ABSTRACT
The relation of positive affect to attention and learning was examined in 5-, 7-, and 9-month-olds (N = 84). Affect and attention were assessed while the infants inspected a photograph. Affect was rated globally, for overall mood, and specifically, for amount of time smiling. Attention was indexed by the duration of the infant's longest (or peak) look, a measure previously linked to differential cognitive performance. At all ages, positive affect (shown by approximately half the infants) was associated with long look durations and slower learning, as assessed on a task in which infants learned to distinguish a familiar face from a series of novel faces. By contrast, neutral affect was associated with short looks and faster learning. Affect and look duration had synergistic effects, in that learning was faster than expected for infants who displayed both short looks and neutral affect. These findings are compatible with adult research that links positive affect to less analytical processing, and provide the first evidence that affect may be associated with the speed of processing differences implicated in short and long looking.
Subject(s)
Affect/physiology , Attention/physiology , Learning/physiology , Pattern Recognition, Visual/physiology , Reaction Time/physiology , Analysis of Variance , Child Development , Cross-Sectional Studies , Face , Female , Fixation, Ocular/physiology , Humans , Infant , Inhibition, Psychological , Male , Psychology, Child , Regression AnalysisABSTRACT
The present study reexamined the relevance of auditory and visual cross-modal matching to reading ability, an issue first addressed in a seminal study by Birch and Belmont (1964). By presenting all patterns to be matched as temporal sequences of tones and lights, including intramodal as well as cross-modal conditions, and covarying memory, three problems with the Birch and Belmont design were corrected. Results showed that poor readers had difficulty in perceiving temporal patterns generally: They did worse than good readers not only on cross-modal conditions but also on intramodal ones. These results were replicated in two tasks. Nonetheless, hierarchical regressions provided some indication that cross-modal abilities themselves are relevant to reading. For one of the two tasks, cross-modal performance contributed to the prediction of reading ability over and above intramodal performance. Poor readers also showed slower response times--a factor that contributed marginally to the prediction of reading independent of temporal processing.
Subject(s)
Auditory Perception , Mental Processes , Models, Psychological , Reading , Visual Perception , Child , Female , Humans , Longitudinal Studies , Male , Memory , Task Performance and Analysis , Time PerceptionABSTRACT
The present study demonstrated that individual differences in cross-modal transfer showed continuity over a 10-year span. Tactual-visual tasks, requiring visual recognition of shapes that had previously been felt but not seen, were given to full-term and preterm children at 2 ages, 1 and 11 years. Cross-modal performance showed a left-hand advantage at 11 years and, for both groups, cross-age correlations were significant when tactual exploration at 11 years was done with the left hand (r = .34-.36). The continuity showed some specificity in that the infant measure did not relate to other types of cross-modal performance at 11 years and was not dependent on aspects of spatial ability involving form perception. This continuity accounted for most of the previously reported relation of infant cross-modal ability to 11-year IQ.
Subject(s)
Child Development , Pattern Recognition, Visual , Psychology, Child , Stereognosis , Touch , Transfer, Psychology , Child , Child, Preschool , Discrimination Learning , Female , Humans , Infant , Male , Psychophysics , Reference Values , Space PerceptionABSTRACT
The present studies investigated a phenomenon reported by Freyd (1983), later termed "representational momentum" (Freyd & Finke, 1984), in which adults' recognition memory for movement in photographs is distorted forward in the direction of the implied motion. To determine whether children are subject to the same distortion, in Experiment 1, 8- and 10-year-olds and adults were shown a photograph of an action scene and asked to remember it. Subjects were then shown a second photograph that was either the same as or slightly different from the first. Subjects made more errors for test photographs showing the action slightly forward, as compared with slightly backward in time, indicating that their memories had shifted forward. This effect depends upon the initial depiction of movement; no forward memory errors occurred when "still" photographs without movement were employed in Experiment 2. Results are discussed in terms of the representational momentum hypothesis and picture memory.
