MedWorm provides a medical RSS filtering service. Over 6000 RSS medical sources are combined and output via different filters. This feed contains the latest medical blog items that have been tagged with 'developmental psychology'. Sat, 03 Sep 2011 02:48:19 +0100 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3750092&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeedproxy.google.com%2F%7Er%2FDevelopingIntelligence%2F%7E3%2Fydk8B9gf3Wo%2F4_things_to_keep_in_mind_when.php A nice 2010 Human Brain Mapping paper by Church, Petersen & Schlaggar covers a number of interpretational issues confronting modern neuroimaging. Their particular application is pediatric neuroimaging (I will also use developmental examples), but the general issues apply to nearly all fMRI studies. So here are some important things to keep in mind whenever you read an fMRI study: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... (Source: Developing Intelligence) Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3750092 Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:29:08 +0100 3750092 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3750093&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeedproxy.google.com%2F%7Er%2FDevelopingIntelligence%2F%7E3%2Fp21GoT3oV6Y%2Fdevelopmental_divergence_in_un.php A 2010 FINS paper from Cohen et al. demonstrates that multivariate patterns in neural recruitment during response inhibition across the brain are significantly predictive of response inhibition ability and age of the scanned subject, and shows that other factors (such as response variability and reaction times) cannot be similarly predicted from the same data. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... (Source: Developing Intelligence) Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3750093 Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:08:05 +0100 3750093 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2313403&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=36089&url=http%3A%2F%2Fthesituationist.wordpress.com%2F2009%2F04%2F05%2Fthe-interior-situation-of-intergenerational-poverty%2F From The Economist, here are some excerpts of a summary of research exploring the interior situation of how poverty is passed from one generation to the next. * * * That the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society. . . . But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now. The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children. Working memory is the ability to hold bits of information in the brain for current use—the digits of a phone number, for example. It is crucial for comprehending languages, for read... The Situationist blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2313403 Sun, 05 Apr 2009 04:01:23 +0100 2313403 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2026967&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FDevelopingIntelligence%2F%7E3%2F480070697%2Fhow_the_temporal_trajectory_of.php In an update to their groundbreaking earlier demonstration that high-IQ children initially show a thinner cortex, and later show an initially thicker one than their average-IQ peers, Shaw et al. have now documented those trajectories of cortical thickening which are invariant to socio-economic status and IQ, but vary between regions of the brain. These videos show the peak in gray matter in cortex between the ages of 5 and 15 years, as assessed from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of 375 subjects of varying ages. And another video below the fold... Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... (Source: Developing Intelligence) Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2026967 Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:00:00 +0100 2026967 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1844655&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FDevelopingIntelligence%2F%7E3%2F407622927%2Fquick_whats_closer_to_1150_150.php If you said 1/1000, you've given the answer provided more often by second graders than by undergraduates. And you're also right. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... (Source: Developing Intelligence) Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1844655 Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:51:53 +0100 1844655 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1834593&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FDevelopingIntelligence%2F%7E3%2F404014035%2Fsocial_vs_cognitive_developmen.php My friend Geoff once said that "all cognition is social." Smugly, I reminded myself that the conclusions of cognitive psychologists are drawn on evidence where social cues are kept constant. But even in the absence of confounding social cues, perhaps the underlying cognitive processes themselves are caused by social factors. A great example of this comes from today's issue of Science, in which Topal et al describe how a well known "cognitive" phenomenon - perseveration - may be dramatically influenced by social cues. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... (Source: Developing Intelligence) Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1834593 Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:32:45 +0100 1834593 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1146542&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=35666&url=http%3A%2F%2Fphineasgage.wordpress.com%2F2008%2F01%2F11%2Flearning-to-recognise-faces-perceptual-narrowing%2F That image certainly piques your interest, doesn’t it? Sugita (2008) was interested in addressing one of the ancient debates in face perception: the role of early experience versus innate mechanisms. In a nutshell, some investigators hold that face perception is a hardwired process, others that every apparently special face perception result can be explained by invoking the massive expertise we all possess with faces, compared to other stimuli. Finally, there is some support for a critical period during infancy, where a lack of face exposure produces irreparable face recognition deficits (see for example Le Grand et al, 2004). Unfortunately, save for a few unfortunate children who are born with cataracts, there is no real way to address this question in humans. Enter the monkeys, and... The Phineas Gage Fan Club blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1146542 Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:38:48 +0100 1146542 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1128681&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FDevelopingIntelligence%2F%7E3%2F210625949%2Fbad_science_vindicating_cognit.php Over New Year's I had a brief discussion with a condensed-matter physicist who proclaimed that 1) "some developmental research is amazingly bad" and that 2) "they think they can tell what a baby has learned from what direction it looks," topping it all off with 3) "you guys don't even know what learning is!" I won't argue with the first point (there are bad researchers in every field, even condensed matter physics), and I'm too lazy to bother with the third (although the 2000 Nobel prize committee might disagree), but the second point - on the technique of preferential looking - I just can't disregard. Complaints about the rigor of developmental cognitive psychology are surprisingly common (e.g.), but all too often unjustified. Using this comment about the preferential looking paradigm ... Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1128681 Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:21:48 +0100 1128681 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1126166&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FDevelopingIntelligence%2F%7E3%2F210042086%2Fis_play_rational.php Play is more often simply observed than studied scientifically - play behaviors occur unpredictably and, when they do occur, are highly chaotic, making it very difficult to study them in the laboratory. Despite these challenges, new work is beginning to make play accessible from a rigorous scientific framework. For example, a recent article by Schulz & Bonawitz takes Piaget's notion of play as a mechanism for understanding causal relationships and recasts it into a testable prediction: children should be more likely to play with an object about which they have incomplete or confounded evidence. To test the idea, Schulz & Bonawitz carefully crafted two toys in the form of a simplified jack-in-the-box: each toy consisted of a box with a puppet inside; the puppet could be made to emerge fro... Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1126166 Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:54:25 +0100 1126166 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1017633&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FDevelopingIntelligence%2F%7E3%2F182227825%2Ffluid_intelligence_in_asperger.php Asperger's disorder is a subtype of autism, characterized by deficits in social interaction, delays in nonverbal communication and possibly also deficits in nonverbal IQ (such as on a test known as Block Design). However, a new study in Brain and Cognition challenges this latter claim - with surprising results. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... (Source: Developing Intelligence) Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1017633 Fri, 09 Nov 2007 15:10:09 +0100 1017633 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=921685&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FDevelopingIntelligence%2F%7E3%2F164317562%2Fimaginative_yet_literal_fewer.php Children are often thought to be imaginative and fanciful, not only in their perception of the world but also in the veridicality of their memories. It may therefore be surprising that a robust method for eliciting false memories in adults is actually ineffective in children. In fact, children even tend to show better performance than adults in terms of false recall in the DRM paradigm, a task in which a list of words must be remembered where every word in each list is strongly associated with a word that is not presented in each list. Adults tend to show a robust tendency to incorrectly recall these "critical lures," but in general, kids don't! Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... (Source: Developing Intelligence) Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=921685 Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:45:38 +0100 921685 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=914190&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=35666&url=http%3A%2F%2Fphineasgage.wordpress.com%2F2007%2F09%2F29%2Fwhat-do-you-know-additives-really-do-cause-hyperactivity%2F This post is about a very different E211. A few months back, the menu from of a local Chinese takeaway caught my eye. Apart from the lengthy questionnaire, which customers could complete to receive £2 off (pretty smart way of gathering customer data for a non-chain takeaway), the menu also made numerous claims that all products were absolutely free of additives, including the ubiquitous Monosodium glutamate (MSG) and colourings. This is a good thing, the menu claimed, because additives cause ADHD in children. My initial reaction was to silently promise myself never to order from that take-away, just as I wouldn’t buy my aspirin in a pharmacy that sells magnet bracelets (although this is a hard rule to follow in the UK, where homeopaths are funded by the NHS), or books from the Chris... The Phineas Gage Fan Club blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=914190 Sat, 29 Sep 2007 21:52:24 +0100 914190 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=906047&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FDevelopingIntelligence%2F%7E3%2F161671171%2Fmemory_before_language_preverb.php Infantile "amnesia" refers to the apparent absence or weakness of memories formed at ages younger than 3 or 4. Some evidence indicates that these early-life memories are not actually lost or forgotten, but are rather merely mislabeled or otherwise inaccessible to adult cognition. One potential reason for this inaccessibility is that adults tend to use language in encoding and retrieving memories, and this strategy may not be sufficient for retrieving memories formed in early-life, which may have been encoded before language is firmly entrenched in the developing brain. A recent study in Child Development may challenge this hypothesis, as described below. In "Fragile But Real: Children's Capacity to Use Newly Acquired Words to Convey Preverbal Memories," authors Morris & Baker-Ward brought... Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=906047 Wed, 26 Sep 2007 19:18:21 +0100 906047 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896027&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FDevelopingIntelligence%2F%7E3%2F160651038%2Fprospective_memory_more_retros.php What processes allow us to execute delayed intentions? This ability, known as prospective memory, is often considered to have two constituent parts: a prospective component which involves forming the intention and possibly maintaining it until action execution, and a retrospective component which involves retrieving this intention, if that intention is not successfully and continuously maintained until the moment of action execution. These components can be easily illustrated. Imagine yourself in a situation where prospective memory is required: while at work, you realize that you need to pick up more coffee beans. Depending on how long you must wait to acquire more coffee, you may think about it continuously until you pick it up (a very costly strategy, in terms of attention and mental e... Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896027 Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:38:51 +0100 896027 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=875267&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=35666&url=http%3A%2F%2Fphineasgage.wordpress.com%2F2007%2F09%2F16%2Fdetecting-genetic-disorders-3d-face-scans%2F Following on from last week’s post on smile measuring software, The Scotsman (via Gizmodo) reports on the work by Hammond and colleagues at UCL, who are developing 3d face scans as a quick, inexpensive alternative to genetic testing. This is not as crazy as it sounds at first since it is known that in a number of congenital conditions, the hallmark behavioural, physiological or cognitive deficits are also (conveniently) accompanied by characteristic appearances. The classic example of this is Down syndrome, which you need no software to recognise. More examples appear in the figure above, where you can compare the characteristic appearances of various conditions to the unaffected face in the middle. Hammond’s software can be used to identify 30 congenital conditions, ranging fr... The Phineas Gage Fan Club blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=875267 Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:41:43 +0100 875267 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=824640&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Fscienceblogs.com%2Fdevelopingintelligence%2F2007%2F08%2Ftask_switching_aided_by_irrele.php In the Dimensional Change Card sorting (DCCS) task, 3-year-olds can usually sort cards successfully by a first rule - whether by shape, color, size, etc. When asked to switch then to another rule, most 3-year-olds will perseverate by continuing to sort cards according to the first and now-irrelevant rule. This occurs even when the current rule is repeated every single time they're asked to sort a card! Children will even correctly repeat the name of the rule they should be using, and then proceed to actually sort the card by the old rule. By age 4, however, most kids are able to successfully switch to a second rule (though many will still have trouble when asked to switch again). What then changes between 3 and 4 to allow this shift away from a remarkably strange behavior? Read the rest o... Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=824640 Mon, 27 Aug 2007 20:01:02 +0100 824640 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=693036&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=35666&url=http%3A%2F%2Fphineasgage.wordpress.com%2F2007%2F06%2F24%2Fbig-brother-knows-best-maybe-not%2F As a big brother, it is tempting to accept the conclusions that Kristensen and Bjerkedal (2007) draw in their recent article in Science. According to these researchers, IQ is associated with birth order, more specifically social birth order. This measure was created by looking at families where the oldest sibling had died, thus leaving what was biologically the middle child as the “social big brother” (note that the IQ data comes from army conscripts, so all the tested siblings were male). Kristensen and Bjerkedal found that even in these families, the older surviving sibling tended to have a slightly higher IQ than the younger sibling, as the figure below shows. Note that differing ages is not a factor here, since all siblings were tested at the same age. Kristensen and Bjerk... The Phineas Gage Fan Club blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=693036 Sun, 24 Jun 2007 13:06:30 +0100 693036 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=687075&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=35666&url=http%3A%2F%2Fphineasgage.wordpress.com%2F2007%2F06%2F20%2Fencephalon-25-arrives%2F Grab it now at Psyblog. Some favourite posts: Developing Intelligence reports on some evidence that children have a difficult time telling fantasy from reality. This notion may seem common sense, but this is one of the first empirical demonstrations I’ve heard of. Omnibrain posted a video of a laughing rat, which almost made me run out and get one for myself. Finally, Memoirs of a Postgrad explains what embodiment means, as applied in embodied cognition but also in AI research. With mirror neurons being all the rage these days, embodied theories are everywhere. This post is a nice introduction to what the fuss is all about. It’s worth emphasising that embodiment theories preceded  the discovery of mirror neurons, and indeed, it’s not clear that mirror neurons are necessa... The Phineas Gage Fan Club blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=687075 Wed, 20 Jun 2007 22:28:23 +0100 687075 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=675210&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Fscienceblogs.com%2Fdevelopingintelligence%2F2007%2F06%2Fthe_autobiographical_blur_betw.php Children have often been claimed to blend reality and fantasy, but according to some this is a wild exaggeration of the truth. For example, renowned child researchers have written that "even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to discriminate between the imaginary and the real" and certainly a lot of recent research tentatively supports that idea. Still, it seems intuitively surprising that children should be so good at knowing the real from the imagined. Nearly everyone - even grown adults - has had the experience of saying (or thinking) something, and afterwards wondering whether they actually said it aloud, or merely thought it. It would be somewhat surprising if children did not also make even these understandable mistakes. Indeed, this intuition is validated by wor... Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=675210 Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:16:27 +0100 675210 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=651325&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=35666&url=http%3A%2F%2Fphineasgage.wordpress.com%2F2007%2F05%2F21%2Flight-blogging-resistance-is-futile%2F I’m juggling something like 8 projects right now, 6 of which influence my degree - 2 of those to a frighteningly large extent. So I’m switch to light blogging for a bit: no extensive write-ups, no pretty pictures. Just links and a brief description. Normal service will resume around the end of June… There is a review in the latest issue of Science on resistance to science. Bloom and Skolnick-Weisberg use findings from developmental psychology to show how non-scientific or even anti-scientific beliefs may develop. Essentially, their idea is that children are by default unscientific in their common-sense reasoning, and will remain such unless they are educated. This in itself is nothing new - many researchers in this area believe that, for instance, naive participants will ... The Phineas Gage Fan Club blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=651325 Mon, 21 May 2007 20:19:38 +0100 651325 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=611863&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Fscienceblogs.com%2Fdevelopingintelligence%2F2007%2F05%2Fwhy_the_simplest_theory_is_alm.php Theories with the fewest assumptions are often preferred to those positing more, a heuristic often called "Occam's razor." This kind of argument has been used on both sides of the creationism vs. evolution debate (is natural selection or divine creation the more parsimonious theory?) and in at least one reductio ad absurdum argument against religion. Simple theories have many advantages: they are often falsifiable or motivate various predictions, and can be easily communicated as well as widely understood. But there are numerous reasons to suspect that this simple "theory of theories" is itself fundamentally misguided. Nowhere is this more apparent than in physics, the science attempting to uncover the fundamental laws giving rise to reality. The history of physics is like a trip down the... Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=611863 Mon, 14 May 2007 19:33:04 +0100 611863 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=554371&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Fscienceblogs.com%2Fdevelopingintelligence%2F2007%2F04%2Fpredicting_the_future_do_child.php Children are famously bad at considering the future consequences of their actions, but some evidence suggests this criticism is slightly off-the-mark: they may not even comprehend "time" in the same way adults do. A variety of findings from multiple lines of research tentatively support this surprising claim about the limitations of children's cognition. Based on the delay of gratification literature, we know that children will reliably choose "less now" rather than "more later" - even at relatively short delays. Children may not be able to adequately represent the value of a future reward as strongly as the value of a present reward, and hence cannot make the same comparison that adults do. Alternatively, children may not accurately predict (and hence, cannot prepare for) their subsequen... Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=554371 Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:15:44 +0100 554371 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=470552&cid=t_100811_109_f&fid=34743&url=http%3A%2F%2Fscienceblogs.com%2Fdevelopingintelligence%2F2007%2F02%2Fthe_development_of_prospective.php Children are famously bad at remembering to do things - for example, taking out the trash. What exactly is the developmental trajectory of the ability to remember and execute planned actions (known as prospective memory)? Although the effects of traumatic brain injury and old age on prospective memory are becoming elucidated, we have little idea how prospective memory comes to function in the first place. This is the topic covered by Kliegel & Jager's 2007 article in Cognitive Development. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... (Source: Developing Intelligence) Developing Intelligence blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=470552 Thu, 22 Feb 2007 15:52:59 +0100 470552