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Accounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlie processing in specific domains of cognition (e.g., perception, mental imagery, and language). However, in this paper, we suggest that both formats play a major role in most cognitive domains. We believe that a comprehensive theory of cognition requires a solid understanding of these representational formats and their functional roles within and across different domains of cognition, the developmental trajectory of these representational formats, and their role in dysfunctional behavior. Here we sketch such an overarching perspective that brings together research from diverse subdisciplines of psychology on modal and amodal representational formats so as to unravel their functional principles and their interactions.
Background
Self-regulation is crucial for children's learning and development. Several studies have explored children's inter-individual differences in self-regulation, but little is known about sources of intra-individual variation.
Aims
This study addressed the variability of children's self-regulation across typical classroom situations and how this might be associated with children's executive functions (EFs).
Sample
The study included 148 children (54.7% girls; Mage = 56.73 months).
Methods
Self-regulation was assessed with an observational measure in teacher-led and child-led activities within naturalistic classroom settings. Children's EFs were assessed with direct assessments at the start and end of the school year.
Results
Linear mixed-effect models showed that children demonstrated higher levels of self-regulation in child-led in comparison with teacher-led activities. Children with higher levels of EFs at the start of the school year showed less variation across teacher-led and child-led activities in comparison with children with lower levels of EFs. Regarding other aspects of the classroom context, neither the group size in which the activity took place nor which school subject it was focused on were associated with children's self-regulation. However, in teacher-led activities the type of interaction involved in the activity and the type of task influenced children's self-regulation.
Conclusion
These results suggest that children who start school with higher levels of EFs are more able to adapt to different situations, highlighting the importance of fostering these skills in early childhood. In turn, children with lower levels of EFs may need additional support from teachers to remain self-regulated across different contexts.
The attentional spatial-numerical association of response codes (Att-SNARC) effect (Fischer, Castel, Dodd, & Pratt, 2003)—the finding that participants are quicker to detect left-side targets when the targets are preceded by small numbers and quicker to detect right-side targets when they are preceded by large numbers—has been used as evidence for embodied number representations and to support strong claims about the link between number and space (e.g., a mental number line). We attempted to replicate Experiment 2 of Fischer et al. by collecting data from 1,105 participants at 17 labs. Across all 1,105 participants and four interstimulus-interval conditions, the proportion of times the effect we observed was positive (i.e., directionally consistent with the original effect) was .50. Further, the effects we observed both within and across labs were minuscule and incompatible with those observed by Fischer et al. Given this, we conclude that we failed to replicate the effect reported by Fischer et al. In addition, our analysis of several participant-level moderators (finger-counting habits, reading and writing direction, handedness, and mathematics fluency and mathematics anxiety) revealed no substantial moderating effects. Our results indicate that the Att-SNARC effect cannot be used as evidence to support strong claims about the link between number and space.
Inhibitory control is a core function that allows us to resist interference from our surroundings and to stop an ongoing action. To date, it is not clear whether inhibitory control is a single process or whether it is composed of different processes. Further, whether these processes are separate or clustered in childhood is under debate. In this study, we investigated the existence and development of two hypothesized component processes of inhibitory control–interference suppression and response inhibition–using a single task and event related potential components. Twenty 8-year-old children and seventeen adults performed a spatially cued Go/Nogo task while their brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography. Mean N2 amplitudes confirmed the expected pattern for response inhibition with both the children and the adults showing more negative N2 for Nogo vs. Go trials. The interference suppression N2 effect was only present in adults and appeared as a more negative N2 in response to Go trials with a congruent cue than Go trials with an incongruent cue. Contrary to previous findings, there was no evidence that the interference suppression N2 effect was later occurring than the response inhibition N2 effect. Overall, response inhibition was present in both the children and the adults whereas interference suppression was only present in the adults. These results provide evidence of distinct maturational processes for both component processes of inhibitory control, with interference suppression probably continuing to develop into late childhood.
Emotion processing is vital for healthy adolescent development, and impaired emotional responses are associated with a number of psychiatric disorders. However, it is unclear whether observed differences between psychiatric populations and healthy controls reflect modifiable variations in functioning (and thus could be sensitive to changes resulting from intervention) or stable, non-modifiable, individual differences. The current study therefore investigated whether the Late Positive Potential (LPP; a neural index of emotion processing) can be used as a marker of therapeutic change following psycho-social intervention. At-risk male adolescents who had received less than four months intervention (minimal-intervention, N = 32) or more than nine months intervention (extended-intervention, N = 32) passively viewed emotional images whilst neural activity was recorded using electroencephalography. Significant differences in emotion processing, indicated by the LPP, were found between the two groups: the LPP did not differ according to valence in the minimal-intervention group, whereas the extended-intervention participants showed emotion processing in line with low risk populations (enhanced LPP for unpleasant images versus other images). Further, an inverse relationship between emotional reactivity (measured via the LPP) and antisocial behaviour was observed in minimal-intervention participants only. The data therefore provide preliminary cross-sectional evidence that abnormal neural responses to emotional information may be normalised following psychosocial intervention. Importantly, this study uniquely suggests that, in future randomised control trials, the LPP may be a useful biomarker to measure development and therapeutic change.
Previous studies have shown severe distortions of introspection about dual-task interference in the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) paradigm. The present study investigated participants’ ability to introspect about the total trial time in this paradigm, as this temporal information may arguably be more relevant for strategic task scheduling than subjective estimates of each task within the dual task. To this end, participants provided estimates of their reaction times (IRTs) for the two subtasks in one half of the experiment, and estimates of the total trial time (ITTs) in the other half of the experiment. Although the IRT results showed the typical unawareness of the PRP effect, ITTs reflected the effects of SOA and Task 2 difficulty on objective total trial time. Additional analyses showed that IRTs were influenced by the introspective task order; that is, the ITT pattern carried over to IRTs when IRTs were assessed in the second half of the experiment. Overall, the present results show that people are able to accurately introspect about total trial time in the PRP paradigm and thus provide some good news for bad introspection in the PRP paradigm.
During the last two decades, there has been new interest in introspection about multitasking performance. In this field, subjective timing of one’s own reaction times (introspective RTs) has proven a useful measure to assess introspection. However, whether timing our own cognitive processing makes use of the same timing mechanisms as timing external intervals has been called into question. Here we take a novel approach to this question and build on the previously observed dissociation between the interference of task switching and memory search with a concurrent time production task whereby temporal productions increased with increasing memory set size but were not affected by switch costs. We tested whether a similar dissociation could be observed in this paradigm when participants provide introspective RTs instead of concurrent temporal productions. The results showed no such dissociation as switch costs and the effect of memory set size on RTs were both reflected in introspective RTs. These findings indicate that the underlying timing mechanisms differ between temporal productions and introspective RTs in this multitasking context, and that introspective RTs are still strikingly accurate estimates of objective RTs.
Randomized response techniques (RRTs) are applied to reduce response biases in self-report surveys on sensitive research questions (e.g., on socially undesirable characteristics). However, there is evidence that they cannot completely eliminate self-protecting response strategies. To address this problem, there are RRTs specifically designed to measure the extent of such strategies. Here we assessed the recently devised unrelated question model—cheating extension (UQMC) in a preregistered online survey on intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization and perpetration during the first contact restrictions as containment measures for the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in Germany in early 2020. The UQMC accounting for self-protecting responses described the data better than its predecessor model which assumes instruction adherence. The resulting three-month prevalence estimates were about 10% and we found a high proportion of self-protecting responses in the group of female participants queried about IPV victimization. However, unexpected results concerning the differences in prevalence estimates across the groups queried about victimization and perpetration highlight the difficulty of investigating sensitive research questions even using methods that guarantee anonymity and the importance of interpreting the respective estimates with caution.
The surprising role of stimulus modality in the dual-task introspective blind spot: a memory account
(2022)
Being able to accumulate accurate information about one’s own performance is important in everyday contexts, and arguably particularly so in complex multitasking contexts. Thus, the observation of a glaring gap in participants’ introspection regarding their own reaction time costs in a concurrent dual-task context is deserving of closer examination. This so-called introspective blind spot has been explained by a ‘consciousness bottleneck’ which states that while attention is occupied by one task, participants cannot consciously perceive another stimulus presented in that time. In the current study, a series of introspective Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) experiments were conducted to identify the determinants of an introspective blind spot; to our surprise, in half of the experiments participants appeared to be aware of their dual-task costs. A single trial analysis highlighted the sensory modality of the two stimuli within the trial as an important predictor of introspective accuracy, along with temporal gaps in the trial. The current findings call into question the claim that attention is required for conscious awareness. We propose a memory-based account of introspective processes in this context, whereby introspective accuracy is determined by the memory systems involved in encoding and rehearsing memory traces. This model of the conditions required to build up accurate representations of our performance may have far-reaching consequences for monitoring and introspection across a range of tasks.
