km routes with 20 junctions, and then retraced the route themselves (two trials). The WS participants performed less well than the other groups, but given verbal information and repeated experience they learnt nearly all of the turns along the route. The extent of improvement in route knowledge (correct turns) in WS was comparable to that of the control groups. Relational knowledge (correctly identifying spatial relationships between landmarks), compared with the TD group, remained poor for both the WS and the MLD group. Assessment of the relationship between performance on the large-scale route-learning task and that on three small-scale tasks (maze learning, perspective taking, map use) showed no relationship for the TD controls, and only a few non-specific associations in the MLD and WS groups.