Sample records for story processing tasks
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Vannest, Jennifer J.; Karunanayaka, Prasanna R.; Altaye, Mekibib; Schmithorst, Vincent J.; Plante, Elena M.; Eaton, Kenneth J.; Rasmussen, Jerod M.; Holland, Scott K.
2009-01-01
Purpose To use functional MRI methods to visualize a network of auditory and language-processing brain regions associated with processing an aurally-presented story. We compare a passive listening (PL) story paradigm to an active-response (AR) version including on-line performance monitoring and a sparse acquisition technique. Materials/Methods Twenty children (ages 11−13) completed PL and AR story processing tasks. The PL version presented alternating 30-second blocks of stories and tones; the AR version presented story segments, comprehension questions, and 5s tone sequences, with fMRI acquisitions between stimuli. fMRI data was analyzed using a general linear model approach and paired t-test identifying significant group activation. Results Both tasks activated in primary auditory cortex, superior temporal gyrus bilaterally, left inferior frontal gyrus. The AR task demonstrated more extensive activation, including dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior/posterior cingulate cortex. Comparison of effect size in each paradigm showed a larger effect for the AR paradigm in a left inferior frontal ROI. Conclusion Activation patterns for story processing in children are similar in passive listening and active-response tasks. Increases in extent and magnitude of activation in the AR task are likely associated with memory and attention resources engaged across acquisition intervals. PMID:19306445
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Vannest, Jennifer J; Karunanayaka, Prasanna R; Altaye, Mekibib; Schmithorst, Vincent J; Plante, Elena M; Eaton, Kenneth J; Rasmussen, Jerod M; Holland, Scott K
2009-04-01
To use functional MRI (fMRI) methods to visualize a network of auditory and language-processing brain regions associated with processing an aurally-presented story. We compare a passive listening (PL) story paradigm to an active-response (AR) version including online performance monitoring and a sparse acquisition technique. Twenty children (ages 11-13 years) completed PL and AR story processing tasks. The PL version presented alternating 30-second blocks of stories and tones; the AR version presented story segments, comprehension questions, and 5-second tone sequences, with fMRI acquisitions between stimuli. fMRI data was analyzed using a general linear model approach and paired t-test identifying significant group activation. Both tasks showed activation in the primary auditory cortex, superior temporal gyrus bilaterally, and left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). The AR task demonstrated more extensive activation, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior/posterior cingulate cortex. Comparison of effect size in each paradigm showed a larger effect for the AR paradigm in a left inferior frontal region-of-interest (ROI). Activation patterns for story processing in children are similar in PL and AR tasks. Increases in extent and magnitude of activation in the AR task are likely associated with memory and attention resources engaged across acquisition intervals.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Enkin, Elizabeth
2016-01-01
The maze task is a psycholinguistic experimental procedure that measures real-time incremental sentence processing. The task has recently been tested as a language learning tool with promising results. Therefore, the present study examines the merits of a contextualized version of this task: the story maze. The findings are consistent with…
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Prereaders' Story Processing Strategies.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Harlin, Rebecca P.
A study examined prereaders' story processing strategies by assessing their performance on tasks that tapped their ability to (1) use story grammar and role playing, (2) retell a wordless picture book, (3) read a predictable book, (4) retell an oral story, (5) sequence pictured story events, and (6) fingerpoint-read a nursery rhyme. Parent…
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Zahodne, Laura B; Bowers, Dawn; Price, Catherine C; Bauer, Russell M; Nisenzon, Anne; Foote, Kelly D; Okun, Michael S
2011-04-01
Patients seeking deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery for Parkinson's disease (PD) typically undergo neuropsychological assessment to determine candidacy for surgery, with poor memory performance interpreted as a contraindication. Patients with PD may exhibit worse memory for word lists than for stories due to the lack of inherent organization in a list of unrelated words. Unfortunately, word list and story tasks are typically developed from different normative datasets, and the existence of a memory performance discrepancy in PD has been challenged. We compared recall of stories and word lists in 35 non-demented PD candidates for DBS. We administered commonly used neuropsychological measures of word list and story memory (Hopkins Verbal Learning Test, Logical Memory), along with a second word list task that was co-normed with the story task. Age-corrected scores were higher for the story task than for both word list tasks. Compared to story recall, word list recall correlated more consistently with motor severity and composite measures of processing speed, working memory, and executive functioning. These results support the classic view of fronto-subcortical contributions to memory in PD and suggest that executive deficits may influence word list recall more than story recall. We recommend a multi-componential memory battery in the neuropsychological assessment of DBS candidates to characterize both mesial temporal and frontal-executive memory processes. One should not rely solely on a word list task because patients exhibiting poor memory for word lists may perform better with stories and therefore deserve an interdisciplinary discussion for DBS surgery.
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Perceptual processing during trauma, priming and the development of intrusive memories
Sündermann, Oliver; Hauschildt, Marit; Ehlers, Anke
2013-01-01
Background Intrusive reexperiencing in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is commonly triggered by stimuli with perceptual similarity to those present during the trauma. Information processing theories suggest that perceptual processing during the trauma and enhanced perceptual priming contribute to the easy triggering of intrusive memories by these cues. Methods Healthy volunteers (N = 51) watched neutral and trauma picture stories on a computer screen. Neutral objects that were unrelated to the content of the stories briefly appeared in the interval between the pictures. Dissociation and data-driven processing (as indicators of perceptual processing) and state anxiety during the stories were assessed with self-report questionnaires. After filler tasks, participants completed a blurred object identification task to assess priming and a recognition memory task. Intrusive memories were assessed with telephone interviews 2 weeks and 3 months later. Results Neutral objects were more strongly primed if they occurred in the context of trauma stories than if they occurred during neutral stories, although the effect size was only moderate (ηp2=.08) and only significant when trauma stories were presented first. Regardless of story order, enhanced perceptual priming predicted intrusive memories at 2-week follow-up (N = 51), but not at 3 months (n = 40). Data-driven processing, dissociation and anxiety increases during the trauma stories also predicted intrusive memories. Enhanced perceptual priming and data-driven processing were associated with lower verbal intelligence. Limitations It is unclear to what extent these findings generalize to real-life traumatic events and whether they are specific to negative emotional events. Conclusions The results provide some support for the role of perceptual processing and perceptual priming in reexperiencing symptoms. PMID:23207970
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Processing of false belief passages during natural story comprehension: An fMRI study.
Kandylaki, Katerina D; Nagels, Arne; Tune, Sarah; Wiese, Richard; Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina; Kircher, Tilo
2015-11-01
The neural correlates of theory of mind (ToM) are typically studied using paradigms which require participants to draw explicit, task-related inferences (e.g., in the false belief task). In a natural setup, such as listening to stories, false belief mentalizing occurs incidentally as part of narrative processing. In our experiment, participants listened to auditorily presented stories with false belief passages (implicit false belief processing) and immediately after each story answered comprehension questions (explicit false belief processing), while neural responses were measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). All stories included (among other situations) one false belief condition and one closely matched control condition. For the implicit ToM processing, we modeled the hemodynamic response during the false belief passages in the story and compared it to the hemodynamic response during the closely matched control passages. For implicit mentalizing, we found activation in typical ToM processing regions, that is the angular gyrus (AG), superior medial frontal gyrus (SmFG), precuneus (PCUN), middle temporal gyrus (MTG) as well as in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) billaterally. For explicit ToM, we only found AG activation. The conjunction analysis highlighted the left AG and MTG as well as the bilateral IFG as overlapping ToM processing regions for both implicit and explicit modes. Implicit ToM processing during listening to false belief passages, recruits the left SmFG and billateral PCUN in addition to the "mentalizing network" known form explicit processing tasks. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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Scott, Rose M; Roby, Erin
2015-01-01
Prior to age four, children succeed in non-elicited-response false-belief tasks but fail elicited-response false-belief tasks. To explain this discrepancy, the processing-load account argues that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in infancy, as indicated by early success on non-elicited-response tasks, but that children's ability to demonstrate this capacity depends on the processing demands of the task and children's processing skills. When processing demands exceed young children's processing abilities, such as in standard elicited-response tasks, children fail despite their capacity to represent beliefs. Support for this account comes from recent evidence that reducing processing demands improves young children's performance: when demands are sufficiently reduced, 2.5-year-olds succeed in elicited-response tasks. Here we sought complementary evidence for the processing-load account by examining whether increasing processing demands impeded children's performance in a non-elicited-response task. 3-year-olds were tested in a preferential-looking task in which they heard a change-of-location false-belief story accompanied by a picture book; across children, we manipulated the amount of linguistic ambiguity in the story. The final page of the book showed two images: one that was consistent with the main character's false belief and one that was consistent with reality. When the story was relatively unambiguous, children looked reliably longer at the false-belief-consistent image, successfully demonstrating their false-belief understanding. When the story was ambiguous, however, this undermined children's performance: looking times to the belief-consistent image were correlated with verbal ability, and only children with verbal skills in the upper quartile of the sample demonstrated a significant preference for the belief-consistent image. These results support the processing-load account by demonstrating that regardless of whether a task involves an elicited response, children's performance depends on the processing demands of the task and their processing skills. These findings also have implications for alternative, deflationary accounts of early false-belief understanding.
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Scott, Rose M.; Roby, Erin
2015-01-01
Prior to age four, children succeed in non-elicited-response false-belief tasks but fail elicited-response false-belief tasks. To explain this discrepancy, the processing-load account argues that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in infancy, as indicated by early success on non-elicited-response tasks, but that children’s ability to demonstrate this capacity depends on the processing demands of the task and children’s processing skills. When processing demands exceed young children’s processing abilities, such as in standard elicited-response tasks, children fail despite their capacity to represent beliefs. Support for this account comes from recent evidence that reducing processing demands improves young children’s performance: when demands are sufficiently reduced, 2.5-year-olds succeed in elicited-response tasks. Here we sought complementary evidence for the processing-load account by examining whether increasing processing demands impeded children’s performance in a non-elicited-response task. 3-year-olds were tested in a preferential-looking task in which they heard a change-of-location false-belief story accompanied by a picture book; across children, we manipulated the amount of linguistic ambiguity in the story. The final page of the book showed two images: one that was consistent with the main character’s false belief and one that was consistent with reality. When the story was relatively unambiguous, children looked reliably longer at the false-belief-consistent image, successfully demonstrating their false-belief understanding. When the story was ambiguous, however, this undermined children’s performance: looking times to the belief-consistent image were correlated with verbal ability, and only children with verbal skills in the upper quartile of the sample demonstrated a significant preference for the belief-consistent image. These results support the processing-load account by demonstrating that regardless of whether a task involves an elicited response, children’s performance depends on the processing demands of the task and their processing skills. These findings also have implications for alternative, deflationary accounts of early false-belief understanding. PMID:26562840
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Functional anatomy of listening and reading comprehension during development.
Berl, Madison M; Duke, Elizabeth S; Mayo, Jessica; Rosenberger, Lisa R; Moore, Erin N; VanMeter, John; Ratner, Nan Bernstein; Vaidya, Chandan J; Gaillard, William Davis
2010-08-01
Listening and reading comprehension of paragraph-length material are considered higher-order language skills fundamental to social and academic functioning. Using ecologically relevant language stimuli that were matched for difficulty according to developmental level, we analyze the effects of task, age, neuropsychological skills, and post-task performance on fMRI activation and hemispheric laterality. Areas of supramodal language processing are identified, with the most robust region being left-lateralized activation along the superior temporal sulcus. Functionally, this conjunction has a role in semantic and syntactic processing, leading us to refer to this conjunction as "comprehension cortex." Different from adults, supramodal areas for children include less extensive inferior frontal gyrus but more extensive right cerebellum and right temporal pole. Broader neuroanatomical pathways are recruited for reading, reflecting the more active processing and larger set of cognitive demands needed for reading compared to listening to stories. ROI analyses reveal that reading is a less lateralized language task than listening in inferior frontal and superior temporal areas, which likely reflects the difficulty of the task as children in this study are still developing their reading skills. For listening to stories, temporal activation is stable by age four with no correlations with age, neuropsychological skills or post-task performance. In contrast, frontal activation during listening to stories occurs more often in older children, and frontal activation is positively correlated with better performance on comprehension questions, suggesting that the activation of frontal networks may reflect greater integration and depth of story processing. 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Central load reduces peripheral processing: Evidence from incidental memory of background speech.
Halin, Niklas; Marsh, John E; Sörqvist, Patrik
2015-12-01
Is there a trade-off between central (working memory) load and peripheral (perceptual) processing? To address this question, participants were requested to undertake an n-back task in one of two levels of central/cognitive load (i.e., 1-back or 2-back) in the presence of a to-be-ignored story presented via headphones. Participants were told to ignore the background story, but they were given a surprise memory test of what had been said in the background story, immediately after the n-back task was completed. Memory was poorer in the high central load (2-back) condition in comparison with the low central load (1-back) condition. Hence, when people compensate for higher central load, by increasing attentional engagement, peripheral processing is constrained. Moreover, participants with high working memory capacity (WMC) - with a superior ability for attentional engagement - remembered less of the background story, but only in the low central load condition. Taken together, peripheral processing - as indexed by incidental memory of background speech - is constrained when task engagement is high. © 2015 The Authors. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology published by Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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Murray, Kim; Johnston, Kate; Cunnane, Helen; Kerr, Charlotte; Spain, Debbie; Gillan, Nicola; Hammond, Neil; Murphy, Declan; Happé, Francesca
2017-06-01
Real-life social processing abilities of adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) can be hard to capture in lab-based experimental tasks. A novel measure of social cognition, the "Strange Stories Film task' (SSFt), was designed to overcome limitations of available measures in the field. Brief films were made based on the scenarios from the Strange Stories task (Happé) and designed to capture the subtle social-cognitive difficulties observed in ASD adults. Twenty neurotypical adults were recruited to pilot the new measure. A final test set was produced and administered to a group of 20 adults with ASD and 20 matched controls, alongside established social cognition tasks and questionnaire measures of empathy, alexithymia and ASD traits. The SSFt was more effective than existing measures at differentiating the ASD group from the control group. In the ASD group, the SSFt was associated with the Strange Stories task. The SSFt is a potentially useful tool to identify social cognitive dis/abilities in ASD, with preliminary evidence of adequate convergent validity. Future research directions are discussed. Autism Res 2017. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1120-1132. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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Kaland, Nils; Callesen, Kirsten; Møller-Nielsen, Annette; Mortensen, Erik Lykke; Smith, Lars
2008-07-01
Although a number of advanced theory of mind tasks have been developed, there is a dearth of information on whether performances on different tasks are associated. The present study examined the performance of 21 children and adolescents with diagnoses of Asperger syndrome (AS) and 20 typically developing controls on three advanced theory of mind tasks: The Eyes Task, the Strange Stories, and the Stories from Everyday Life. The participants in the clinical group demonstrated lower performance than the controls on all the three tasks. The pattern of findings, however, indicates that these tasks may share different information-processing requirements in addition to tapping different mentalizing abilities.
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Mizuno, Kei; Tanaka, Masaaki; Tanabe, Hiroki C; Sadato, Norihiro; Watanabe, Yasuyoshi
2012-07-01
The kana pick-out test has been widely used in Japan to evaluate the ability to divide attention in both adult and pediatric patients. However, the neural substrates underlying the ability to divide attention using the kana pick-out test, which requires participants to pick out individual letters (vowels) in a story while also reading for comprehension, thus requiring simultaneous allocation of attention to both activities, are still unclear. Moreover, outside of the clinical area, neuroimaging studies focused on the mechanisms of divided attention during complex story comprehension are rare. Thus, the purpose of the present study, to clarify the neural substrates of kana pick-out test, improves our current understanding of the basic neural mechanisms of dual task performance in verbal memory function. We compared patterns of activation in the brain obtained during performance of the individual tasks of vowel identification and story comprehension, to levels of activation when participants performed the two tasks simultaneously during the kana pick-out test. We found that activations of the left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus and superior parietal lobule increase in functional connectivity to a greater extent during the dual task condition compared to the two single task conditions. In contrast, activations of the left fusiform gyrus and middle temporal gyrus, which are significantly involved in picking out letters and complex sentences during story comprehension, respectively, were reduced in the dual task condition compared to during the two single task conditions. These results suggest that increased activations of the dorsal inferior frontal gyrus and superior parietal lobule during dual task performance may be associated with the capacity for attentional resources, and reduced activations of the left fusiform gyrus and middle temporal gyrus may reflect the difficulty of concurrent processing of the two tasks. In addition, the increase in synchronization between the left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus and superior parietal lobule in the dual task condition may induce effective communication between these brain regions and contribute to more attentional processing than in the single task condition, due to greater and more complex demands on voluntary attentional resources. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Horowitz-Kraus, Tzipi; Farah, Rola; DiFrancesco, Mark; Vannest, Jennifer
2017-02-01
Story listening in children relies on brain regions supporting speech perception, auditory word recognition, syntax, semantics, and discourse abilities, along with the ability to attend and process information (part of executive functions). Speed-of-processing is an early-developed executive function. We used functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to demonstrate the relationship between story listening and speed-of-processing in preschool-age children. Eighteen participants performed story-listening tasks during MRI scans. Functional and structural connectivity analysis was performed using the speed-of-processing scores as regressors. Activation in the superior frontal gyrus during story listening positively correlated with speed-of-processing scores. This region was functionally connected with the superior temporal gyrus, insula, and hippocampus. Fractional anisotropy in the inferior frontooccipital fasciculus, which connects the superior frontal and temporal gyri, was positively correlated with speed-of-processing scores. Our results suggest that speed-of-processing skills in preschool-age children are reflected in functional activation and connectivity during story listening and may act as a biomarker for future academic abilities. Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.
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Age and Task-Related Effects on Young Children's Understanding of a Complex Picture Story
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hayward, Denyse; Schneider, Phyllis; Gillam, Ronald B.
2009-01-01
In this study we examined age- and task-related effects in story schema knowledge across an independent narrative task (story formulations) and a supported narrative task (answering questions). We also examined age-related changes to questions about the story as a whole. Participants were typically developing English-speaking children aged 4, 5,…
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Koutsoftas, Anthony D
2016-12-01
Difficulties with written expression are an important consideration in the assessment and treatment of school-age children. This study evaluated how intermediate-grade children with and without written language difficulties fared on a writing task housed within the Hayes and Berninger (2014) writing process framework. Sixty-four children completed a writing task whereby they planned, wrote, and revised a narrative story across 3 days. Children had extended time to produce an outline, first draft, and final copy of their story. Language transcription approaches were used to obtain measures reflecting writing productivity, complexity, accuracy, and mechanics, in addition to measures of planning and revision. Results indicated that children with writing difficulties produced poorer quality stories compared with their peers yet were not significantly different across all measures. Children with typical development produced longer stories with better spelling accuracy. Writing process measures predicted significant amounts of variance in writing quality across the sample. Writing should be considered as part of language assessment and intervention, whether as the sole language difficulty or alongside difficulties with speaking, listening, or reading in children with language-based learning difficulties. Implications for translation of research to practice and service delivery are provided.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Wyatt, Neal
2007-01-01
Readers often think of nonfiction as an information experience and not as a story experience, and indeed many nonfiction titles are task oriented, teaching readers how to knit or outlining the process of building a fence. But there is a huge body of nonfiction that is both informative and story-based. New nonfiction classics like Jon Krakauer's…
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Inference generation and story comprehension among children with ADHD.
Van Neste, Jessica; Hayden, Angela; Lorch, Elizabeth P; Milich, Richard
2015-02-01
Academic difficulties are well-documented among children with ADHD. Exploring these difficulties through story comprehension research has revealed deficits among children with ADHD in making causal connections between events and in using causal structure and thematic importance to guide recall of stories. Important to theories of story comprehension and implied in these deficits is the ability to make inferences. Often, characters' goals are implicit and explanations of events must be inferred. The purpose of the present study was to compare the inferences generated during story comprehension by 23 7- to 11-year-old children with ADHD (16 males) and 35 comparison peers (19 males). Children watched two televised stories, each paused at five points. In the experimental condition, at each pause children told what they were thinking about the story, whereas in the control condition no responses were made during pauses. After viewing, children recalled the story. Several types of inferences and inference plausibility were coded. Children with ADHD generated fewer of the most essential inferences, plausible explanatory inferences, than did comparison children, both during story processing and during story recall. The groups did not differ on production of other types of inferences. Group differences in generating inferences during the think-aloud task significantly mediated group differences in patterns of recall. Both groups recalled more of the most important story information after completing the think-aloud task. Generating fewer explanatory inferences has important implications for story comprehension deficits in children with ADHD.
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Deen, Ben; McCarthy, Gregory
2010-05-01
Prior neuroimaging research has implicated regions within and near the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in the visual processing of biological motion and of the intentions implied by specific movements. However, it is unknown whether this region is engaged during the processing of human motion at a conceptual level, such as during story comprehension. Here, we obtained functional magnetic resonance images from subjects reading brief stories that described a human character's background and then concluded with an action or decision made by the character. Half of the stories contained incidental descriptions of biological motion (such as the character's walking or grasping) while the remaining half did not. As a second factor, the final action of the story was either congruent or incongruent with the character's background and implied goals and intentions. Stories that contained biological motion strongly activated the pSTS bilaterally, along with ventral temporal areas, premotor cortex, left motor cortex, and the precuneus. Active regions of pSTS in individual subjects closely overlapped with regions identified with a separate biological motion localizer (point-light display) task. Reading incongruent versus congruent stories activated dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral anterior insula. These results support the hypothesis that reading can engage higher visual cortex in a content-specific manner, and suggest that the presence of biological motion should be controlled as a potential confound in fMRI studies using story comprehension tasks. 2010. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
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Young children have difficulty ascribing true beliefs.
Riggs, Kevin J; Simpson, Andrew
2005-05-01
Using the format of a false belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), we investigated the ability of 88 3- and 4-year-olds to ascribe a previously held true belief to a story protagonist. In an unexpected transfer task, children found true belief ascription as difficult as false belief ascription even though they could answer memory questions about story details. Results are discussed in relation to theoretical accounts of theory of mind development that stress the importance of understanding the falsity of belief, and those accounts that stress the importance of information or executive processes.
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Rossell, Susan L; Van Rheenen, Tamsyn E
2013-01-01
Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability to understand the mental state of self and others. There is limited research into this topic in bipolar disorder (BD), with no previous study examining ToM in a BD group within a psychotic manic phase. Twenty-eight psychotic manic BD patients were compared with 30 schizophrenia (SCZ) patients and 29 healthy controls (HC). Participants performed a ToM story comprehension task that compared ToM stories and non-ToM stories (which we relabelled non-ToM "semantic" stories). Performance was examined by answering comprehension questions. Both patient groups were equally impaired on their scores for ToM stories (scores BD = 10/24, SCZ = 9/24, HC = 14/24, p < .001). Interestingly, both patient groups showed reduced performance on non-ToM semantic stories (scores BD = 12/24, SCZ = 9/24, HC = 15/24, p < .001); SCZ showed a larger deficit. Reduced ToM performance was correlated with delusion severity in the BD group only. ToM performance was impaired in BD patients experiencing psychotic symptoms. Patient performance was also impaired on the control condition (i.e., non-ToM semantic stories) supporting an additional deficit in semantic processing.
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Illustrating Story Plans: Does a Mnemonic Strategy Including Art Media Render More Elaborate Text?
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Dunn, Michael W.
2012-01-01
Students who have difficulty with academics often benefit from learning mnemonic strategies which provide a step-by-step process to accomplish a task. Three fourth-grade students who struggled with writing learned the Ask, Reflect, Text (ART) strategy to help them produce more elaborate narrative story text. After initially asking the questions…
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An Exploratory Study of a Story Problem Assessment: Understanding Children's Number Sense
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Shumway, Jessica F.; Westenskow, Arla; Moyer-Packenham, Patricia S.
2016-01-01
The purpose of this study was to identify and describe students' use of number sense as they solved story problem tasks. Three 8- and 9-year-old students participated in clinical interviews. Through a process of holistic and qualitative coding, researchers used the number sense view as a theoretical framework for exploring how students' number…
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Cook, Sarah E.; Sisco, Shannon M.; Marsiske, Michael
2013-01-01
While driving is a complex task, it becomes relatively automatic over time although unfamiliar situations require increased cognitive effort. Much research has examined driving risk in cognitively impaired elders and found little effect. This study assessed whether mildly memory impaired elders made disproportionate errors in driving or story recall, under simultaneous simulated driving and story recall. Forty-six healthy (61% women; mean age = 76.4) and 15 memory impaired (66% women, mean age = 79.4) elders participated. Cognitive status was determined by neuropsychological performance. Results showed that during dual-task conditions, participants stayed in lane more, and recalled stories more poorly, than when they did the tasks separately. Follow-up analysis revealed that verbatim recall, in particular, was reduced while driving for healthy participants. While memory impaired participants performed more poorly than healthy controls on both tasks, cognitive status was not associated with greater dual-task costs when driving and story recall were combined. PMID:23043546
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Cook, Sarah E; Sisco, Shannon M; Marsiske, Michael
2013-01-01
While driving is a complex task, it becomes relatively automatic over time although unfamiliar situations require increased cognitive effort. Much research has examined driving risk in cognitively impaired elders and found little effect. This study assessed whether mildly memory impaired elders made disproportionate errors in driving or story recall, under simultaneous simulated driving and story recall. Forty-six healthy (61% women; mean age = 76.4) and 15 memory impaired (66% women, mean age = 79.4) elders participated. Cognitive status was determined by neuropsychological performance. Results showed that during dual-task conditions, participants stayed in lane more, and recalled stories more poorly, than when they did the tasks separately. Follow-up analysis revealed that verbatim recall, in particular, was reduced while driving for healthy participants. While memory impaired participants performed more poorly than healthy controls on both tasks, cognitive status was not associated with greater dual-task costs when driving and story recall were combined.
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Story Processing Ability in Cognitively Healthy Younger and Older Adults
Wright, Heather Harris; Capilouto, Gilson J.; Srinivasan, Cidambi; Fergadiotis, Gerasimos
2012-01-01
Purpose The purpose of the study was to examine the relationships among measures of comprehension and production for stories depicted in wordless pictures books and measures of memory and attention for 2 age groups. Method Sixty cognitively healthy adults participated. They consisted of two groups—young adults (20–29 years of age) and older adults (70–89 years of age). Participants completed cognitive measures and several discourse tasks; these included telling stories depicted in wordless picture books and answering multiple-choice comprehension questions pertaining to the story. Results The 2 groups did not differ significantly for proportion of story propositions conveyed; however, the younger group performed significantly better on the comprehension measure as compared with the older group. Only the older group demonstrated a statistically significant relationship between the story measures. Performance on the production and comprehension measures significantly correlated with performance on the cognitive measures for the older group but not for the younger group. Conclusions The relationship between adults’ comprehension of stimuli used to elicit narrative production samples and their narrative productions differed across the life span, suggesting that discourse processing performance changes in healthy aging. Finally, the study’s findings suggest that memory and attention contribute to older adults’ story processing performance. PMID:21106701
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Egidi, Giovanna; Caramazza, Alfonso
2016-10-01
This research studies the neural systems underlying two integration processes that take place during natural discourse comprehension: consistency evaluation and passive comprehension. Evaluation was operationalized with a consistency judgment task and passive comprehension with a passive listening task. Using fMRI, the experiment examined the integration of incoming sentences with more recent, local context and with more distal, global context in these two tasks. The stimuli were stories in which we manipulated the consistency of the endings with the local context and the relevance of the global context for the integration of the endings. A whole-brain analysis revealed several differences between the two tasks. Two networks previously associated with semantic processing and attention orienting showed more activation during the judgment than the passive listening task. A network previously associated with episodic memory retrieval and construction of mental scenes showed greater activity when global context was relevant, but only during the judgment task. This suggests that evaluation, more than passive listening, triggers the reinstantiation of global context and the construction of a rich mental model for the story. Finally, a network previously linked to fluent updating of a knowledge base showed greater activity for locally consistent endings than inconsistent ones, but only during passive listening, suggesting a mode of comprehension that relies on a local scope approach to language processing. Taken together, these results show that consistency evaluation and passive comprehension weigh differently on distal and local information and are implemented, in part, by different brain networks.
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Developmental Trajectories of Form Perception: A Story of Attention
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kovshoff, Hanna; Iarocci, Grace; Shore, David I.; Burack, Jacob A.
2015-01-01
The developmental trajectories of selective and divided attention were examined in relation to the processing of hierarchically integrated stimuli. The participants included children in 4 age groups (6, 8, 10, and 12 years) and a group of young adults (24 years) who completed 2 computer-based attention tasks. In the selective attention task, the…
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Preservation of memory-based automaticity in reading for older adults.
Rawson, Katherine A; Touron, Dayna R
2015-12-01
Concerning age-related effects on cognitive skill acquisition, the modal finding is that older adults do not benefit from practice to the same extent as younger adults in tasks that afford a shift from slower algorithmic processing to faster memory-based processing. In contrast, Rawson and Touron (2009) demonstrated a relatively rapid shift to memory-based processing in the context of a reading task. The current research extended beyond this initial study to provide more definitive evidence for relative preservation of memory-based automaticity in reading tasks for older adults. Younger and older adults read short stories containing unfamiliar noun phrases (e.g., skunk mud) followed by disambiguating information indicating the combination's meaning (either the normatively dominant meaning or an alternative subordinate meaning). Stories were repeated across practice blocks, and then the noun phrases were presented in novel sentence frames in a transfer task. Both age groups shifted from computation to retrieval after relatively few practice trials (as evidenced by convergence of reading times for dominant and subordinate items). Most important, both age groups showed strong evidence for memory-based processing of the noun phrases in the transfer task. In contrast, older adults showed minimal shifting to retrieval in an alphabet arithmetic task, indicating that the preservation of memory-based automaticity in reading was task-specific. Discussion focuses on important implications for theories of memory-based automaticity in general and for specific theoretical accounts of age effects on memory-based automaticity, as well as fruitful directions for future research. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
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Hege, Inga; Dietl, Anita; Kiesewetter, Jan; Schelling, Jörg; Kiesewetter, Isabel
2018-02-28
Virtual patients (VPs) are narrative-based educational activities to train clinical reasoning in a safe environment. Our aim was to explore the influence of the design of the narrative and level of difficulty on the clinical reasoning process, diagnostic accuracy and time-on-task. In a randomized controlled trial, we analyzed the clinical reasoning process of 46 medical students with six VPs in three different variations: (1) patients showing a friendly behavior, (2) patients showing a disruptive behavior and (3) a version without a patient story. For easy VPs, we did not see a significant difference in diagnostic accuracy. For difficult VPs, the diagnostic accuracy was significantly higher for participants who worked on the friendly VPs compared to the other two groups. Independent from VP difficulty, participants identified significantly more problems and tests for disruptive than for friendly VPs; time on task was comparable for these two groups. The extrinsic motivation of participants working on the VPs without a patient story was significantly lower than for the students working on the friendly VPs. Our results indicate that the measured VP difficulty has a higher influence on the clinical reasoning process and diagnostic accuracy than the variations in the narratives.
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Mouse-tracking evidence for parallel anticipatory option evaluation.
Cranford, Edward A; Moss, Jarrod
2017-12-23
In fast-paced, dynamic tasks, the ability to anticipate the future outcome of a sequence of events is crucial to quickly selecting an appropriate course of action among multiple alternative options. There are two classes of theories that describe how anticipation occurs. Serial theories assume options are generated and evaluated one at a time, in order of quality, whereas parallel theories assume simultaneous generation and evaluation. The present research examined the option evaluation process during a task designed to be analogous to prior anticipation tasks, but within the domain of narrative text comprehension. Prior research has relied on indirect, off-line measurement of the option evaluation process during anticipation tasks. Because the movement of the hand can provide a window into underlying cognitive processes, online metrics such as continuous mouse tracking provide more fine-grained measurements of cognitive processing as it occurs in real time. In this study, participants listened to three-sentence stories and predicted the protagonists' final action by moving a mouse toward one of three possible options. Each story was presented with either one (control condition) or two (distractor condition) plausible ending options. Results seem most consistent with a parallel option evaluation process because initial mouse trajectories deviated further from the best option in the distractor condition compared to the control condition. It is difficult to completely rule out all possible serial processing accounts, although the results do place constraints on the time frame in which a serial processing explanation must operate.
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Language Testing and the Assessment of Dementia in Second Language Settings: A Case Study.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Baker, Rosemary
1996-01-01
Reports on a patient of Japanese background with suspected dementia in an English-speaking geriatric unit. The subject was tested in Japanese using tasks such as naming, story recall, and processing by semantic category. Results demonstrate the potential contribution of information from language-based tasks in the person's preferred language to…
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Hutton, John S; Phelan, Kieran; Horowitz-Kraus, Tzipi; Dudley, Jonathan; Altaye, Mekibib; DeWitt, Thomas; Holland, Scott K
2017-01-01
Expanding behavioral and neurobiological evidence affirms benefits of shared (especially parent-child) reading on cognitive development during early childhood. However, the majority of this evidence involves factors under caregiver control, the influence of those intrinsic to the child, such as interest or engagement in reading, largely indirect or unclear. The cerebellum is increasingly recognized as playing a "smoothing" role in higher-level cognitive processing and learning, via feedback loops with language, limbic and association cortices. We utilized functional MRI to explore the relationship between child engagement during a mother-child reading observation and neural activation and connectivity during a story listening task, in a sample of 4-year old girls. Children exhibiting greater interest and engagement in the narrative showed increased activation in right-sided cerebellar association areas during the task, and greater functional connectivity between this activation cluster and language and executive function areas. Our findings suggest a potential cerebellar "boost" mechanism responsive to child engagement level that may contribute to emergent literacy development during early childhood, and synergy between caregiver and child factors during story sharing.
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Narrative abilities, memory and attention in children with a specific language impairment.
Duinmeijer, Iris; de Jong, Jan; Scheper, Annette
2012-01-01
While narrative tasks have proven to be valid measures for detecting language disorders, measuring communicative skills and predicting future academic performance, research into the comparability of different narrative tasks has shown that outcomes are dependent on the type of task used. Although many of the studies detecting task differences touch upon the fact that tasks place differential demands on cognitive abilities like auditory attention and memory, few studies have related specific narrative tasks to these cognitive abilities. Examining this relation is especially warranted for children with specific language impairment (SLI), who are characterized by language problems, but often have problems in other cognitive domains as well. In the current research, a comparison was made between a story retelling task (The Bus Story) and a story generation task (The Frog Story) in a group of children with SLI (n= 34) and a typically developing group (n= 38) from the same age range. In addition to the two narrative tasks, sustained auditory attention (TEA-Ch) and verbal working memory (WISC digit span and the Dutch version of the CVLT-C word list recall) were measured. Correlations were computed between the narrative, the memory and the attention scores. A group comparison showed that the children with SLI scored significantly worse than the typically developing children on several narrative measures as well as on sustained auditory attention and verbal working memory. A within-subjects comparison of the scores on the two narrative tasks showed a contrast between the tasks on several narrative measures. Furthermore, correlational analyses showed that, on the level of plot structure, the story generation task correlated with sustained auditory attention, while the story retelling task correlated with word list recall. Mean length of utterance (MLU) on the other hand correlated with digit span but not with sustained auditory attention. While children with SLI have problems with narratives in general, their performance is also dependent on the specific elicitation task used for research or diagnostics. Various narrative tasks generate different scores and are differentially correlated to cognitive skills like attention and memory, making the selection of a given task crucial in the clinical setting. © 2012 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.
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Narrative Analysis: Clinical Applications of Story Generation and Story Retelling.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Merritt, Donna DiSegna; Liles, Betty Z.
1989-01-01
Twenty language-disordered and 20 nonimpaired children, aged 9-11, performed story generation and story retelling tasks. For both groups, retold narratives were longer and contained more story grammar components and complete episode structures. Clause length differentiated story generation from story retelling for the language-disordered children…
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Semantic Learning Modifies Perceptual Face Processing
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Heisz, Jennifer J.; Shedden, Judith M.
2009-01-01
Face processing changes when a face is learned with personally relevant information. In a five-day learning paradigm, faces were presented with rich semantic stories that conveyed personal information about the faces. Event-related potentials were recorded before and after learning during a passive viewing task. When faces were novel, we observed…
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Effects of Elicitation Procedures on the Narratives of Normal and Closed Head-Injured Adults.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Liles, Betty Z.; And Others
1989-01-01
Twenty-three normal adults and four closed head-injured (CHI) adults with a high level of language recovery retold and generated stories. The two tasks differentially influenced the performance of both groups. The two groups differed in measures of cohesiveness and story grammar only in the story generation task. (Author/JDD)
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Phelan, Kieran; Horowitz-Kraus, Tzipi; Dudley, Jonathan; Altaye, Mekibib; DeWitt, Thomas; Holland, Scott K.
2017-01-01
Expanding behavioral and neurobiological evidence affirms benefits of shared (especially parent-child) reading on cognitive development during early childhood. However, the majority of this evidence involves factors under caregiver control, the influence of those intrinsic to the child, such as interest or engagement in reading, largely indirect or unclear. The cerebellum is increasingly recognized as playing a “smoothing” role in higher-level cognitive processing and learning, via feedback loops with language, limbic and association cortices. We utilized functional MRI to explore the relationship between child engagement during a mother-child reading observation and neural activation and connectivity during a story listening task, in a sample of 4-year old girls. Children exhibiting greater interest and engagement in the narrative showed increased activation in right-sided cerebellar association areas during the task, and greater functional connectivity between this activation cluster and language and executive function areas. Our findings suggest a potential cerebellar “boost” mechanism responsive to child engagement level that may contribute to emergent literacy development during early childhood, and synergy between caregiver and child factors during story sharing. PMID:28562619
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hutchins, Tiffany L.; Deraway, Chelsea; Prelock, Patricia; O'Neill, Ana
2017-01-01
The production of specific mental state terms types and functions by caregivers and their TD children and caregivers and their children with ASD were assessed in two contexts: a parent's story-telling task and a child's story-telling task. Caregivers of children with ASD produced less causal talk and proportionally less desire and cognitive talk…
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Mapping Anterior Temporal Lobe Language Areas with FMRI: A Multi-Center Normative Study
Binder, Jeffrey R.; Gross, William L.; Allendorfer, Jane B.; Bonilha, Leonardo; Chapin, Jessica; Edwards, Jonathan C.; Grabowski, Thomas J.; Langfitt, John T.; Loring, David W.; Lowe, Mark J.; Koenig, Katherine; Morgan, Paul S.; Ojemann, Jeffrey G.; Rorden, Christopher; Szaflarski, Jerzy P.; Tivarus, Madalina E.; Weaver, Kurt E.
2010-01-01
Removal of the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) is an effective surgical treatment for intractable temporal lobe epilepsy but carries a risk of language and verbal memory deficits. Preoperative localization of functional zones in the ATL might help reduce these risks, yet fMRI protocols in current widespread use produce very little activation in this region. Based on recent evidence suggesting a role for the ATL in semantic integration, we designed an fMRI protocol comparing comprehension of brief narratives (Story task) with a semantically shallow control task involving serial arithmetic (Math task). The Story > Math contrast elicited strong activation throughout the ATL, lateral temporal lobe, and medial temporal lobe bilaterally in an initial cohort of 18 healthy participants. The task protocol was then implemented at 6 other imaging centers using identical methods. Data from a second cohort of participants scanned at these centers closely replicated the results from the initial cohort. The Story-Math protocol provides a reliable method for activation of surgical regions of interest in the ATL. The bilateral activation supports previous claims that conceptual processing involves both temporal lobes. Used in combination with language lateralization measures, reliable ATL activation maps may be useful for predicting cognitive outcome in ATL surgery, though the validity of this approach needs to be established in a prospective surgical series. PMID:20884358
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Searching for Judy: how small mysteries affect narrative processes and memory.
Love, Jessica; McKoon, Gail; Gerrig, Richard J
2010-05-01
Current theories of text processing say little about how authors' narrative choices, including the introduction of small mysteries, can affect readers' narrative experiences. Gerrig, Love, and McKoon (2009) provided evidence that 1 type of small mystery-a character introduced without information linking him or her to the story-affects readers' moment-by-moment processing. For that project, participants read stories that introduced characters by proper name alone (e.g., "Judy") or with information connecting the character to the rest of the story (e.g., "our principal Judy"). In an online recognition probe task, responses to the character's name 3 lines after his or her introduction were faster when the character had not been introduced with connecting information, suggesting that the character remained accessible awaiting resolution. In the 4 experiments in this article, we extend our theoretical analysis of small mysteries. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found evidence that trait information (e.g., "daredevil Judy") is not sufficient to connect a character to a text. In Experiments 3 and 4, we found evidence that the moment-by-moment processing effects of such small mysteries also affect readers' memory for the stories. We interpret the results in terms of Kintsch's (1988) construction-integration model of discourse processing. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved.
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Home Reading Environment and Brain Activation in Preschool Children Listening to Stories.
Hutton, John S; Horowitz-Kraus, Tzipi; Mendelsohn, Alan L; DeWitt, Tom; Holland, Scott K
2015-09-01
Parent-child reading is widely advocated to promote cognitive development, including in recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics to begin this practice at birth. Although parent-child reading has been shown in behavioral studies to improve oral language and print concepts, quantifiable effects on the brain have not been previously studied. Our study used blood oxygen level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the relationship between home reading environment and brain activity during a story listening task in a sample of preschool-age children. We hypothesized that while listening to stories, children with greater home reading exposure would exhibit higher activation of left-sided brain regions involved with semantic processing (extraction of meaning). Nineteen 3- to 5-year-old children were selected from a longitudinal study of normal brain development. All completed blood oxygen level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging using an age-appropriate story listening task, where narrative alternated with tones. We performed a series of whole-brain regression analyses applying composite, subscale, and individual reading-related items from the validated StimQ-P measure of home cognitive environment as explanatory variables for neural activation. Higher reading exposure (StimQ-P Reading subscale score) was positively correlated (P < .05, corrected) with neural activation in the left-sided parietal-temporal-occipital association cortex, a "hub" region supporting semantic language processing, controlling for household income. In preschool children listening to stories, greater home reading exposure is positively associated with activation of brain areas supporting mental imagery and narrative comprehension, controlling for household income. These neural biomarkers may help inform eco-bio-developmental models of emergent literacy. Copyright © 2015 by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
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Badcock, Nicholas A.; Nye, Abigail; Bishop, Dorothy V. M.
2011-01-01
Language is lateralised to the left hemisphere in most people, but it is unclear whether the same degree and direction of lateralisation is found for all verbal tasks and whether laterality is affected by task difficulty. We used functional transcranial Doppler ultrasonography (fTCD) to assess the lateralisation of language processing in 27 young adults using three tasks: word generation (WG), auditory naming (AN), and picture story (PS). WG and AN are active tasks requiring behavioural responses whereas PS is a passive task that involves listening to an auditory story accompanied by pictures. We also examined the effect of task difficulty by a post hoc behavioural categorisation of trials in the WG task and a word frequency manipulation in the AN task. fTCD was used to measure task-dependent blood flow velocity changes in the left and right middle cerebral arteries. All of these tasks were significantly left lateralised: WG, 77% of individuals left, 5% right; AN, 72% left: 4% right; PS, 56% left: 0% right. There were significant positive relationships between WG and AN (r = 0.56) as well as AN and PS (r = .76) but not WG and PS (r = −0.22). The task difficulty manipulation affected accuracy in both WG and AN tasks, as well as reaction time in the AN task, but did not significantly influence laterality indices in either task. It is concluded that verbal tasks are not interchangeable when assessing cerebral lateralisation, but that differences between tasks are not a consequence of task difficulty. PMID:23098198
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Ehlers, Anke; Mauchnik, Jana; Handley, Rachel
2012-01-01
Unwanted memories of traumatic events are a core symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. A range of interventions including imaginal exposure and elaboration of the trauma memory in its autobiographical context are effective in reducing such unwanted memories. This study explored whether priming for stimuli that occur in the context of trauma and evaluative conditioning may play a role in the therapeutic effects of these procedures. Healthy volunteers (N = 122) watched analogue traumatic and neutral picture stories. They were then randomly allocated to 20 min of either imaginal exposure, autobiographical memory elaboration, or a control condition designed to prevent further processing of the picture stories. A blurred picture identification task showed that neutral objects that preceded traumatic pictures in the stories were subsequently more readily identified than those that had preceded neutral stories, indicating enhanced priming. There was also an evaluative conditioning effect in that participants disliked neutral objects that had preceded traumatic pictures more. Autobiographical memory elaboration reduced the enhanced priming effect. Both interventions reduced the evaluative conditioning effect. Imaginal exposure and autobiographical memory elaboration both reduced the frequency of subsequent unwanted memories of the picture stories. PMID:21227404
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A Structural Equation Model of the Writing Process in Typically-Developing Sixth Grade Children
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Koutsoftas, Anthony D.; Gray, Shelley
2013-01-01
The purpose of this study was to evaluate how sixth grade children planned, translated, and revised written narrative stories using a task reflecting current instructional and assessment practices. A modified version of the Hayes and Flower (1980) writing process model was used as the theoretical framework for the study. Two hundred one…
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Coding in Senior School Mathematics with Live Editing
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Thompson, Ian
2017-01-01
In this paper, an example is offered of a problem-solving task for senior secondary school students which was given in the context of a story. As the story unfolds, the task requires progressively more complex forms of linear programming to be applied. Coding in MATLAB is used throughout the task in such a way that it supports the increasing…
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Relation between measures of speech-in-noise performance and measures of efferent activity
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Smith, Brad; Harkrider, Ashley; Burchfield, Samuel; Nabelek, Anna
2003-04-01
Individual differences in auditory perceptual abilities in noise are well documented but the factors causing such variability are unclear. The purpose of this study was to determine if individual differences in responses measured from the auditory efferent system were correlated to individual variations in speech-in-noise performance. The relation between behavioral performance on three speech-in-noise tasks and two objective measures of the efferent auditory system were examined in thirty normal-hearing, young adults. Two of the speech-in-noise tasks measured an acceptable noise level, the maximum level of speech-babble noise that a subject is willing to accept while listening to a story. For these, the acceptable noise level was evaluated using both an ipsilateral (story and noise in same ear) and a contralateral (story and noise in opposite ears) paradigm. The third speech-in-noise task evaluated speech recognition using monosyllabic words presented in competing speech babble. Auditory efferent activity was assessed by examining the resulting suppression of click-evoked otoacoustic emissions following the introduction of a contralateral, broad-band stimulus and the activity of the ipsilateral and contralateral acoustic reflex arc was evaluated using tones and broad-band noise. Results will be discussed relative to current theories of speech in noise performance and auditory inhibitory processes.
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Performance of children with autism spectrum disorder on advanced theory of mind tasks.
Brent, Ella; Rios, Patricia; Happé, Francesca; Charman, Tony
2004-09-01
Although a number of advanced theory of mind tasks have been developed, there is sparse information on whether performance on different tasks is associated. The study examined the performance of 20 high-functioning 6- to 12-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder and 20 controls on three high-level theory of mind tasks: Strange Stories, Cartoons and the children's version of the Eyes task. The pattern of findings suggests that the three tasks may share differing, non-specific, information-processing requirements in addition to tapping any putative mentalizing ability. They may also indicate a degree of dissociation between social-cognitive and social-perceptual or affective components of the mentalizing system.
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Sanefuji, Wakako; Haryu, Etsuko
2018-01-01
This study investigated the relationship between children’s abilities to understand causal sequences and another’s false belief. In Experiment 1, we tested 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children (n = 28, 28, 27, and 27, respectively) using false belief and picture sequencing tasks involving mechanical, behavioral, and psychological causality. Understanding causal sequences in mechanical, behavioral, and psychological stories was related to understanding other’s false beliefs. In Experiment 2, children who failed the initial false belief task (n = 50) were reassessed 5 months later. High scorers in the sequencing of the psychological stories in Experiment 1 were more likely to pass the standard false belief task than were the low scorers. Conversely, understanding causal sequences in the mechanical and behavioral stories in Experiment 1 did not predict passing the false belief task in Experiment 2. Thus, children may understand psychological causality before they are able to use it to understand false beliefs.
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Taking the Perspective of the Other Contributes to Awareness of Illness in Schizophrenia
Langdon, Robyn; Ward, Philip
2009-01-01
Two approaches dominate research on the lack of awareness of illness that characterizes schizophrenia. The “deficit” approach uses standardized neuropsychological batteries to identify the neural underpinnings of intact insight; the “nondeficit” approach investigates the psychological defense mechanisms that motivate denial of illness. We adopt, instead, a cognitive neuropsychological approach to model the cognitive processes which underpin insight and which might be either damaged (because of neuropathology) or not used (because of motivational forces). We conceive of these processes in terms of a metacognitive capacity “to see ourselves as others see us.” We predict that a general difficulty with adopting other mental perspectives (with “seeing the world as others do”), indexed by performance deficits on theory of mind (ToM) tasks, will impair insight in schizophrenia. Thirty schizophrenic patients (also assessed for insight) and 26 healthy controls completed a battery of ToM tasks which varied presentation modality, response mode and instruction type (picture sequencing, joke appreciation and story comprehension tasks). While patients performed more poorly than controls on all ToM tasks, impairment in patients was not concordant across tasks. ToM scores from the picture sequencing and joke appreciation tasks, and not the story comprehension task, intercorrelated significantly in patients and predicted insight. Findings support the view that insight relies upon a cognitive capacity to adopt the other perspective, which, if intact, contributes to the metacognitive capacity to reflect upon “one's own” mental health from the other perspective. Findings also suggest that the nature of perspective-taking difficulty which disrupts insight in schizophrenia is best revealed using ToM tasks with “indirect” instructions. PMID:18495647
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Text-speak processing impairs tactile location.
Head, James; Helton, William; Russell, Paul; Neumann, Ewald
2012-09-01
Dual task experiments have highlighted that driving while having a conversation on a cell phone can have negative impacts on driving (Strayer & Drews, 2007). It has also been noted that this negative impact is greater when reading a text-message (Lee, 2007). Commonly used in text-messaging are shortening devices collectively known as text-speak (e.g.,Ys I wll ttyl 2nite, Yes I will talk to you later tonight). To the authors' knowledge, there has been no investigation into the potential negative impacts of reading text-speak on concurrent performance on other tasks. Forty participants read a correctly spelled story and a story presented in text-speak while concurrently monitoring for a vibration around their waist. Slower reaction times and fewer correct vibration detections occurred while reading text-speak than while reading a correctly spelled story. The results suggest that reading text-speak imposes greater cognitive load than reading correctly spelled text. These findings suggest that the negative impact of text messaging on driving may be compounded by the messages being in text-speak, instead of orthographically correct text. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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Silent Films and Strange Stories: Theory of Mind, Gender, and Social Experiences in Middle Childhood
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Devine, Rory T.; Hughes, Claire
2013-01-01
In this study of two hundred and thirty 8- to 13-year-olds, a new "Silent Films" task is introduced, designed to address the dearth of research on theory of mind in older children by providing a film-based analogue of F. G. E. Happe's (1994) Strange Stories task. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that all items from both tasks loaded…
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Batterink, Laura; Neville, Helen
2011-11-01
The vast majority of word meanings are learned simply by extracting them from context rather than by rote memorization or explicit instruction. Although this skill is remarkable, little is known about the brain mechanisms involved. In the present study, ERPs were recorded as participants read stories in which pseudowords were presented multiple times, embedded in consistent, meaningful contexts (referred to as meaning condition, M+) or inconsistent, meaningless contexts (M-). Word learning was then assessed implicitly using a lexical decision task and explicitly through recall and recognition tasks. Overall, during story reading, M- words elicited a larger N400 than M+ words, suggesting that participants were better able to semantically integrate M+ words than M- words throughout the story. In addition, M+ words whose meanings were subsequently correctly recognized and recalled elicited a more positive ERP in a later time window compared with M+ words whose meanings were incorrectly remembered, consistent with the idea that the late positive component is an index of encoding processes. In the lexical decision task, no behavioral or electrophysiological evidence for implicit priming was found for M+ words. In contrast, during the explicit recognition task, M+ words showed a robust N400 effect. The N400 effect was dependent upon recognition performance, such that only correctly recognized M+ words elicited an N400. This pattern of results provides evidence that the explicit representations of word meanings can develop rapidly, whereas implicit representations may require more extensive exposure or more time to emerge.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Dunn, Michael W.; Finley, Susan
2010-01-01
Composing text is an essential skill for students. Assignments, tests, and emailing are a few examples of the many tasks which require students to generate thoughts and put them into prose. For many students, choosing a topic, creating an outline, generating an initial draft, and making edits to produce a final copy is a fluid process which poses…
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Effects of discrete emotions on young children's suggestibility.
Levine, Linda J; Burgess, Stewart L; Laney, Cara
2008-05-01
Two experiments investigated the effects of sadness, anger, and happiness on 4- to 6-year-old children's memory and suggestibility concerning story events. In Experiment 1, children were presented with 3 interactive stories on a video monitor. The stories included protagonists who wanted to give the child a prize. After each story, the child completed a task to try to win the prize. The outcome of the child's effort was manipulated in order to elicit sadness, anger, or happiness. Children's emotions did not affect story recall, but children were more vulnerable to misleading questions about the stories when sad than when angry or happy. In Experiment 2, a story was presented and emotions were elicited using an autobiographical recall task. Children responded to misleading questions and then recalled the story for a different interviewer. Again, children's emotions did not affect the amount of story information recalled correctly, but sad children incorporated more information from misleading questions during recall than did angry or happy children. Sad children's greater suggestibility is discussed in terms of the differing problem-solving strategies associated with discrete emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).
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Less efficient and costly processes of frontal cortex in childhood chronic fatigue syndrome.
Mizuno, Kei; Tanaka, Masaaki; Tanabe, Hiroki C; Joudoi, Takako; Kawatani, Junko; Shigihara, Yoshihito; Tomoda, Akemi; Miike, Teruhisa; Imai-Matsumura, Kyoko; Sadato, Norihiro; Watanabe, Yasuyoshi
2015-01-01
The ability to divide one's attention deteriorates in patients with childhood chronic fatigue syndrome (CCFS). We conducted a study using a dual verbal task to assess allocation of attentional resources to two simultaneous activities (picking out vowels and reading for story comprehension) and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Patients exhibited a much larger area of activation, recruiting additional frontal areas. The right middle frontal gyrus (MFG), which is included in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, of CCFS patients was specifically activated in both the single and dual tasks; this activation level was positively correlated with motivation scores for the tasks and accuracy of story comprehension. In addition, in patients, the dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus (dACC) and left MFG were activated only in the dual task, and activation levels of the dACC and left MFG were positively associated with the motivation and fatigue scores, respectively. Patients with CCFS exhibited a wider area of activated frontal regions related to attentional resources in order to increase their poorer task performance with massive mental effort. This is likely to be less efficient and costly in terms of energy requirements. It seems to be related to the pathophysiology of patients with CCFS and to cause a vicious cycle of further increases in fatigue.
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Less efficient and costly processes of frontal cortex in childhood chronic fatigue syndrome
Mizuno, Kei; Tanaka, Masaaki; Tanabe, Hiroki C.; Joudoi, Takako; Kawatani, Junko; Shigihara, Yoshihito; Tomoda, Akemi; Miike, Teruhisa; Imai-Matsumura, Kyoko; Sadato, Norihiro; Watanabe, Yasuyoshi
2015-01-01
The ability to divide one's attention deteriorates in patients with childhood chronic fatigue syndrome (CCFS). We conducted a study using a dual verbal task to assess allocation of attentional resources to two simultaneous activities (picking out vowels and reading for story comprehension) and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Patients exhibited a much larger area of activation, recruiting additional frontal areas. The right middle frontal gyrus (MFG), which is included in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, of CCFS patients was specifically activated in both the single and dual tasks; this activation level was positively correlated with motivation scores for the tasks and accuracy of story comprehension. In addition, in patients, the dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus (dACC) and left MFG were activated only in the dual task, and activation levels of the dACC and left MFG were positively associated with the motivation and fatigue scores, respectively. Patients with CCFS exhibited a wider area of activated frontal regions related to attentional resources in order to increase their poorer task performance with massive mental effort. This is likely to be less efficient and costly in terms of energy requirements. It seems to be related to the pathophysiology of patients with CCFS and to cause a vicious cycle of further increases in fatigue. PMID:26594619
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Teaching Young Readers to Navigate a Digital Story When Rules Keep Changing
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Javorsky, Kristin; Trainin, Guy
2014-01-01
As mobile technologies such as tablets and smartphones offer opportunities to view stories in digital format, young readers are faced with new challenges in the reading task. The authors conducted an exploratory study of digital story applications on a mobile reading device and found that digital story applications are capable of taking large…
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Batterink, Laura; Neville, Helen
2011-01-01
The vast majority of word meanings are learned simply by extracting them from context, rather than by rote memorization or explicit instruction. Although this skill is remarkable, little is known about the brain mechanisms involved. In the present study, ERPs were recorded as participants read stories in which pseudowords were presented multiple times, embedded in consistent, meaningful contexts (referred to as meaning condition, M+) or inconsistent, meaningless contexts (M−). Word learning was then assessed implicitly using a lexical decision task and explicitly through recall and recognition tasks. Overall, during story reading, M− words elicited a larger N400 than M+ words, suggesting that participants were better able to semantically integrate M+ words than M− words throughout the story. In addition, M+ words whose meanings were subsequently correctly recognized and recalled elicited a more positive ERP in a later time-window compared to M+ words whose meanings were incorrectly remembered, consistent with the idea that the late positive component (LPC) is an index of encoding processes. In the lexical decision task, no behavioral or electrophysiological evidence for implicit priming was found for M+ words. In contrast, during the explicit recognition task, M+ words showed a robust N400 effect. The N400 effect was dependent upon recognition performance, such that only correctly recognized M+ words elicited an N400. This pattern of results provides evidence that the explicit representations of word meanings can develop rapidly, while implicit representations may require more extensive exposure or more time to emerge. PMID:21452941
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Effects of Acute Cortisol Administration on Perceptual Priming of Trauma-Related Material
Streb, Markus; Pfaltz, Monique; Michael, Tanja
2014-01-01
Intrusive memories are a hallmark symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They reflect excessive and uncontrolled retrieval of the traumatic memory. Acute elevations of cortisol are known to impair the retrieval of already stored memory information. Thus, continuous cortisol administration might help in reducing intrusive memories in PTSD. Strong perceptual priming for neutral stimuli associated with a “traumatic” context has been shown to be one important learning mechanism that leads to intrusive memories. However, the memory modulating effects of cortisol have only been shown for explicit declarative memory processes. Thus, in our double blind, placebo controlled study we aimed to investigate whether cortisol influences perceptual priming of neutral stimuli that appeared in a “traumatic” context. Two groups of healthy volunteers (N = 160) watched either neutral or “traumatic” picture stories on a computer screen. Neutral objects were presented in between the pictures. Memory for these neutral objects was tested after 24 hours with a perceptual priming task and an explicit memory task. Prior to memory testing half of the participants in each group received 25 mg of cortisol, the other half received placebo. In the placebo group participants in the “traumatic” stories condition showed more perceptual priming for the neutral objects than participants in the neutral stories condition, indicating a strong perceptual priming effect for neutral stimuli presented in a “traumatic” context. In the cortisol group this effect was not present: Participants in the neutral stories and participants in the “traumatic” stories condition in the cortisol group showed comparable priming effects for the neutral objects. Our findings show that cortisol inhibits perceptual priming for neutral stimuli that appeared in a “traumatic” context. These findings indicate that cortisol influences PTSD-relevant memory processes and thus further support the idea that administration of cortisol might be an effective treatment strategy in reducing intrusive reexperiencing. PMID:25192334
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Construction, integration, and mind wandering in reading.
Dixon, Peter; Bortolussi, Marisa
2013-03-01
In two experiments, we investigated how text recall was related to moment-to-moment variations in mental state while reading, and how both recall and mental state were related to the interest value of the text. In both experiments, subjects read either an interesting text (a segment of Rice's Interview with the Vampire [A. Rice, 1997, Interview with the vampire, New York. NY: Ballantine Books] or a less interesting text (a segment of Thackery's The History of Pendennis [W. M. Thackery, 2009/1914, The history of Pendennis, Project Gutenberg, Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7265]). The texts were read sentence-by-sentence on a computer screen, and subjects were periodically interrupted to answer a probe question. In Experiment 1, the probe asked whether subjects were attending to the text; in Experiment 2, the probe asked whether subjects were engaged with the story world. After reading the text, subjects were asked to recall as much of the story as possible. Recall of the material just prior to the probe was examined as a function of the whether the ratings were high, medium, or low. As expected, both on-task ratings and engagement ratings were higher for Interview than for Pendennis, but there were a substantial number of medium ratings given to both stories. In Experiment 1, there was a clear effect of story on recall over and above the effect of on-task rating. However, in Experiment 2, recall was purely a function of engagement rating. The results were interpreted in terms of a model in which recall is largely determined by the situation model representation of the narrative and in which engagement ratings (but not on-task ratings) provide a relatively pure index of the allocation of resources to processing of the situation model.
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Can Games Help Creative Writing Students to Collaborate on Story-Writing Tasks?
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Jackson, David
2017-01-01
Story writing is a complex semantic and creative task, and the difficulty of managing it is made greater by attempting to write in collaboration with others. This complication can deter students from experimenting with collaboration before mastering their own practice in relative privacy. Such reticence is in spite of the fact that there are many…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Corso, Gail S.; Weiss, Sandra; McGregor, Tiffany
2010-01-01
This narrative describes collaboration among librarians, writing program coordinator, and professors on an information literacy task force. Their attempts to infuse the University's curriculum with information literacy are described. Authors define the term, explain its history with three professional organizations, and describe processes for…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Seamon, John G.; Bohn, Justin M.; Coddington, Inslee E.; Ebling, Maritza C.; Grund, Ethan M.; Haring, Catherine T.; Jang, Sue-Jung; Kim, Daniel; Liong, Christopher; Paley, Frances M.; Pang, Luke K.; Siddique, Ashik H.
2012-01-01
Research from the adaptive memory framework shows that thinking about words in terms of their survival value in an incidental learning task enhances their free recall relative to other semantic encoding strategies and intentional learning (Nairne, Pandeirada, & Thompson, 2008). We found similar results. When participants used incidental…
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NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Draper, Franklin Gno
This study was focused on what students remembered about five middle school science tasks when they were juniors and seniors in high school. Descriptions of the five tasks were reconstructed from available artifacts and teachers' records, notes and recollections. Three of the five tasks were "authentic" in the sense that students were asked to duplicate the decisions practitioners make in the adult world. The other two tasks were more typical school tasks involving note taking and preparation for a quiz. All five tasks, however, involved use of computers. Students were interviewed to examine what and how well they recalled the tasks and what forms or patterns of recall existed. Analysis of their responses indicated that different kinds of tasks produced different levels of recall. Authentically situated tasks were remembered much better than routine school tasks. Further, authentic tasks centered on design elements were recalled better than those for which design was not as pivotal. Patterns of recall indicated that participants most often recalled the decisions they made, the scenarios of the authentically situated tasks, the consequences of their tasks and the social contexts of the classroom. Task events, in other words, appeared to form a framework upon which students constructed stories of the tasks. The more salient the events, the richer the story, the deeper and more detailed the recall of the task. Thus, authentic tasks appeared to lend themselves to creating stories better than regular school tasks and therefore such tasks were recalled better. Implications of these patterns of recall are discussed with respect to issues of school learning and assessment.
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The Contribution of Verbal Working Memory to Deaf Children’s Oral and Written Production
Arfé, Barbara; Rossi, Cristina; Sicoli, Silvia
2015-01-01
This study investigated the contribution of verbal working memory to the oral and written story production of deaf children. Participants were 29 severely to profoundly deaf children aged 8–13 years and 29 hearing controls, matched for grade level. The children narrated a picture story orally and in writing and performed a reading comprehension test, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition forward digit span task, and a reading span task. Oral and written stories were analyzed at the microstructural (i.e., clause) and macrostructural (discourse) levels. Hearing children’s stories scored higher than deaf children’s at both levels. Verbal working memory skills contributed to deaf children’s oral and written production over and above age and reading comprehension skills. Verbal rehearsal skills (forward digit span) contributed significantly to deaf children’s ability to organize oral and written stories at the microstructural level; they also accounted for unique variance at the macrostructural level in writing. Written story production appeared to involve greater verbal working memory resources than oral story production. PMID:25802319
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Story Sparks! How to Kindle Your Young Writers' Imaginations
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Traver, Warren
2004-01-01
Make writing less of a task and more of an adventure through this creative and imaginative collection of writing prompts, targeted at grade levels 2 to 5. It provides not only ideas and inspiration, but also motivation. This book includes: (1) Story Headers: single pictures with story titles that kids write about; (2) Every Picture Tells a Story:…
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Speech processing in children with functional articulation disorders.
Gósy, Mária; Horváth, Viktória
2015-03-01
This study explored auditory speech processing and comprehension abilities in 5-8-year-old monolingual Hungarian children with functional articulation disorders (FADs) and their typically developing peers. Our main hypothesis was that children with FAD would show co-existing auditory speech processing disorders, with different levels of these skills depending on the nature of the receptive processes. The tasks included (i) sentence and non-word repetitions, (ii) non-word discrimination and (iii) sentence and story comprehension. Results suggest that the auditory speech processing of children with FAD is underdeveloped compared with that of typically developing children, and largely varies across task types. In addition, there are differences between children with FAD and controls in all age groups from 5 to 8 years. Our results have several clinical implications.
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Comprehension of Short Stories: Effects of Task Instructions on Literary Interpretation
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
McCarthy, Kathryn S.; Goldman, Susan R.
2015-01-01
An important purpose of reading literature is to move beyond the literal text to construct an interpretation of what the text conveys about the human condition and nature of the world. In two experiments, college students with no prior training in literary analysis read a short story and responded to one of four task instructions (plot, ambiguous,…
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Özdem, Ceylan; Brass, Marcel; Van der Cruyssen, Laurens; Van Overwalle, Frank
2017-04-01
Neuroimaging research has demonstrated that the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is activated when unexpected stimuli appear in spatial reorientation tasks as well as during thinking about the beliefs of other people triggered by verbal scenarios. While the role of potential common component processes subserved by the TPJ has been extensively studied to explain this common activation, the potential confounding role of input modality (spatial vs. verbal) has been largely ignored. To investigate the role of input modality apart from task processes, we developed a novel spatial false belief task based on moving shapes. We explored the overlap in TPJ activation across this novel task and traditional tasks of spatial reorientation (Posner) and verbal belief (False Belief vs. Photo stories). The results show substantial overlap across the same spatial input modality (both reorientation and false belief) as well as across the common task process (verbal and spatial belief), but no triple overlap. This suggests the potential for an overarching function of the TPJ, with some degree of specialization in different subregions due to modality, function and connectivity. The results are discussed with respect to recent theoretical models of the TPJ.
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Devine, Rory T; Hughes, Claire
2016-09-01
Recent years have seen a growth of research on the development of children's ability to reason about others' mental states (or "theory of mind") beyond the narrow confines of the preschool period. The overall aim of this study was to investigate the psychometric properties of a task battery composed of items from Happé's Strange Stories task and Devine and Hughes' Silent Film task. A sample of 460 ethnically and socially diverse children (211 boys) between 7 and 13years of age completed the task battery at two time points separated by 1month. The Strange Stories and Silent Film tasks were strongly correlated even when verbal ability and narrative comprehension were taken into account, and all items loaded onto a single theory-of-mind latent factor. The theory-of-mind latent factor provided reliable estimates of performance across a wide range of theory-of-mind ability and showed no evidence of differential item functioning across gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. The theory-of-mind latent factor also exhibited strong 1-month test-retest reliability, and this stability did not vary as a function of child characteristics. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for the validity and reliability of the Strange Stories and Silent Film task battery as a measure of individual differences in theory of mind suitable for use across middle childhood. We consider the methodological and conceptual implications of these findings for research on theory of mind beyond the preschool years. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Dufour, Nicholas; Redcay, Elizabeth; Young, Liane; Mavros, Penelope L.; Moran, Joseph M.; Triantafyllou, Christina; Gabrieli, John D. E.; Saxe, Rebecca
2013-01-01
Reading about another person’s beliefs engages ‘Theory of Mind’ processes and elicits highly reliable brain activation across individuals and experimental paradigms. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined activation during a story task designed to elicit Theory of Mind processing in a very large sample of neurotypical (N = 462) individuals, and a group of high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders (N = 31), using both region-of-interest and whole-brain analyses. This large sample allowed us to investigate group differences in brain activation to Theory of Mind tasks with unusually high sensitivity. There were no differences between neurotypical participants and those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. These results imply that the social cognitive impairments typical of autism spectrum disorder can occur without measurable changes in the size, location or response magnitude of activity during explicit Theory of Mind tasks administered to adults. PMID:24073267
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Dufour, Nicholas; Redcay, Elizabeth; Young, Liane; Mavros, Penelope L; Moran, Joseph M; Triantafyllou, Christina; Gabrieli, John D E; Saxe, Rebecca
2013-01-01
Reading about another person's beliefs engages 'Theory of Mind' processes and elicits highly reliable brain activation across individuals and experimental paradigms. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined activation during a story task designed to elicit Theory of Mind processing in a very large sample of neurotypical (N = 462) individuals, and a group of high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders (N = 31), using both region-of-interest and whole-brain analyses. This large sample allowed us to investigate group differences in brain activation to Theory of Mind tasks with unusually high sensitivity. There were no differences between neurotypical participants and those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. These results imply that the social cognitive impairments typical of autism spectrum disorder can occur without measurable changes in the size, location or response magnitude of activity during explicit Theory of Mind tasks administered to adults.
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Searching for Judy: How small mysteries affect narrative processes and memory
Love, Jessica; McKoon, Gail; Gerrig, Richard J.
2010-01-01
Current theories of text processing say little about how author’s narrative choices, including the introduction of small mysteries, can affect readers’ narrative experiences. Gerrig, Love, and McKoon (2009) provided evidence that one type of small mystery—a character introduced without information linking him or her to the story—affects readers’ moment-by-moment processing. For that project, participants read stories that introduced characters by proper name alone (e.g., Judy) or with information connecting the character to the rest of the story (e.g., our principal Judy). In an on-line recognition probe task, responses to the character’s name three lines after his or her introduction were faster when the character had not been introduced with connecting information, suggesting that the character remained accessible awaiting resolution. In the four experiments in this paper, we extended our theoretical analysis of small mysteries. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found evidence that trait information (e.g., daredevil Judy) is not sufficient to connect a character to a text. In Experiments 3 and 4, we provide evidence that the moment-by-moment processing effects of such small mysteries also affect readers’ memory for the stories. We interpret the results in terms of Kintsch’s Construction-Integration model (1988) of discourse processing. PMID:20438273
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Iconic Prosody in Story Reading
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Perlman, Marcus; Clark, Nathaniel; Falck, Marlene Johansson
2015-01-01
Recent experiments have shown that people iconically modulate their prosody corresponding with the meaning of their utterance (e.g., Shintel et al., 2006). This article reports findings from a story reading task that expands the investigation of iconic prosody to abstract meanings in addition to concrete ones. Participants read stories that…
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Collective memory: collaborative and individual processes in remembering.
Weldon, M S; Bellinger, K D
1997-09-01
Two experiments compared collaborative and individual recall. In Experiment 1, participants encoded pictures and words with a deep or shallow processing task, then recalled them twice either individually or collaboratively. Collaborative groups recalled more than individuals, but less than nominal groups (pooled individuals), thus exhibiting collaborative inhibition. However, group recall appeared to be more stable over time than individual recall. Groups and individuals both showed a picture-superiority effect, a level-of-processing effect, and hypermnesia. In Experiment 2, participants recalled the story "War of the Ghosts" (from F. C. Bartlett, 1932), and again collaborative groups recalled more than individuals, but less than nominal groups. Both the individual and collaborative recalls were highly organized. There was evidence that the collaborative groups tended to rely on the best individual to a greater extent in story than in list recall. Possible social and cognitive mechanisms are considered.
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Social-cognitive deficits in normal aging
Moran, Joseph M.; Jolly, Eshin; Mitchell, Jason P.
2012-01-01
A sizeable number of studies have implicated the default network (e.g., medial prefrontal and parietal cortices) in tasks that require participants to infer the mental states of others—that is, to mentalize. Parallel research has demonstrated that default network function declines over the lifespan, suggesting that older adults may show impairments in social-cognitive tasks that require mentalizing. Older and younger human adults were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing three different social-cognitive tasks. Across three mentalizing paradigms, younger and older adults viewed animated shapes in brief social vignettes, stories about a person's moral actions and false belief stories. Consistent with predictions, older adults responded less accurately to stories about others' false beliefs and made less use of actors' intentions to judge the moral permissibility of behavior. These impairments in performance during social-cognitive tasks were accompanied by age-related decreases across all three paradigms in the BOLD response of a single brain region—dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. These findings suggest specific, task-independent age-related deficits in mentalizing that are localizeable to changes in circumscribed subregions of the default network. PMID:22514317
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Demir, Özlem Ece; Levine, Susan C.; Goldin-Meadow, Susan
2009-01-01
Children with pre- or perinatal brain injury (PL) exhibit marked plasticity for language learning. Previous work mostly focused on the emergence of earlier developing skills, such as vocabulary and syntax. Here we ask whether this plasticity for earlier developing aspects of language extends to more complex, later-developing language functions by examining the narrative production of children with PL. Using an elicitation technique that involves asking children to create stories de novo in response to a story stem, we collected narratives from 11 children with PL and 20 typically-developing (TD) children. Narratives were analyzed for length, diversity of the vocabulary used, use of complex syntax, complexity of the macro-level narrative structure and use of narrative evaluation. Children’s language performance on vocabulary and syntax tasks outside of the narrative context was also measured. Findings show that children with PL produced shorter stories, used less diverse vocabulary, produced structurally less complex stories at the macro-level, and made fewer inferences regarding the cognitive states of the story characters. These differences in the narrative task emerged even though children with PL did not differ from TD children on vocabulary and syntax tasks outside of the narrative context. Thus, findings suggest that there may be limitations to the plasticity for language functions displayed by children with PL, and that these limitations may be most apparent in complex, decontextualized language tasks such as narrative production. PMID:20590727
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Nuske, Heather Joy; Bavin, Edith L
2011-01-01
Despite somewhat spared structural language development in high-functioning autism, communicative comprehension deficits persist. Comprehension involves the integration of meaning: global processing is required. The Weak Central Coherence theory suggests that individuals with autism are biased to process information locally. This cognitive style may impair comprehension, particularly if inferencing is required. However, task performance may be facilitated by this cognitive style if local processing is required. The current study was designed to examine the extent to which the 'weak central coherence' cognitive style affects comprehension and inferential processing of spoken narratives. The children with autism were expected to perform comparatively poorer on inferences relating to event scripts and comparatively better on inferences requiring deductive reasoning. Fourteen high-functioning children with autism were recruited from databases of various autism organizations (mean age = 6:7, 13 males, one female) and were matched on a receptive vocabulary and a picture-completion task with 14 typically developing children recruited from a local childcare centre (mean age = 4:10, seven males, seven females). The children were read short stories and asked questions about the stories. Results indicated that the children with autism were less able to make inferences based on event scripts, but the groups did not differ significantly on inferences requiring deductive logical reasoning. Despite similar group performance on questions relating to the main idea of the stories, only for the typically developing group was good performance on extracting the main idea of the narratives significantly correlated with performance on all other comprehension tasks. Findings provide some support for the Weak Central Coherence theory and demonstrate that young children with autism do not spontaneously integrate information in order to make script inferences, as do typically developing children. These findings may help to explain communicative problems of young children with autism and can be applied to intervention programme development. More research on the link between a 'weak central coherence' cognitive style and communicative comprehension in autism will be valuable in understanding the comprehension deficits associated with autism. © 2010 Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists.
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Dissecting Success Stories on Mathematical Problem Posing: A Case of the Billiard Task
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Koichu, Boris; Kontorovich, Igor
2013-01-01
"Success stories," i.e., cases in which mathematical problems posed in a controlled setting are perceived by the problem posers or other individuals as interesting, cognitively demanding, or surprising, are essential for understanding the nature of problem posing. This paper analyzes two success stories that occurred with individuals of different…
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DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)
Wiley, H. S.
2010-05-01
Creating a story for a particular audience is one of the most difficult tasks for anyone to learn. This is true for scientists and writers as well as any creative artist who tries to understand the complexity of the world and explain it to other people. Telling a good story always takes skill. Telling a popular story, however, requires simplification.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Miller, Scott A.
2013-01-01
This research examined children's performance on second-order false belief tasks as a function of the content area for the belief and the method of assessing understanding. A total of 70 kindergarten and first-grade children responded to four second-order stories. On two stories, the task was to judge a belief about a belief, and on two, the…
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Real-Time Distributed Algorithms for Visual and Battlefield Reasoning
2006-08-01
High-Level Task Definition Language, Graphical User Interface (GUI), Story Analysis, Story Interpretation, SensIT Nodes 16. SECURITY...or more actions to be taken in the event the conditions are satisfied. We developed graphical user interfaces that may be used to express such...actions to be taken in the event the conditions are satisfied. We developed graphical user interfaces that may be used to express such task
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Teng, Dan W; Wallot, Sebastian; Kelty-Stephen, Damian G
2016-12-01
Research on reading comprehension of connected text emphasizes reliance on single-word features that organize a stable, mental lexicon of words and that speed or slow the recognition of each new word. However, the time needed to recognize a word might not actually be as fixed as previous research indicates, and the stability of the mental lexicon may change with task demands. The present study explores the effects of narrative coherence in self-paced story reading to single-word feature effects in lexical decision. We presented single strings of letters to 24 participants, in both lexical decision and self-paced story reading. Both tasks included the same words composing a set of adjective-noun pairs. Reading times revealed that the tasks, and the order of the presentation of the tasks, changed and/or eliminated familiar effects of single-word features. Specifically, experiencing the lexical-decision task first gradually emphasized the role of single-word features, and experiencing the self-paced story-reading task afterwards counteracted the effect of single-word features. We discuss the implications that task-dependence and narrative coherence might have for the organization of the mental lexicon. Future work will need to consider what architectures suit the apparent flexibility with which task can accentuate or diminish effects of single-word features.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Cain, Kate; Towse, Andrea S.; Knight, Rachael S.
2009-01-01
Two experiments compared 7- and 8-year-olds' and 9- and 10-year-olds' ability to use semantic analysis and inference from context to understand idioms. We used a multiple-choice task and manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, familiar or novel, and presented with or without a supportive story context. Performance was compared…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kingston, Helen Chen
2009-01-01
Research indicates that oral narrative is the discourse form that functions as a bridge between conversational oral language and language skills that contribute to the acquisition of literacy in children (Westby, 1991). Learning to tell stories, therefore, is important to children's literacy development. Mastering extended discourse tasks such as…
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Yu, Alan C L; Abrego-Collier, Carissa; Sonderegger, Morgan
2013-01-01
Numerous studies have documented the phenomenon of phonetic imitation: the process by which the production patterns of an individual become more similar on some phonetic or acoustic dimension to those of her interlocutor. Though social factors have been suggested as a motivator for imitation, few studies has established a tight connection between language-external factors and a speaker's likelihood to imitate. The present study investigated the phenomenon of phonetic imitation using a within-subject design embedded in an individual-differences framework. Participants were administered a phonetic imitation task, which included two speech production tasks separated by a perceptual learning task, and a battery of measures assessing traits associated with Autism-Spectrum Condition, working memory, and personality. To examine the effects of subjective attitude on phonetic imitation, participants were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions, where the perceived sexual orientation of the narrator (homosexual vs. heterosexual) and the outcome (positive vs. negative) of the story depicted in the exposure materials differed. The extent of phonetic imitation by an individual is significantly modulated by the story outcome, as well as by the participant's subjective attitude toward the model talker, the participant's personality trait of openness and the autistic-like trait associated with attention switching.
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Familiar-Strange: Teaching the Scripture as John Would Teach
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Ha, Tung-Chiew
2014-01-01
The Gospel of John teaches through telling the story of Jesus in light of the familiar Hebrew faith stories. It is an interpretive task that presents Jesus to his audience and teaches them adequate faith. John the Teacher skillfully uses narrative skills to create the familiar-strange effect in his storytelling. Each story is followed by a…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Adrian, Juan E.; Clemente, Rosa Ana; Villanueva, Lidon
2007-01-01
Mothers read stories to their children (N = 41) aged between 3.3 years and 5.11 years old, and children then completed two false-belief tasks. One year later, mothers read a story to 37 of those children who were also given four tasks to assess their advanced understanding of mental states. Mothers' early use of cognitive verbs in picture-book…
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Madurski, Christine; LeBel, Etienne P
2015-08-01
Correll (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 48-59, 2008; Study 2) found that instructions to use or avoid race information decreased the emission of 1/f noise in a weapon identification task (WIT). These results suggested that 1/f noise in racial bias tasks reflected an effortful deliberative process, providing new insights regarding the mechanisms underlying implicit racial biases. Given the potential theoretical and applied importance of understanding the psychological processes underlying implicit racial biases - and in light of the growing demand for independent direct replications of findings to ensure the cumulative nature of our science - we attempted to replicate Correll's finding in two high-powered studies. Despite considerable effort to closely duplicate all procedural and methodological details of the original study (i.e., same cover story, experimental manipulation, implicit measure task, original stimuli, task instructions, sampling frame, population, and statistical analyses), both replication attempts were unsuccessful in replicating the original finding challenging the theoretical account that 1/f noise in racial bias tasks reflects a deliberative process. However, the emission of 1/f noise did consistently emerge across samples in each of our conditions. Hence, future research is needed to clarify the psychological significance of 1/f noise in racial bias tasks.
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Boudewyn, Megan A.; Long, Debra L.; Traxler, Matthew J.; Lesh, Tyler A.; Dave, Shruti; Mangun, George R.; Carter, Cameron S.; Swaab, Tamara Y.
2016-01-01
The establishment of reference is essential to language comprehension. The goal of this study was to examine listeners’ sensitivity to referential ambiguity as a function of individual variation in attention, working memory capacity, and verbal ability. Participants listened to stories in which two entities were introduced that were either very similar (e.g., two oaks) or less similar (e.g., one oak and one elm). The manipulation rendered an anaphor in a subsequent sentence (e.g., oak) ambiguous or unambiguous. EEG was recorded as listeners comprehended the story, after which participants completed tasks to assess working memory, verbal ability, and the ability to use context in task performance. Power in the alpha and theta frequency bands when listeners received critical information about the discourse entities (e.g., oaks) was used to index attention and the involvement of the working memory system in processing the entities. These measures were then used to predict an ERP component that is sensitive to referential ambiguity, the Nref, which was recorded when listeners received the anaphor. Nref amplitude at the anaphor was predicted by alpha power during the earlier critical sentence: Individuals with increased alpha power in ambiguous compared with unambiguous stories were less sensitive to the anaphor's ambiguity. Verbal ability was also predictive of greater sensitivity to referential ambiguity. Finally, increased theta power in the ambiguous compared with unambiguous condition was associated with higher working-memory span. These results highlight the role of attention and working memory in referential processing during listening comprehension. PMID:26401815
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Boudewyn, Megan A; Long, Debra L; Traxler, Matthew J; Lesh, Tyler A; Dave, Shruti; Mangun, George R; Carter, Cameron S; Swaab, Tamara Y
2015-12-01
The establishment of reference is essential to language comprehension. The goal of this study was to examine listeners' sensitivity to referential ambiguity as a function of individual variation in attention, working memory capacity, and verbal ability. Participants listened to stories in which two entities were introduced that were either very similar (e.g., two oaks) or less similar (e.g., one oak and one elm). The manipulation rendered an anaphor in a subsequent sentence (e.g., oak) ambiguous or unambiguous. EEG was recorded as listeners comprehended the story, after which participants completed tasks to assess working memory, verbal ability, and the ability to use context in task performance. Power in the alpha and theta frequency bands when listeners received critical information about the discourse entities (e.g., oaks) was used to index attention and the involvement of the working memory system in processing the entities. These measures were then used to predict an ERP component that is sensitive to referential ambiguity, the Nref, which was recorded when listeners received the anaphor. Nref amplitude at the anaphor was predicted by alpha power during the earlier critical sentence: Individuals with increased alpha power in ambiguous compared with unambiguous stories were less sensitive to the anaphor's ambiguity. Verbal ability was also predictive of greater sensitivity to referential ambiguity. Finally, increased theta power in the ambiguous compared with unambiguous condition was associated with higher working-memory span. These results highlight the role of attention and working memory in referential processing during listening comprehension.
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Tell Me a Story: How Children's Developing Domain Knowledge Affects Their Story Construction
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Sobel, David M.; Weisberg, Deena Skolnick
2014-01-01
Young children distinguish between the physical and biological domains of knowledge. The current study examines how this distinction is expressed in a story construction task. Three- and 4-year-olds were shown pairs of pictures, one that depicted a normal event and one that depicted an event that violated either physical or biological causal…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hassan, Said
2012-01-01
Many high school students are faced with the dilemma of "what next?" as they go through their final years at school. With new-economy jobs becoming more complex and career paths increasingly convoluted, the decision-making process is no simple task. What do these jobs and careers entail? How does what they are studying in school relate…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Mizuno, Kei; Tanaka, Masaaki; Tanabe, Hiroki C.; Sadato, Norihiro; Watanabe, Yasuyoshi
2012-01-01
The kana pick-out test has been widely used in Japan to evaluate the ability to divide attention in both adult and pediatric patients. However, the neural substrates underlying the ability to divide attention using the kana pick-out test, which requires participants to pick out individual letters (vowels) in a story while also reading for…
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The Palliative Care Chaplain as Story Catcher.
Cooper, Rhonda S
2018-01-01
The role of the professional chaplain on the palliative care team in the health care setting formalizes the concern for the emotional, spiritual, and social well-being of the care recipients and their caregivers. The chaplain also has a peculiar role on the team, in that her most fundamental task is her intentional listening-and-hearing of the other person's story. One palliative chaplain introduces herself as a Story Catcher to care recipients, in an effort both to overcome the resistance some may have to her presence on the team and communicate her essential role and intent in providing spiritual care. This self-appointed sobriquet resonates with the author's embrace of the theory and practice of the late theologian, educator, and civil rights activist Nelle Morton, who coined the phrase "hearing into speech" to describe the process by which another person, through being truly heard and entering into a relationship with the hearer, claims her/his own truth, hope, and identity in the face of adversity. The chaplain as Story Catcher functions as the agent of healing and hope for those who choose to tell their stories and are heard, as they resist their illness and death rather than submit to its indignity. Copyright © 2017 American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Nyhout, Angela; O'Neill, Daniela K.
2017-01-01
A story's space or setting often determines and constrains the actions of its characters. We report on an experiment with 106 children of 7-8 years old in which, using a novel enactment task, we measured children's representation of a story character's movement during story listening. We found that children were more likely to enact movements that…
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Interindividual variability in the hemispheric organization for speech.
Tzourio-Mazoyer, N; Josse, G; Crivello, F; Mazoyer, B
2004-01-01
A PET activation study was designed to investigate hemispheric specialization during speech comprehension and production in right- and left-handed subjects. Normalized regional cerebral blood flow (NrCBF) was repeatedly monitored while subjects either listened to factual stories (Story) or covertly generated verbs semantically related to heard nouns (Gener), using silent resting (Rest) as a common control condition. NrCBF variations in each task, as compared to Rest, as well as functional asymmetry indices (FAI = right minus left NrCBF variations), were computed in anatomical regions of interest (AROIs) defined on the single-subject MNI template. FAIs were predominantly leftward in all regions during both tasks, although larger FAIs were observed during Gener. Subjects were declared "typical" for language hemispheric specialization based on the presence of significant leftward asymmetries (FAI < 0) in the pars triangularis and opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus during Gener, and in the middle and inferior temporal AROIs during Story. Six subjects (including five LH) showed an atypical language representation. Among them, one presented a right hemisphere specialization during both tasks, another a shift in hemispheric specialization from production to comprehension (left during Gener, right during Story). The group of 14 typical subjects showed significant positive correlation between homologous left and right AROIs NrCBF variations in temporal areas during Story, and in temporal and inferior frontal areas during Gener, almost all regions presenting a leftward FAI. Such correlations were also present in deactivated areas with strong leftward asymmetry (supramarginalis gyrus, inferior parietal region). These results suggest that entry into a language task translates into a hemispheric reconfiguration of lateral cortical areas with global NrCBF increase in the dominant hemisphere and decrease in the minor hemisphere. This can be considered as the setting up of a "language mode", under the control of a mechanism that operates at a perisylvian level. On top of this global organization, regional variations carry on the performance of the cognitive operations specific to the language task to be performed. Hemispheric relationships could be different in atypical subjects, with either between task hemispheric regulation differences or differences in regional specialization.
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Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force Meeting and Public Listening
Data Media & News Publications Press Releases Story Archive Home Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force Meeting and Public Listening Session Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force Meeting and Title: Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force Meeting and Public Listening SessionDescription: The
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Domain-General Brain Regions Do Not Track Linguistic Input as Closely as Language-Selective Regions.
Blank, Idan A; Fedorenko, Evelina
2017-10-11
Language comprehension engages a cortical network of left frontal and temporal regions. Activity in this network is language-selective, showing virtually no modulation by nonlinguistic tasks. In addition, language comprehension engages a second network consisting of bilateral frontal, parietal, cingulate, and insular regions. Activity in this "multiple demand" (MD) network scales with comprehension difficulty, but also with cognitive effort across a wide range of nonlinguistic tasks in a domain-general fashion. Given the functional dissociation between the language and MD networks, their respective contributions to comprehension are likely distinct, yet such differences remain elusive. Prior neuroimaging studies have suggested that activity in each network covaries with some linguistic features that, behaviorally, influence on-line processing and comprehension. This sensitivity of the language and MD networks to local input characteristics has often been interpreted, implicitly or explicitly, as evidence that both networks track linguistic input closely, and in a manner consistent across individuals. Here, we used fMRI to directly test this assumption by comparing the BOLD signal time courses in each network across different people ( n = 45, men and women) listening to the same story. Language network activity showed fewer individual differences, indicative of closer input tracking, whereas MD network activity was more idiosyncratic and, moreover, showed lower reliability within an individual across repetitions of a story. These findings constrain cognitive models of language comprehension by suggesting a novel distinction between the processes implemented in the language and MD networks. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Language comprehension recruits both language-specific mechanisms and domain-general mechanisms that are engaged in many cognitive processes. In the human cortex, language-selective mechanisms are implemented in the left-lateralized "core language network", whereas domain-general mechanisms are implemented in the bilateral "multiple demand" (MD) network. Here, we report the first direct comparison of the respective contributions of these networks to naturalistic story comprehension. Using a novel combination of neuroimaging approaches we find that MD regions track stories less closely than language regions. This finding constrains the possible contributions of the MD network to comprehension, contrasts with accounts positing that this network has continuous access to linguistic input, and suggests a new typology of comprehension processes based on their extent of input tracking. Copyright © 2017 the authors 0270-6474/17/3710000-13$15.00/0.
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Domain-General Brain Regions Do Not Track Linguistic Input as Closely as Language-Selective Regions
Fedorenko, Evelina
2017-01-01
Language comprehension engages a cortical network of left frontal and temporal regions. Activity in this network is language-selective, showing virtually no modulation by nonlinguistic tasks. In addition, language comprehension engages a second network consisting of bilateral frontal, parietal, cingulate, and insular regions. Activity in this “multiple demand” (MD) network scales with comprehension difficulty, but also with cognitive effort across a wide range of nonlinguistic tasks in a domain-general fashion. Given the functional dissociation between the language and MD networks, their respective contributions to comprehension are likely distinct, yet such differences remain elusive. Prior neuroimaging studies have suggested that activity in each network covaries with some linguistic features that, behaviorally, influence on-line processing and comprehension. This sensitivity of the language and MD networks to local input characteristics has often been interpreted, implicitly or explicitly, as evidence that both networks track linguistic input closely, and in a manner consistent across individuals. Here, we used fMRI to directly test this assumption by comparing the BOLD signal time courses in each network across different people (n = 45, men and women) listening to the same story. Language network activity showed fewer individual differences, indicative of closer input tracking, whereas MD network activity was more idiosyncratic and, moreover, showed lower reliability within an individual across repetitions of a story. These findings constrain cognitive models of language comprehension by suggesting a novel distinction between the processes implemented in the language and MD networks. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Language comprehension recruits both language-specific mechanisms and domain-general mechanisms that are engaged in many cognitive processes. In the human cortex, language-selective mechanisms are implemented in the left-lateralized “core language network”, whereas domain-general mechanisms are implemented in the bilateral “multiple demand” (MD) network. Here, we report the first direct comparison of the respective contributions of these networks to naturalistic story comprehension. Using a novel combination of neuroimaging approaches we find that MD regions track stories less closely than language regions. This finding constrains the possible contributions of the MD network to comprehension, contrasts with accounts positing that this network has continuous access to linguistic input, and suggests a new typology of comprehension processes based on their extent of input tracking. PMID:28871034
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Yu, Alan C. L.; Abrego-Collier, Carissa; Sonderegger, Morgan
2013-01-01
Numerous studies have documented the phenomenon of phonetic imitation: the process by which the production patterns of an individual become more similar on some phonetic or acoustic dimension to those of her interlocutor. Though social factors have been suggested as a motivator for imitation, few studies has established a tight connection between language-external factors and a speaker’s likelihood to imitate. The present study investigated the phenomenon of phonetic imitation using a within-subject design embedded in an individual-differences framework. Participants were administered a phonetic imitation task, which included two speech production tasks separated by a perceptual learning task, and a battery of measures assessing traits associated with Autism-Spectrum Condition, working memory, and personality. To examine the effects of subjective attitude on phonetic imitation, participants were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions, where the perceived sexual orientation of the narrator (homosexual vs. heterosexual) and the outcome (positive vs. negative) of the story depicted in the exposure materials differed. The extent of phonetic imitation by an individual is significantly modulated by the story outcome, as well as by the participant’s subjective attitude toward the model talker, the participant’s personality trait of openness and the autistic-like trait associated with attention switching. PMID:24098665
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Brehmer, Matthew; Ingram, Stephen; Stray, Jonathan; Munzner, Tamara
2014-12-01
For an investigative journalist, a large collection of documents obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request or a leak is both a blessing and a curse: such material may contain multiple newsworthy stories, but it can be difficult and time consuming to find relevant documents. Standard text search is useful, but even if the search target is known it may not be possible to formulate an effective query. In addition, summarization is an important non-search task. We present Overview, an application for the systematic analysis of large document collections based on document clustering, visualization, and tagging. This work contributes to the small set of design studies which evaluate a visualization system "in the wild", and we report on six case studies where Overview was voluntarily used by self-initiated journalists to produce published stories. We find that the frequently-used language of "exploring" a document collection is both too vague and too narrow to capture how journalists actually used our application. Our iterative process, including multiple rounds of deployment and observations of real world usage, led to a much more specific characterization of tasks. We analyze and justify the visual encoding and interaction techniques used in Overview's design with respect to our final task abstractions, and propose generalizable lessons for visualization design methodology.
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Gaudreau, G.; Monetta, L.; Macoir, J.; Poulin, S.; Laforce, R. Jr.; Hudon, C.
2015-01-01
Objective. The present study examined mentalizing capacities as well as the relative implication of mentalizing in the comprehension of ironic and sincere assertions among 30 older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 30 healthy control (HC) subjects. Method. Subjects were administered a task evaluating mentalizing by means of short stories. A verbal irony comprehension task, in which participants had to identify ironic or sincere statements within short stories, was also administered; the design of the task allowed uniform implication of mentalizing across the conditions. Results. Findings indicated that participants with MCI have second-order mentalizing difficulties compared to HC subjects. Moreover, MCI participants were impaired compared to the HC group in identifying ironic or sincere stories, both requiring mental inference capacities. Conclusion. This study suggests that, in individuals with MCI, difficulties in the comprehension of ironic and sincere assertions are closely related to second-order mentalizing deficits. These findings support previous data suggesting a strong relationship between irony comprehension and mentalizing. PMID:26199459
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Aging of theory of mind: the influence of educational level and cognitive processing.
Li, Xiaoming; Wang, Kai; Wang, Fan; Tao, Qian; Xie, Yu; Cheng, Qi
2013-01-01
Previous studies of theory of mind (ToM) in old age have provided mixed results. We predicted that educational level and cognitive processing are two factors influencing the pattern of the aging of ToM. To test this hypothesis, a younger group who received higher education (mean age 20.46 years), an older group with an education level equal to that of the young group (mean age 76.29 years), and an older group with less education (mean age 73.52 years) were recruited. ToM tasks included the following tests: the second-order false-belief task, the faux-pas task, the eyes test, and tests of fundamental aspects of cognitive function that included two background tests (memory span and processing speed) and three subcomponents of executive function (inhibition, updating, and shifting). We found that the younger group and the older group with equally high education outperformed the older group with less education in false-belief and faux-pas tasks. However, there was no significant difference between the two former groups. The three groups of participants performed equivalently in the eyes test as well as in control tasks (false-belief control question, faux-pas control question, faux-pas control story, and Eyes Test control task). The younger group outperformed the other two groups in the cognitive processing tasks. Mediation analyses showed that difficulties in inhibition, memory span, and processing speed mediated the age differences in false-belief reasoning. Also, the variables of inhibition, updating, memory span, and processing speed mediated age-related variance in faux-pas. Discussion focused on the links between ToM aging, educational level, and cognitive processing. Supported by Chinese National Natural Science Foundation (number: 30870766) and Anhui Province Natural Science Foundation (number: 11040606M166).
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Dodich, Alessandra; Cerami, Chiara; Canessa, Nicola; Crespi, Chiara; Iannaccone, Sandro; Marcone, Alessandra; Realmuto, Sabrina; Lettieri, Giada; Perani, Daniela; Cappa, Stefano F
2015-10-01
Theory of Mind (ToM), the process by which an individual imputes mental states to himself and others, is presently considered as a multidimensional cognitive domain, with two main facets (i.e., cognitive and affective ToM) accounting, respectively, for the ability to understand others' intention (intention attribution-IA) and emotions (emotion attribution-EA). Despite the large amount of literature investigating the behavioural and neural bases of mentalizing abilities in neurological conditions, there is still a lack of validated neuropsychological tools specifically designed to assess such skills. Here, we report the normative data of the Story-Based Empathy Task (SET), a non-verbal test developed for the assessment of intention and emotion attribution in the neurodegenerative conditions characterized by the impairment of social-emotional abilities. It is an easy-to-administer task including 18 stimuli, sub-grouped into two experimental conditions assessing, respectively, the ability to infer others' intentions (SET-IA) and emotions (SET-EA), compared to a control condition of causal inference (SET-CI). Normative data were collected in 136 Italian subjects pooled across subgroups homogenous for age (range 20-79 years), sex, and education (at least 5 years). The results show a detrimental effect of age and a beneficial effect of education on both the global score and each subscale, for which we provide correction grids. This new task could be a useful tool to investigate both affective and cognitive aspects of ToM in the course of disorders of socio-emotional behaviour, such as the fronto-temporal dementia spectrum.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Sadoski, Mark C.
A study investigated the role of visual imagery in the comprehension and retention of prose. Subjects were 48 fifth grade students who orally read a story and then completed three comprehension tasks directly related to the story: a retelling, an oral reading cloze test, and a multiple choice question test comprised of items demonstrated to be…
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von Koss Torkildsen, Janne; Morken, Frøydis; Helland, Wenche A; Helland, Turid
In this study of third grade school children, we investigated the association between writing process measures recorded with key stroke logging and the final written product. Moreover, we examined the cognitive predictors of writing process and product measures. Analyses of key strokes showed that while most children spontaneously made local online revisions while writing, few revised previously written text. Children with good reading and spelling abilities made more online revisions than their peers. Two process factors, transcription fluency and online revision activity, contributed to explaining variance in narrative macrostructural quality and story length. As for cognitive predictors, spelling was the only factor that gave a unique contribution to explaining variance in writing process factors. Better spelling was associated with more revisions and faster transcription. The results show that developing writers' ability to make online revisions in creative writing tasks is related to both the quality of the final written product and to individual literacy skills. More generally, the findings indicate that investigations of the dynamics of the writing process may provide insights into the factors that contribute to creative writing during early stages of literacy.
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Wynn, Jonathan K.; Lee, Junghee; Horan, William P.; Green, Michael F.
2008-01-01
Schizophrenia patients show impairments in identifying facial affect; however, it is not known at what stage facial affect processing is impaired. We evaluated 3 event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore stages of facial affect processing in schizophrenia patients. Twenty-six schizophrenia patients and 27 normal controls participated. In separate blocks, subjects identified the gender of a face, the emotion of a face, or if a building had 1 or 2 stories. Three ERPs were examined: (1) P100 to examine basic visual processing, (2) N170 to examine facial feature encoding, and (3) N250 to examine affect decoding. Behavioral performance on each task was also measured. Results showed that schizophrenia patients’ P100 was comparable to the controls during all 3 identification tasks. Both patients and controls exhibited a comparable N170 that was largest during processing of faces and smallest during processing of buildings. For both groups, the N250 was largest during the emotion identification task and smallest for the building identification task. However, the patients produced a smaller N250 compared with the controls across the 3 tasks. The groups did not differ in behavioral performance in any of the 3 identification tasks. The pattern of intact P100 and N170 suggest that patients maintain basic visual processing and facial feature encoding abilities. The abnormal N250 suggests that schizophrenia patients are less efficient at decoding facial affect features. Our results imply that abnormalities in the later stage of feature decoding could potentially underlie emotion identification deficits in schizophrenia. PMID:18499704
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Alho, Kimmo; Vorobyev, Victor A; Medvedev, Svyatoslav V; Pakhomov, Sergey V; Starchenko, Maria G; Tervaniemi, Mari; Näätänen, Risto
2006-02-23
Regional cerebral blood flow was measured with positron emission tomography (PET) in 10 healthy male volunteers. They heard two binaurally delivered concurrent stories, one spoken by a male voice and the other by a female voice. A third story was presented at the same time as a text running on a screen. The subjects were instructed to attend silently to one of the stories at a time. In an additional resting condition, no stories were delivered. PET data showed that in comparison with the reading condition, the brain activity in the speech-listening conditions was enhanced bilaterally in the anterior superior temporal sulcus including cortical areas that have been reported to be specifically sensitive to human voice. Previous studies on attention to non-linguistic sounds and visual objects, in turn, showed prefrontal activations that are presumably related to attentional control functions. However, comparisons of the present speech-listening and reading conditions with each other or with the resting condition indicated no prefrontal activity, except for an activation in the inferior frontal cortex that was presumably associated with semantic and syntactic processing of the attended story. Thus, speech listening, as well as reading, even in a distracting environment appears to depend less on the prefrontal control functions than do other types of attention-demanding tasks, probably because selective attention to speech and written text are over-learned actions rehearsed daily.
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Where Good Pedagogical Ideas Come From: The Story of an EAP Task
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Light, Justine; Ranta, Leila
2016-01-01
Teachers using a task-based language teaching (TBLT) approach are always searching for learning tasks that have the potential to prepare learners for the real world. In this article, we describe how an authentic academic assignment for graduate students in a teaching English as a second language (TESL) course was transformed into a task-based…
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Theory of mind and its relation to schizotypy.
Pickup, Graham J
2006-03-01
Frith (1992) suggested that many psychotic symptoms are associated with impaired theory of mind (ToM), the ability to represent the mental states of others. Langdon and Coltheart (1999) found an association in a nonclinical adult population between schizotypal traits and poorer ToM on a picture-sequencing task. The present study attempted to replicate and extend this finding using a ToM story task. A total of 62 nonclinical individuals completed a schizotypy questionnaire (the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences; O-LIFE) and a set of ToM stories. Matched "physical" control stories were administered to control for general reasoning ability. Executive function and current verbal IQ were assessed using the Cognitive Estimates Test and the Quick Test, respectively. Schizotypal traits analogous to positive symptoms of schizophrenia (UE scale of the O-LIFE) predicted poorer scores on the ToM task, but were unrelated to scores on physical stories. Individuals with high scores for total schizotypy on the O-LIFE did not differ in ToM from those with low total scores. There was no association between poorer ToM and schizotypal traits analogous to the "behavioural signs" of schizophrenia. Executive function and verbal IQ did not significantly predict story scores. Positive schizotypal traits in the normal population are associated with subtle impairments in ToM, independent of reasoning ability, executive function, or verbal IQ. A strong association between poor ToM and "behavioural signs" may only appear in studies of schizophrenic patients, and not in studies of nonclinical individuals. The findings are discussed in relation to Frith's (1992) cognitive neuropsychological model of schizophrenia.
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Get the Story Straight: Contextual Repetition Promotes Word Learning from Storybooks
Horst, Jessica S.; Parsons, Kelly L.; Bryan, Natasha M.
2011-01-01
Although shared storybook reading is a common activity believed to improve the language skills of preschool children, how children learn new vocabulary from such experiences has been largely neglected in the literature. The current study systematically explores the effects of repeatedly reading the same storybooks on both young children's fast and slow mapping abilities. Specially created storybooks were read to 3-year-old children three times during the course of 1 week. Each of the nine storybooks contained two novel name–object pairs. At each session, children either heard three different stories with the same two novel name–object pairs or the same story three times. Importantly, all children heard each novel name the same number of times. Both immediate recall and retention were tested with a four-alternative forced-choice task with pictures of the novel objects. Children who heard the same stories repeatedly were very accurate on both the immediate recall and retention tasks. In contrast, children who heard different stories were only accurate on immediate recall during the last two sessions and failed to learn any of the new words. Overall, then, we found a dramatic increase in children's ability to both recall and retain novel name–object associations encountered during shared storybook reading when they heard the same stories multiple times in succession. Results are discussed in terms of contextual cueing effects observed in other cognitive domains. PMID:21713179
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Task Design and Interaction in Collaborative Writing: The Students' Story
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Bremner, Stephen; Peirson-Smith, Anne; Jones, Rodney; Bhatia, Vijay
2014-01-01
This article investigates student behaviour on collaborative assignments, looking at the relationship between task type and interaction, and considers the implications for task design. Students reported on interactions in a year-long workplace-focussed group communication project, comparing these with interactions on other academy-based group…
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Pleasantness of Creative Tasks and Creative Performance
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Zenasni, Franck; Lubart, Todd
2011-01-01
To examine the impact of emotion on creative potential, experimental studies have typically focused on the impact of induced or spontaneous mood states on creative performance. In this report the relationship between the perceived pleasantness of tasks (using divergent thinking and story writing tasks) and creative performance was examined.…
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Effects of chewing gum on mood, learning, memory and performance of an intelligence test.
Smith, Andrew
2009-04-01
Recent research suggests that chewing gum may increase alertness and lead to changes in cognitive performance. The present study examined effects of chewing gum on these functions within the context of a single study. This study had four main aims. The first was to examine whether chewing gum improved learning and memory of information in a story. The second aim was to determine whether chewing gum improved test performance on a validated intellectual task (the Alice Heim task). A third aim was to determine whether chewing gum improved performance on short memory tasks (immediate and delayed recall of a list of words, delayed recognition memory, retrieval from semantic memory, and a working memory task). The final aim was to determine whether chewing gum improved mood (alertness, calm and hedonic tone). A cross-over design was used with gum and no-gum sessions being on consecutive weeks. In each week, volunteers attended for two sessions, two days apart. The first session assessed mood, immediate recall of information from a story and performance on short memory tasks. The second session assessed mood, delayed recall of information from a story and performance of an intelligence test (the Alice Heim test). There were no significant effects of chewing gum on any aspect of recall of the story. Chewing gum improved the accuracy of performing the Alice Heim test which confirms the benefits of gum on test performance seen in an earlier study. Chewing gum had no significant effect on the short memory tasks. Chewing gum increased alertness at the end of the test session in both parts of the study. This effect was in the region of a 10% increase and was highly significant (P < 0.001). The results of this study showed that chewing gum increases alertness. In contrast, no significant effects of chewing gum were observed in the memory tasks. Intellectual performance was improved in the gum condition. Overall, the results suggest further research on the alerting effects of chewing gum and possible improved test performance in these situations.
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The Official Version: Incoherence and Credibility in the Appellate Opinion.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Griffin, Susan
According to narrative theory, stories are told when there is a need to resolve conflicts. Like history, the law, too, has the task of choosing among many stories, designating one as "what really happened." Bernard Jackson suggests that judges, in deciding cases, look for "narrative coherence," that is, internal and external…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Vu, Jennifer A.
2015-01-01
This study describes the use of story stems in order to determine children's representations of relationships with mothers, teachers, and friends, and how these representations are related to mother- and teacher-rated social competence. Thirty preschool-aged children were administered the story stem tasks featuring three different interactional…
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Defense.gov - Special Report: Haiti Earthquake Relief
. Top Stories Medical Group Provides Assistance MANDRIN, Haiti, July 14, 2010 - Airmen with the 56th Medical Group provided optometry, dental and general services at the New Horizons medical site. Story assigned to Joint Task Force New Horizons have made major progress on their engineering and medical
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Mourning a Lost Childhood: A Therapeutic Task.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kulish, Nancy Mann
J. M. Barrie's popular story of Peter Pan depicts the never-neverland of an endless happy childhood. Analysis of the story and of J. M. Barrie's personal background, however, reveals that the tale is a conflicted solution to and separation from early childhood losses and disappointments. Themes of separation and reunion, redesertion and revenge…
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Polišenská, Kamila; Kapalková, Svetlana; Novotková, Monika
2018-06-05
The study aims to describe receptive language skills in children with intellectual disability (ID) and to contribute to the debate on deviant versus delayed language development. This is the 1st study of receptive skills in children with ID who speak a Slavic language, providing insight into how language development is affected by disability and also language typology. Twenty-eight Slovak-speaking children participated in the study (14 children with ID and 14 typically developing [TD] children matched on nonverbal reasoning abilities). The children were assessed by receptive language tasks targeting words, sentences, and stories, and the groups were compared quantitatively and qualitatively. The groups showed similar language profiles, with a better understanding of words, followed by sentences, with the poorest comprehension for stories. Nouns were comprehended better than verbs; sentence constructions also showed a qualitatively similar picture, although some dissimilarities emerged. Verb comprehension was strongly related to sentence comprehension in both groups and related to story comprehension in the TD group only. The findings appear to support the view that receptive language skills follow the same developmental route in children with ID as seen in younger TD children, suggesting that language development is a robust process and does not seem to be differentially affected by ID even when delayed.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Camras, Linda A.; Perlman, Susan B.; Fries, Alison B. Wismer; Pollak, Seth D.
2006-01-01
Post-institutionalized Chinese and Eastern European children participated in two emotion understanding tasks. In one task, children selected facial expressions corresponding to four emotion labels (happy, sad, angry, scared). The second task required children to match facial expressions to stories describing situations for these emotions. While…
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Neural circuit of verbal humor comprehension in schizophrenia - an fMRI study.
Adamczyk, Przemysław; Wyczesany, Miroslaw; Domagalik, Aleksandra; Daren, Artur; Cepuch, Kamil; Błądziński, Piotr; Cechnicki, Andrzej; Marek, Tadeusz
2017-01-01
Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit problems with understanding the figurative meaning of language. This study evaluates neural correlates of diminished humor comprehension observed in schizophrenia. The study included chronic schizophrenia (SCH) outpatients (n = 20), and sex, age and education level matched healthy controls (n = 20). The fMRI punchline based humor comprehension task consisted of 60 stories of which 20 had funny, 20 nonsensical and 20 neutral (not funny) punchlines. After the punchlines were presented, the participants were asked to indicate whether the story was comprehensible and how funny it was. Three contrasts were analyzed in both groups reflecting stages of humor processing: abstract vs neutral stories - incongruity detection; funny vs abstract - incongruity resolution and elaboration; and funny vs neutral - complete humor processing. Additionally, parametric modulation analysis was performed using both subjective ratings separately. Between-group comparisons revealed that the SCH subjects had attenuated activation in the right posterior superior temporal gyrus (BA 41) in case of irresolvable incongruity processing of nonsensical puns; in the left dorsomedial middle and superior frontal gyri (BA 8/9) in case of incongruity resolution and elaboration processing of funny puns; and in the interhemispheric dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (BA 24) in case of complete processing of funny puns. Additionally, during comprehensibility ratings the SCH group showed a suppressed activity in the left dorsomedial middle and superior frontal gyri (BA 8/9) and revealed weaker activation during funniness ratings in the left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (BA 24). Interestingly, these differences in the SCH group were accompanied behaviorally by a protraction of time in both types of rating responses and by indicating funny punchlines less comprehensible. Summarizing, our results indicate neural substrates of humor comprehension processing impairments in schizophrenia, which is accompanied by fronto-temporal hypoactivation.
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Long-Term Episodic Memory in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Skowronek, Jeffrey S.; Leichtman, Michelle D.; Pillemer, David B.
2008-01-01
Twenty-nine grade-matched 4th-8th-grade males, 12 with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (age M = 12.2 years, SD = 1.48), and 17 without (age M = 11.5, SD = 1.59), completed two working memory tasks (digit span and the Simon game) and three long-term episodic memory tasks (a personal event memory task, story memory task, and picture…
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Goodnight book: sleep consolidation improves word learning via storybooks
Williams, Sophie E.; Horst, Jessica S.
2014-01-01
Reading the same storybooks repeatedly helps preschool children learn words. In addition, sleeping shortly after learning also facilitates memory consolidation and aids learning in older children and adults. The current study explored how sleep promotes word learning in preschool children using a shared storybook reading task. Children were either read the same story repeatedly or different stories and either napped after the stories or remained awake. Children's word retention were tested 2.5 h later, 24 h later, and 7 days later. Results demonstrate strong, persistent effects for both repeated readings and sleep consolidation on young children's word learning. A key finding is that children who read different stories before napping learned words as well as children who had the advantage of hearing the same story. In contrast, children who read different stories and remained awake never caught up to their peers on later word learning tests. Implications for educational practices are discussed. PMID:24624111
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Capturing Children's Multiplication and Division Stories
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
McCormick, Kelly K.; Essex, N. Kathryn
2017-01-01
This article reports on a study in which researchers asked children to "make up as story and a picture about marbles for this number sentence: 3 x 5 = 15." Students in this study came from pre - dominantly low- to average-income families living in three distinct geographical areas within the United States. A similar division task was…
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Effects of Story Mapping on Third-Grade Students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Chavez, Jaime N.; Martinez, James; Pienta, Rachel S.
2015-01-01
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of story mapping on the reading comprehension scores, on-task behaviors, and attitudes of third- -grade students (N = 6) with ADHD. Students' reading grade equivalencies were assessed before and after the study. The teacher-researcher compared two other achievement measures before and during…
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Gesture Use in Story Recall by Chinese-English Bilinguals
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Nicoladis, Elena; Pika, Simone; Yin, Hui; Marentette, Paula
2007-01-01
Previous studies have shown inconsistent results concerning bilinguals' use of gestures to compensate for reduced proficiency in their second language (L2). These results could be because of differing task demands. In this study, we asked 16 intermediate English L2 speakers (whose first language [L1] was Chinese) to watch a story and tell it back…
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Referential Cohesion and Logical Coherence of Narration after Closed Head Injury
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Davis, G. Albyn; Coelho, Carl A.
2004-01-01
A group with closed head injury was compared to neurologically intact controls regarding the referential cohesion and logical coherence of narrative production. A sample of six stories was obtained with tasks of cartoon-elicited story-telling and auditory-oral retelling. We found deficits in the clinical group with respect to referential cohesion,…
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Narrative Skills and Genre Knowledge: Ways of Telling in the Primary School Grades.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hicks, Deborah
1990-01-01
Primary school children, after viewing a silent film, were asked to narrate a segment of the film and recount its events both as a news story and as an embellished story. The results indicate that primary school children have only nascent ability to apply genre knowledge to school language tasks. (55 references) (Author/JL)
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Jacola, L M; Byars, A W; Hickey, F; Vannest, J; Holland, S K; Schapiro, M B
2014-10-01
Previous studies have documented differences in neural activation during language processing in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) in comparison with typically developing individuals matched for chronological age. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare activation during language processing in young adults with DS to typically developing comparison groups matched for chronological age or mental age. We hypothesised that the pattern of neural activation in the DS cohort would differ when compared with both typically developing cohorts. Eleven persons with DS (mean chronological age = 18.3; developmental age range = 4-6 years) and two groups of typically developing individuals matched for chronological (n = 13; mean age = 18.3 years) and developmental (mental) age (n = 12; chronological age range = 4-6 years) completed fMRI scanning during a passive story listening paradigm. Random effects group comparisons were conducted on individual maps of the contrast between activation (story listening) and rest (tone presentation) conditions. Robust activation was seen in typically developing groups in regions associated with processing auditory information, including bilateral superior and middle temporal lobe gyri. In contrast, the DS cohort demonstrated atypical spatial distribution of activation in midline frontal and posterior cingulate regions when compared with both typically developing control groups. Random effects group analyses documented reduced magnitude of activation in the DS cohort when compared with both control groups. Activation in the DS group differed significantly in magnitude and spatial extent when compared with chronological and mental age-matched typically developing control groups during a story listening task. Results provide additional support for an atypical pattern of functional organisation for language processing in this population. © 2013 MENCAP and International Association of the Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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Higher social intelligence can impair source memory.
Barber, Sarah J; Franklin, Nancy; Naka, Makiko; Yoshimura, Hiroki
2010-03-01
Source monitoring is made difficult when the similarity between candidate sources increases. The current work examines how individual differences in social intelligence and perspective-taking abilities serve to increase source similarity and thus negatively impact source memory. Strangers first engaged in a cooperative storytelling task. On each trial, a single word was shown to both participants, but only 1 participant was designated to add a story sentence, using this assigned word. As predicted, social intelligence negatively predicted performance in a subsequent source-monitoring task. In a 2nd study, preventing participants from being able to anticipate their partner's next contribution to the story eliminated the effect.
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Deception and false belief in paranoia: modelling theory of mind stories.
Shryane, Nick M; Corcoran, Rhiannon; Rowse, Georgina; Moore, Rosanne; Cummins, Sinead; Blackwood, Nigel; Howard, Robert; Bentall, Richard P
2008-01-01
This study used Item Response Theory (IRT) to model the psychometric properties of a Theory of Mind (ToM) stories task. The study also aimed to determine whether the ability to understand states of false belief in others and the ability to understand another's intention to deceive are separable skills, and to establish which is more sensitive to the presence of paranoia. A large and diverse clinical and nonclinical sample differing in levels of depression and paranoid ideation performed a ToM stories task measuring false belief and deception at first and second order. A three-factor IRT model was found to best fit the data, consisting of first- and second-order deception factors and a single false-belief factor. The first-order deception and false-belief factors had good measurement properties at low trait levels, appropriate for samples with reduced ToM ability. First-order deception and false beliefs were both sensitive to paranoid ideation with IQ predicting performance on false belief items. Separable abilities were found to underlie performance on verbal ToM tasks. However, paranoia was associated with impaired performance on both false belief and deception understanding with clear impairment at the simplest level of mental state attribution.
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Localizing Pain Matrix and Theory of Mind networks with both verbal and non-verbal stimuli.
Jacoby, Nir; Bruneau, Emile; Koster-Hale, Jorie; Saxe, Rebecca
2016-02-01
Functional localizer tasks allow researchers to identify brain regions in each individual's brain, using a combination of anatomical and functional constraints. In this study, we compare three social cognitive localizer tasks, designed to efficiently identify regions in the "Pain Matrix," recruited in response to a person's physical pain, and the "Theory of Mind network," recruited in response to a person's mental states (i.e. beliefs and emotions). Participants performed three tasks: first, the verbal false-belief stories task; second, a verbal task including stories describing physical pain versus emotional suffering; and third, passively viewing a non-verbal animated movie, which included segments depicting physical pain and beliefs and emotions. All three localizers were efficient in identifying replicable, stable networks in individual subjects. The consistency across tasks makes all three tasks viable localizers. Nevertheless, there were small reliable differences in the location of the regions and the pattern of activity within regions, hinting at more specific representations. The new localizers go beyond those currently available: first, they simultaneously identify two functional networks with no additional scan time, and second, the non-verbal task extends the populations in whom functional localizers can be applied. These localizers will be made publicly available. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Toward an implicit measure of emotions: ratings of abstract images reveal distinct emotional states.
Bartoszek, Gregory; Cervone, Daniel
2017-11-01
Although implicit tests of positive and negative affect exist, implicit measures of distinct emotional states are scarce. Three experiments examined whether a novel implicit emotion-assessment task, the rating of emotion expressed in abstract images, would reveal distinct emotional states. In Experiment 1, participants exposed to a sadness-inducing story inferred more sadness, and less happiness, in abstract images. In Experiment 2, an anger-provoking interaction increased anger ratings. In Experiment 3, compared to neutral images, spider images increased fear ratings in spider-fearful participants but not in controls. In each experiment, the implicit task indicated elevated levels of the target emotion and did not indicate elevated levels of non-target negative emotions; the task thus differentiated among emotional states of the same valence. Correlations also supported the convergent and discriminant validity of the implicit task. Supporting the possibility that heuristic processes underlie the ratings, group differences were stronger among those who responded relatively quickly.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Pap, Emese Boksay
2016-01-01
This paper reports on the results of an exploratory study that employed the concurrent think-aloud method to investigate narrative text-creating strategies of multilingual Transylvanian-Hungarians in English, their third language. The study explored the participants' reliance on their different languages as they composed a story in English based…
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Towards a Pedagogy of Listening: Teaching and Learning from Life Stories of Human Rights Violations
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Low, Bronwen E.; Sonntag, Emmanuelle
2013-01-01
In response to the task of designing curriculum that helps youth engage thoughtfully with digital stories of human rights violations, the authors articulate the central tenets of a pedagogy of listening that draws upon elements of oral history, concepts of witnessing and testimony, the work on listening of Dewey, Freire and Rinaldi and the…
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Synchronization of spontaneous eyeblinks while viewing video stories
Nakano, Tamami; Yamamoto, Yoshiharu; Kitajo, Keiichi; Takahashi, Toshimitsu; Kitazawa, Shigeru
2009-01-01
Blinks are generally suppressed during a task that requires visual attention and tend to occur immediately before or after the task when the timing of its onset and offset are explicitly given. During the viewing of video stories, blinks are expected to occur at explicit breaks such as scene changes. However, given that the scene length is unpredictable, there should also be appropriate timing for blinking within a scene to prevent temporal loss of critical visual information. Here, we show that spontaneous blinks were highly synchronized between and within subjects when they viewed the same short video stories, but were not explicitly tied to the scene breaks. Synchronized blinks occurred during scenes that required less attention such as at the conclusion of an action, during the absence of the main character, during a long shot and during repeated presentations of a similar scene. In contrast, blink synchronization was not observed when subjects viewed a background video or when they listened to a story read aloud. The results suggest that humans share a mechanism for controlling the timing of blinks that searches for an implicit timing that is appropriate to minimize the chance of losing critical information while viewing a stream of visual events. PMID:19640888
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Development and validation of the Spanish-English Language Proficiency Scale (SELPS).
Smyk, Ekaterina; Restrepo, M Adelaida; Gorin, Joanna S; Gray, Shelley
2013-07-01
This study examined the development and validation of a criterion-referenced Spanish-English Language Proficiency Scale (SELPS) that was designed to assess the oral language skills of sequential bilingual children ages 4-8. This article reports results for the English proficiency portion of the scale. The SELPS assesses syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, verbal fluency, and lexical diversity based on 2 story retell tasks. In Study 1, 40 children were given 2 story retell tasks to evaluate the reliability of parallel forms. In Study 2, 76 children participated in the validation of the scale against language sample measures and teacher ratings of language proficiency. Study 1 indicated no significant differences between the SELPS scores on the 2 stories. Study 2 indicated that the SELPS scores correlated significantly with their counterpart language sample measures. Correlations between the SELPS and teacher ratings were moderate. The 2 story retells elicited comparable SELPS scores, providing a valuable tool for test-retest conditions in the assessment of language proficiency. Correlations between the SELPS scores and external variables indicated that these measures assessed the same language skills. Results provided empirical evidence regarding the validity of inferences about language proficiency based on the SELPS score.
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A new mode of fear expression: perceptual bias in height fear.
Teachman, Bethany A; Stefanucci, Jeanine K; Clerkin, Elise M; Cody, Meghan W; Proffitt, Dennis R
2008-04-01
Emotion and psychopathology researchers have described the fear response as consisting of four main components--subjective affect, physiology, cognition, and behavior. The current study provides evidence for an additional component in the domain of height fear (perception) and shows that it is distinct from measures of cognitive processing. Individuals High (N = 35) and Low (N = 36) in acrophobic symptoms looked over a two-story balcony ledge and estimated its vertical extent using a direct height estimation task (visual matching), and an indirect task (size estimation); the latter task seems to exhibit little influence from cognitive factors. In addition, implicit and explicit measures of cognitive processing were obtained. Results indicated that, as expected, the High Fear group showed greater relative, implicit height fear associations and explicit threat cognitions. Of primary interest, the High (compared to Low) Fear group estimated the vertical extent to be higher, and judged target sizes to be greater, even when controlling for the cognitive bias measures. These results suggest that emotional factors such as fear are related to perception. (Copyright) 2008 APA.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Oi, Misato; Saito, Hirofumi; Li, Zongfeng; Zhao, Wenjun
2013-01-01
To examine the neural mechanism of co-speech gesture production, we measured brain activity of bilinguals during an animation-narration task using near-infrared spectroscopy. The task of the participants was to watch two stories via an animated cartoon, and then narrate the contents in their first language (Ll) and second language (L2),…
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Dewitt, Natalie; Lohrmann, David K; O'Neill, James; Clark, Jeffrey K
2011-12-01
The purpose of this study was to detect and document common themes among success stories, along with challenges, as related by participants in the Michiana Coordinated School Health Leadership Institute. Four-member teams from 18 Michigan and Indiana school districts participated in semiannual Institute workshops over a 3-year period and were tasked with implementing Coordinated School Health Programs (CSHPs). Qualitative methods were used to generate themes from interviews. Data were gathered through a combined survey/interview process related to programmatic successes, evidence of success, and implementation challenges. One participant from 11 of 18 participating school districts completed the survey/interview. Each participant reported at least 1 success that had a positive effect on students and/or staff, many of which were related to the federally mandated wellness policy. With some notable exceptions, success was based on subjective judgments rather than systematically collected data. Unanimous expression of time constraints and being overworked in their current positions constituted major challenges. Although the Institute required only process evaluation, some participants collected outcome data, a task that is important in validating the benefits of CSHPs. Most districts were not able to hire the recommended coordinator to ensure implementation of health program planning initially developed during the institute. Encouragingly, at the time of data collection many teams were still acting to ensure health programming remained a priority. Nevertheless, without the network of social support provided by the Institute, some respondents struggled to maintain momentum. © 2011, American School Health Association.
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Individualized Theory of Mind (iToM): When Memory Modulates Empathy
Ciaramelli, Elisa; Bernardi, Francesco; Moscovitch, Morris
2013-01-01
Functional neuroimaging studies have noted that brain regions supporting theory of mind (ToM) overlap remarkably with those underlying episodic memory, suggesting a link between the two processes. The present study shows that memory for others’ past experiences modulates significantly our appraisal of, and reaction to, what is happening to them currently. Participants read the life story of two characters; one had experienced a long series of love-related failures, the other a long series of work-related failures. In a later faux pas recognition task, participants reported more empathy for the character unlucky in love in love-related faux pas scenarios, and for the character unlucky at work in work-related faux pas scenarios. The memory-based modulation of empathy correlated with the number of details remembered from the characters’ life story. These results suggest that individuals use memory for other people’s past experiences to simulate how they feel in similar situations they are currently facing. The integration of ToM and memory processes allows adjusting mental state inferences to fit unique social targets, constructing an individualized ToM. PMID:23378839
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Fix, Gemmae M; Houston, Thomas K; Barker, Anna M; Wexler, Laura; Cook, Natasha; Volkman, Julie E; Bokhour, Barbara G
2012-09-01
Patient narratives, or stories, are an effective means of educating patients because they increase personal relevance and may reduce counter-arguing. However, such stories must seamlessly combine evidenced-based health information while being true to real patient experiences. The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of developing an educational intervention using African-American patients' success stories controlling hypertension. We identified a process to address stories development challenges. (1) To help identify story tellers, we conducted a literature review and subsequently streamlined the process of storyteller identification through screening and telephone interviews. (2) To better elicit stories, we consulted with experts in storytelling and incorporated principles from theater. (3) To select stories, we used intervention mapping to map the intervention to theory and key clinical concepts, and also engaged members of the target community to ensure scientific criteria and maintain authenticity. Using personal narratives as intervention requires weaving together science, theory and clinically sound content, while still being true to the art of storytelling. Through a careful process of identifying storytellers and story selection and drawing upon theater arts, creating stories for intervention can be streamlined while meeting the goals of authenticity and scientific soundness. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.
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Inferencing Processes After Right Hemisphere Brain Damage: Effects of Contextual Bias
Blake, Margaret Lehman
2009-01-01
Purpose Comprehension deficits associated with right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) have been attributed to an inability to use context, but there is little direct evidence to support the claim. This study evaluated the effect of varying contextual bias on predictive inferencing by adults with RHD. Method Fourteen adults with no brain damage (NBD) and 14 with RHD read stories constructed with either high predictability or low predictability of a specific outcome. Reading time for a sentence that disconfirmed the target outcome was measured and compared with a control story context. Results Adults with RHD evidenced activation of predictive inferences only for highly predictive conditions, whereas NBD adults generated inferences in both high- and low-predictability stories. Adults with RHD were more likely than those with NBD to require additional time to integrate inferences in high-predictability conditions. The latter finding was related to working memory for the RHD group. Results are interpreted in light of previous findings obtained using the same stimuli. Conclusions RHD does not abolish the ability to use context. Evidence of predictive inferencing is influenced by task and strength of inference activation. Treatment considerations and cautions regarding interpreting results from one methodology are discussed. PMID:19252126
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Mood congruity and episodic memory in young children.
Christodoulou, Joan; Burke, Deborah M
2016-02-01
Although mood congruity effects on episodic memory have been reported extensively in adults, they have not been reported for children younger than 10 years. The current research investigated mood congruity effects in story recall using an embodied approach to mood induction involving a facial manipulation task with 3- and 4-year-old children. Participants held a chopstick or a popsicle stick in their mouths in a way to either produce or inhibit a smile while they listened to a story featuring happy events for a happy character and sad events for a sad character. Children's mood ratings before and after mood induction indicated that mood became more positive in the smile condition, with no change in the no smile condition. Children in the smile condition, but not in the no smile condition, remembered more about the happy character than the sad character in the story. These results extend mood congruity effects to 3- and 4-year olds, suggesting that at this age representations of emotion interact with basic memory processes. Moreover, the efficacy of reenactment of sensorimotor components of emotion in modifying mood is consistent with embodied representation of emotion during early childhood. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Negative emotion impacts memory for verbal discourse in pediatric bipolar disorder.
Jacobs, Rachel H; Pavuluri, Mani N; Schenkel, Lindsay S; Palmer, Anne; Shah, Khushbu; Vemuri, Deepthi; Whited, Stefanie; Little, Deborah M
2011-05-01
Cognitive and emotional deficits have been documented in youth with pediatric bipolar disorder (PBD); however, to date, a systematic evaluation of comprehension and memory for verbally presented information has not been conducted. The effect of emotion on comprehension and memory for verbally presented material also has not been examined. We examined whether youth with PBD have difficulty recalling the big picture (macrostructure) as well as the story details (microstructure). A total of 35 youth with PBD and 25 healthy controls completed an Affective Story Task. A psychological processing model allowed for the examination of both the macrostructure and microstructure of language comprehension. Youth with PBD were capable of comprehending the gist of the stories and were not impaired by emotion when comprehending and remembering macrostructure. However, negative emotional material was found to proactively interfere with the encoding and recall of microstructure. Level of depression appeared to impact recall of microstructure, but not macrostructure. Negatively valenced material may impair subsequent comprehension and memory for details among youth with PBD. This deficit could impact the daily functioning of these youth, as the perception of negative affect may derail aspects of successful comprehension and learning. © 2011 John Wiley and Sons A/S.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Whitacre, Ian; Pierson Bishop, Jessica; Lamb, Lisa L.; Philipp, Randolph A.; Bagley, Spencer; Schappelle, Bonnie P.
2015-01-01
We interviewed 40 students each in grades 7 and 11 to investigate their integer-related reasoning. In one task, the students were asked to write and interpret equations related to a story problem about borrowing money from a friend. All the students solved the story problem correctly. However, they reasoned about the problem in different ways.…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Laible, Deborah; Carlo, Gustavo; Torquati, Julia; Ontai, Lenna
2004-01-01
This study was designed to examine the links between parenting, children's perceptions of family relationships, and children's social behavior. Seventy-four children (M age = 6.01 years; 39 boys; 35 girls) and their parents took part in the study. Children completed relationship-oriented doll stories that were coded for coherence, prosocial…
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Adrián, Juan E; Clemente, Rosa Ana; Villanueva, Lidón
2007-01-01
Mothers read stories to their children (N=41) aged between 3.3 years and 5.11 years old, and children then completed two false-belief tasks. One year later, mothers read a story to 37 of those children who were also given four tasks to assess their advanced understanding of mental states. Mothers' early use of cognitive verbs in picture-book reading correlated with their children's later understanding of mental states. Some pragmatic aspects of maternal input correlated with children's later outcomes. Two different factors in mothers' cognitive discourse were identified, suggesting a zone of proximal development in children's understanding of mental states.
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The evolving story of information assurance at the DoD.
DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)
Campbell, Philip LaRoche
2007-01-01
This document is a review of five documents on information assurance from the Department of Defense (DoD), namely 5200.40, 8510.1-M, 8500.1, 8500.2, and an ''interim'' document on DIACAP [9]. The five documents divide into three sets: (1) 5200.40 & 8510.1-M, (2) 8500.1 & 8500.2, and (3) the interim DIACAP document. The first two sets describe the certification and accreditation process known as ''DITSCAP''; the last two sets describe the certification and accreditation process known as ''DIACAP'' (the second set applies to both processes). Each set of documents describes (1) a process, (2) a systems classification, and (3) a measurement standard.more » Appendices in this report (a) list the Phases, Activities, and Tasks of DITSCAP, (b) note the discrepancies between 5200.40 and 8510.1-M concerning DITSCAP Tasks and the System Security Authorization Agreement (SSAA), (c) analyze the DIACAP constraints on role fusion and on reporting, (d) map terms shared across the documents, and (e) review three additional documents on information assurance, namely DCID 6/3, NIST 800-37, and COBIT{reg_sign}.« less
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Weber, Kirsten; Luther, Lisa; Indefrey, Peter; Hagoort, Peter
2016-05-01
When we learn a second language later in life, do we integrate it with the established neural networks in place for the first language or is at least a partially new network recruited? While there is evidence that simple grammatical structures in a second language share a system with the native language, the story becomes more multifaceted for complex sentence structures. In this study, we investigated the underlying brain networks in native speakers compared with proficient second language users while processing complex sentences. As hypothesized, complex structures were processed by the same large-scale inferior frontal and middle temporal language networks of the brain in the second language, as seen in native speakers. These effects were seen both in activations and task-related connectivity patterns. Furthermore, the second language users showed increased task-related connectivity from inferior frontal to inferior parietal regions of the brain, regions related to attention and cognitive control, suggesting less automatic processing for these structures in a second language.
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Sex Differences in Memory for Sexually-Relevant Information
McCall, Katie M.; Rellini, Alessandra H.; Seal, Brooke N.
2010-01-01
The present study was conducted in an attempt to examine potential differences between men and women in memory for sexually relevant information. A total of 77 undergraduate students (31 men, 46 women) read a sexual story and completed memory tasks in response to the story. Based on previous research, we hypothesized that differences would exist between men and women for different types of sexual information and we hoped to understand whether specific variables (sexual experiences, sexual functioning, and reactions to the sexual story) could explain such differences. Men were more likely to remember erotic or explicit details of the story, whereas women were more likely to remember love and emotional bonding details of the story. Additionally, women were more likely to recall information referencing the characters in the story. Results from regression analyses indicated that sexual desire and satisfaction were related to differences in recall and recognition of the love and emotional bonding aspects of the story, and that frequency of sexual intercourse was related to differences in the recall of erotic or explicit details of the story. The significant results obtained in this study correspond to previously established sex differences in memory for sexual information. PMID:17186127
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Devine, Rory T; Hughes, Claire
2013-01-01
In this study of two hundred and thirty 8- to 13-year-olds, a new "Silent Films" task is introduced, designed to address the dearth of research on theory of mind in older children by providing a film-based analogue of F. G. E. Happé's (1994) Strange Stories task. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that all items from both tasks loaded onto a single theory-of-mind latent factor. With effects of verbal ability and family affluence controlled, theory-of-mind latent factor scores increased significantly with age, indicating that mentalizing skills continue to develop through middle childhood. Girls outperformed boys on the theory-of-mind latent factor, and the correlates of individual differences in theory of mind were gender specific: Low scores were related to loneliness in girls and to peer rejection in boys. © 2012 The Authors. Child Development © 2012 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.
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The nature of orthographic learning in self-teaching: Testing the extent of transfer.
Tucker, Rebecca; Castles, Anne; Laroche, Annie; Deacon, S Hélène
2016-05-01
The current study was designed to test how orthographic learning, or the learning of the spelling patterns of words, happens within the self-teaching paradigm. One possibility is that orthographic learning occurs on a word-specific basis. Two other possibilities are that orthographic learning transfers specifically to the processing of novel words that are morphologically related or that it transfers to novel words that are orthographically similar, regardless of morphological relationship. In an orthographic learning paradigm, we asked children in Grades 3 and 5 to read nonwords embedded in short stories. In a between-participants design, some children read nonwords that were base forms, others read nonwords that were morphologically complex forms, and others read nonwords that were orthographically complex forms (e.g., feap, feaper, and feaple, respectively). Children completed an orthographic choice task with the same items as in the stories. To evaluate transfer of learning, children also completed orthographic choices for the two forms of the nonwords not seen in the stories. Results indicated that children's orthographic learning affected processing of novel items that appeared to be morphologically related as well as those that shared only orthographic structure (e.g., both feaper and feaple). Additional analyses showed that these effects were held across cases when children did and did not successfully decode the novel words in the learning experience, although successful decoding did lead to higher levels of orthographic learning and transfer. Together, the findings suggest that children's prior experiences affect their processing of novel words that share orthographic similarity, likely reflecting a role for orthographic analogies in the self-teaching process. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Creativity and Tolerance of Ambiguity: An Empirical Study
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Zenasni, Franck; Besancon, Maud; Lubart, Todd
2008-01-01
This study examines the relationship between creativity and tolerance of ambiguity. Participants were parents and their adolescent children. Three measures of creativity were used: a divergent thinking task, a story-writing task and self-evaluation of creative attitudes and behavior. Participants completed two self-report measures of tolerance of…
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van Nispen, Karin; van de Sandt-Koenderman, Mieke; Mol, Lisette; Krahmer, Emiel
2014-01-01
Gesticulation (gestures accompanying speech) and pantomime (gestures in the absence of speech) can each be comprehensible. Little is known about the differences between these two gesture modes in people with aphasia. To discover whether there are differences in the communicative use of gesticulation and pantomime in QH, a person with severe fluent aphasia. QH performed two tasks: naming objects and retelling a story. He did this once in a verbal condition (enabling gesticulation) and once in a pantomime condition. For both conditions, the comprehensibility of gestures was analysed in a forced-choice task by naïve judges. Secondly, a comparison was made between QH and healthy controls for the representation techniques used. Pantomimes produced by QH for naming objects were significantly more comprehensible than chance, whereas his gesticulation was not. For retelling a story the opposite pattern was found. When naming objects QH gesticulated much more than did healthy controls. His pantomimes for this task were simpler than those used by the control group. For retelling a story no differences were found. Although QH did not make full use of each gesture modes' potential, both did contribute to QH's comprehensibility. Crucially, the benefits of each mode differed across tasks. This implies that both gesture modes should be taken into account separately in models of speech and gesture production and in clinical practice for different communicative settings. © 2013 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Richels, Corrin; Bobzien, Jonna; Raver, Sharon A.; Schwartz, Kathryn; Hester, Peggy; Reed, Lauren
2014-01-01
The purpose of this study was to investigate whether specific emotion vocabulary could be taught to children with hearing impairments using child-specific social stories and demonstration tasks. The participants were three preschool-aged children who were being served in an auditory-verbal preschool classroom. An A-B single-subject design was used…
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Corcoran, Rhiannon; Bentall, Richard P; Rowse, Georgina; Moore, Rosanne; Cummins, Sinead; Blackwood, Nigel; Howard, Robert; Shryane, Nick M
2011-11-01
INTRODUCTION. This study used Item-Response Theory (IRT) to model the psychometric properties of a false belief picture sequencing task. Consistent with the mental time travel hypothesis of paranoia, we anticipated that performance on this deductive theory of mind (ToM) task would not be associated with the presence of persecutory delusions but would be related to other clinical, cognitive, and demographic factors. METHOD. A large (N=237) and diverse clinical and nonclinical sample differing in levels of depression and paranoid ideation performed 2 ToM tasks: the false belief sequencing task and a ToM stories task that was used to assess the validity of the false belief sequencing task as a measure of ToM. RESULTS. A unidimensional IRT model was found to fit the data well. Latent ToM ability as measured by the false belief sequencing task was negatively related with age and positively with IQ. In contrast to the ToM stories measure, there was no association between clinical diagnosis or symptoms and false belief picture sequencing after controlling for age and IQ. CONCLUSIONS. In line with mental time travel hypothesis of paranoia (Corcoran, 2010 ), performance on this deductive nonverbal ToM task is not related to the presence of paranoid symptoms. This measure is best suited for assessing ToM functioning where participants' performance falls just short of the average latent ToM ability. Furthermore, it is sensitive to the effects of increasing age and decreasing IQ.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Snyder, Barbara, Ed.
1984-01-01
The journal includes nine articles on the theme of a world view of foreign language teaching. They are: "The Foreign Language Articulation Task Force Survey: A Report" (Reid Baker); "Report of the Ohio Foreign Language Task Force" (Barbara Snyder); "The Akron Story Part I: Summer Foreign Language Camps" (John D. Durden and Sandra K. Strauber);…
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The Effects of Microcomputers on Children's Attention to Reading Tasks.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Zuk, Dorie; Danner, Fred
A study investigated the effects of microcomputers on children's attention to reading tasks and the relationship between previous reading achievement and grade level on such attentional behavior. Fifty-five third and fifth graders read two stories each, one presented on a microcomputer and one presented in print. Television cartoons and rock music…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Pena, Elizabeth D.; Gillam, Ronald B.; Malek, Melynn; Ruiz-Felter, Roxanna; Resendiz, Maria; Fiestas, Christine; Sabel, Tracy
2006-01-01
Two experiments examined reliability and classification accuracy of a narration-based dynamic assessment task. Purpose: The first experiment evaluated whether parallel results were obtained from stories created in response to 2 different wordless picture books. If so, the tasks and measures would be appropriate for assessing pretest and posttest…
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An Open-Sourced and Interactive Ebook Development Program for Minority Languages
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Sheepy, Emily; Sundberg, Ross; Laurie, Anne
2017-01-01
According to Long (2014), genuine task-based pedagogy is centered around the real-world activities that learners need to complete using the target language. We are developing the OurStories mobile application to support learners and instructors of minority languages in the development of personally relevant, task-based learning resources. The…
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Shimada, K; Hirotani, M; Yokokawa, H; Yoshida, H; Makita, K; Yamazaki-Murase, M; Tanabe, H C; Sadato, N
2015-08-06
This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the brain regions underlying language task performance in adult second language (L2) learners. Specifically, we identified brain regions where the level of activation was associated with L2 fluency levels. Thirty Japanese-speaking adults participated in the study. All participants were L2 learners of English and had achieved varying levels of fluency, as determined by a standardized L2 English proficiency test, the Versant English Test (Pearson Education Inc., 2011). When participants performed the oral sentence building task from the production tasks administered, the dorsal part of the left inferior frontal gyrus (dIFG) showed activation patterns that differed depending on the L2 fluency levels: The more fluent the participants were, the more dIFG activation decreased. This decreased activation of the dIFG might reflect the increased automaticity of a syntactic building process. In contrast, when participants performed an oral story comprehension task, the left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) showed increased activation with higher fluency levels. This suggests that the learners with higher L2 fluency were actively engaged in post-syntactic integration processing supported by the left pSTG. These data imply that L2 fluency predicts neural resource allocation during language comprehension tasks as well as in production tasks. This study sheds light on the neural underpinnings of L2 learning by identifying the brain regions recruited during different language tasks across different modalities (production vs. comprehension). Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.
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Dodell-Feder, David; Lincoln, Sarah Hope; Coulson, Joseph P.; Hooker, Christine I.
2013-01-01
Social functioning depends on the ability to attribute and reason about the mental states of others – an ability known as theory of mind (ToM). Research in this field is limited by the use of tasks in which ceiling effects are ubiquitous, rendering them insensitive to individual differences in ToM ability and instances of subtle ToM impairment. Here, we present data from a new ToM task – the Short Story Task (SST) - intended to improve upon many aspects of existing ToM measures. More specifically, the SST was designed to: (a) assess the full range of individual differences in ToM ability without suffering from ceiling effects; (b) incorporate a range of mental states of differing complexity, including epistemic states, affective states, and intentions to be inferred from a first- and second-order level; (c) use ToM stimuli representative of real-world social interactions; (d) require participants to utilize social context when making mental state inferences; (e) exhibit adequate psychometric properties; and (f) be quick and easy to administer and score. In the task, participants read a short story and were asked questions that assessed explicit mental state reasoning, spontaneous mental state inference, and comprehension of the non-mental aspects of the story. Responses were scored according to a rubric that assigned greater points for accurate mental state attributions that included multiple characters’ mental states. Results demonstrate that the SST is sensitive to variation in ToM ability, can be accurately scored by multiple raters, and exhibits concurrent validity with other social cognitive tasks. The results support the effectiveness of this new measure of ToM in the study of social cognition. The findings are also consistent with studies demonstrating significant relationships among narrative transportation, ToM, and the reading of fiction. Together, the data indicate that reading fiction may be an avenue for improving ToM ability. PMID:24244736
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Nijdam, Mirjam J; Martens, Irene J M; Reitsma, Johannes B; Gersons, Berthold P R; Olff, Miranda
2018-05-01
Individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have neurocognitive deficits in verbal memory and executive functioning. In this study, we examined whether memory and executive functioning changed over the course of treatment and which clinical variables were associated with change. Neuropsychological assessments were administered at baseline and endpoint of a randomized controlled trial as secondary outcome. Trauma survivors (n = 88) diagnosed with PTSD received trauma-focused psychotherapy within a 17-week randomized controlled trial. Neuropsychological tests were the California Verbal Learning Test, Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test, Stroop Color Word Test, and Trail Making Test. Significant, small- to medium-sized improvements in verbal memory, information processing speed, and executive functioning were found after trauma-focused psychotherapy (Cohen's d 0.16-0.68). Greater PTSD symptom decrease was significantly related to better post-treatment neurocognitive performance (all p < .005). Patients with comorbid depression improved more than patients with PTSD alone on interference tasks (p < .01). No differences emerged between treatment conditions and between patients on serotonergic antidepressants and those who were not. This study suggests that neurocognitive deficits in PTSD can improve over the course of trauma-focused psychotherapy and are therefore at least partly reversible. Improvements over treatment are in line with previous neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies and effect sizes exceed those of practice effects. Future research should determine whether these changes translate into improved functioning in the daily lives of the patients. Patients with PTSD have difficulties performing verbal memory tasks (e.g., remembering a grocery list, recall of a story) and executive functioning tasks (e.g., shifting attention between two tasks, ignoring irrelevant information to complete a task). Verbal memory, information processing speed, and executive functioning significantly improved in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder over the course of trauma-focused psychotherapy. Improvements were equal in size for two different trauma-focused psychotherapies (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy and brief eclectic psychotherapy for PTSD). Medium-sized effects were found for recall of a story, whereas effects in other aspects of verbal memory, information processing speed, and executive functioning were small-sized. No causal attributions can be made because we could not include a control group without treatment for ethical reasons. Findings may be more reflective of patients who completed treatment than patients who prematurely dropped out as completers were overrepresented in our sample. © 2018 The British Psychological Society.
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RN students need to tell their stories.
Blecke, J; Flatt, M M
1993-04-01
Finally, what is it about RN students' experiences in the transition process in nursing education that makes their stories need to be told? Actually this question is asked from both the side of the RN students who are the learners and need to tell the stories, and the side of the educator/advisor who needs to have the stories told. In short, the answer to both is that these stories reveal very graphically and meaningfully what is happening in the learning and professional development processes and, simultaneously, they facilitate the progression of those processes. The RN students seem to have an innate sense about what telling their stories will do for them in relation to their learning and professional development processes. They require very little encouragement to prompt their story telling. For the educators/advisors, no other strategy is as adaptable and achieves as much in relation to facilitating the learning and development processes. For both parties, the graphic revelations in stories paint a picture of how past, present, and future blend together to form a meaningful, coherent view of a position in the world. According to Antonovsky's (1979) work on stress and coping, such a view is necessary if stress is to be resisted and health maintained.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
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Understanding and representing natural language meaning
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Waltz, D. L.; Maran, L. R.; Dorfman, M. H.; Dinitz, R.; Farwell, D.
1982-12-01
During this contract period the authors have: (1) continued investigation of events and actions by means of representation schemes called 'event shape diagrams'; (2) written a parsing program which selects appropriate word and sentence meanings by a parallel process know as activation and inhibition; (3) begun investigation of the point of a story or event by modeling the motivations and emotional behaviors of story characters; (4) started work on combining and translating two machine-readable dictionaries into a lexicon and knowledge base which will form an integral part of our natural language understanding programs; (5) made substantial progress toward a general model for the representation of cognitive relations by comparing English scene and event descriptions with similar descriptions in other languages; (6) constructed a general model for the representation of tense and aspect of verbs; (7) made progress toward the design of an integrated robotics system which accepts English requests, and uses visual and tactile inputs in making decisions and learning new tasks.
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Toy Story: Illustrating Gender Differences in a Motor Skills Task
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Knight, Jennifer L.; Hebl, Michelle R.; Mendoza, Miriam
2004-01-01
To challenge students' stereotypes about gendered performance on motor skills tasks, we developed a classroom active learning demonstration. Four 3-person, same-gender teams received either a Barbie(r) doll or a Transformer(r), and team members dressed the Barbie or manipulated the Transformer from a tank to a robot as quickly as possible, with…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Tobia, Valentina; Bonifacci, Paola; Ottaviani, Cristina; Borsato, Thomas; Marzocchi, Gian Marco
2016-01-01
The aim of this study was to investigate physiological activation during reading and control tasks in children with dyslexia and typical readers. Skin conductance response (SCR) recorded during four tasks involving reading aloud, reading silently, and describing illustrated stories aloud and silently was compared for children with dyslexia (n =…
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Tracking Deceased-Related Thinking with Neural Pattern Decoding of a Cortical-Basal Ganglia Circuit.
Schneck, Noam; Haufe, Stefan; Tu, Tao; Bonanno, George A; Ochsner, Kevin; Sajda, Paul; Mann, J John
2017-07-01
Deceased-related thinking is central to grieving and potentially critical to processing of the loss. Self-report measurements might fail to capture important elements of deceased-related thinking and processing. Here, we used a machine learning approach applied to fMRI - known as neural decoding - to develop a measure of ongoing deceased-related processing. 23 subjects grieving the loss of a first-degree relative, spouse or partner within 14 months underwent two fMRI tasks. They first viewed pictures and stories related to the deceased, a living control and a demographic control figure while providing ongoing valence and arousal ratings. Second, they performed a 10-minute Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) with thought probes every 25-35 seconds to identify deceased, living and self-related thoughts. A conjunction analysis, controlling for valence/arousal, identified neural clusters in basal ganglia, orbital prefrontal cortex and insula associated with both types of deceased-related stimuli vs. the two control conditions in the first task. This pattern was applied to fMRI data collected during the SART, and discriminated deceased-related but not living or self-related thoughts, independently of grief-severity and time since loss. Deceased-related thoughts on the SART correlated with self-reported avoidance. The neural model predicted avoidance over and above deceased-related thoughts. A neural pattern trained to identify mental representations of the deceased tracked deceased-related thinking during a sustained attention task and also predicted subject-level avoidance. This approach provides a new imaging tool to be used as an index of processing the deceased for future studies of complicated grief.
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Warren, R E; Zammitt, N N; Deary, I J; Frier, B M
2007-01-01
Global memory performance is impaired during acute hypoglycaemia. This study assessed whether moderate hypoglycaemia disrupts learning and recall in isolation, and utilised a novel test of prospective memory which may better reflect the role of memory in daily life than conventional tests. Thirty-six subjects with type 1 diabetes participated, 20 with normal hypoglycaemia awareness (NHA) and 16 with impaired hypoglycaemia awareness (IHA). Each underwent a hypoglycaemic clamp with target blood glucose 2.5 mmol/l. Prior to hypoglycaemia, subjects attempted to memorise instructions for a prospective memory task, and recall was assessed during hypoglycaemia. Subjects then completed the learning and immediate recall stages of three conventional memory tasks (word recall, story recall, visual recall) during hypoglycaemia. Euglycaemia was restored and delayed memory for the conventional tasks was tested. The same procedures were completed in euglycaemic control studies (blood glucose 4.5 mmol/l). Hypoglycaemia impaired performance significantly on the prospective memory task (p = 0.004). Hypoglycaemia also significantly impaired both immediate and delayed recall for the word and story recall tasks (p < 0.01 in each case). There was no significant deterioration of performance on the visual memory task. The effect of hypoglycaemia did not differ significantly between subjects with NHA and IHA. Impaired performance on the prospective memory task during hypoglycaemia demonstrates that recall is disrupted by hypoglycaemia. Impaired performance on the conventional memory tasks demonstrates that learning is also disrupted by hypoglycaemia. Results of the prospective memory task support the relevance of these findings to the everyday lives of people with diabetes.
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Practising family history: 'identity' as a category of social practice.
Bottero, Wendy
2015-09-01
Research on family history argues it performs the task of anchoring a sense of 'self' through tracing ancestral connection and cultural belonging, seeing it as a form of storied 'identity-work'. This paper draws on a small-scale qualitative study to think further on the identity-work of family history. Using practice theory, and a disaggregated notion of 'identity', it explores how the storying of family histories relates to genealogy as a leisure hobby, a form of historical research, and an information-processing activity; and examines the social organization of that narrativity, where various practical engagements render certain kinds of genealogical information more, or less, 'storyable'. Key features of 'identity-work' in family history, such as the construction of genealogy as a personal journey of discovery and identification with particular ancestors, emerge as a consequence of the procedures of family history, organized as a set of practical tasks. The paper explores 'identity-work' as a consequence of people's engagement in specific social practices which provide an internal logic to their actions, with various components of 'identity' emerging as categories of practice shaped within, and for, use. Focusing on 'identity' as something produced when we are engaged in doing other things, the paper examines how the practical organization of 'doing other things' helps produce 'identity' in particular ways. © London School of Economics and Political Science 2015.
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Storytelling in Mexican Homes: Connections Between Oral and Literacy Practices
Reese, Leslie
2013-01-01
The study focuses on storytelling among Mexican families, documenting the frequency of storytelling in the homes of working and middle class Mexican families, the range of topics of the stories, characteristics and genres of stories, and intergenerational continuity of storytelling practices. Also examined are potential associations between storytelling practices and children’s performance on language and early reading tasks. This qualitative study draws from interview data with 30 families, supplemented with survey and outcome data from the larger mixed method project of which it forms a part. Storytelling continues to be a widespread but not frequent activity, including genres of family anecdotes, horror stories, folktales, and historical recounts. Storytelling as a cultural resource is discussed. PMID:23565052
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Storytelling in Mexican Homes: Connections Between Oral and Literacy Practices.
Reese, Leslie
2012-01-01
The study focuses on storytelling among Mexican families, documenting the frequency of storytelling in the homes of working and middle class Mexican families, the range of topics of the stories, characteristics and genres of stories, and intergenerational continuity of storytelling practices. Also examined are potential associations between storytelling practices and children's performance on language and early reading tasks. This qualitative study draws from interview data with 30 families, supplemented with survey and outcome data from the larger mixed method project of which it forms a part. Storytelling continues to be a widespread but not frequent activity, including genres of family anecdotes, horror stories, folktales, and historical recounts. Storytelling as a cultural resource is discussed.
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The 3D Digital Story-telling Media on Batik Learning in Vocational High Schools
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Widiaty, I.; Achdiani, Y.; Kuntadi, I.; Mubaroq, S. R.; Zakaria, D.
2018-02-01
The aim of this research is to make 3D digital Story-telling Media on Batik Learning in Vocational High School. The digital story-telling developed in this research is focused on 3D-based story-telling. In contrast to the digital story-telling that has been developed in existing learning, this research is expected to be able to improve understanding of vocational students about the value of local wisdom batik more meaningful and “live”. The process of making 3D digital story-telling media consists of two processes, namely the creation of 3D objects and the creation of 3D object viewer.
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I Hate Chicken Breast: A Tale of Resisting Stories and Disembodied Knowledge Construction
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Moreira, Claudio
2012-01-01
In this performance autoethnography, the author explores the simultaneity of telling and resisting stories of lived experience. In the process, the author constructs the notion of "resisting stories" as autoethnographic narratives that both resist and demand telling in the process of making themselves public. In the process the author engages in a…
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A Drawing Task to Assess Emotion Inference in Language-Impaired Children.
Vendeville, Nathalie; Blanc, Nathalie; Brechet, Claire
2015-10-01
Studies investigating the ability of children with language impairment (LI) to infer emotions rely on verbal responses (which can be challenging for these children) and/or the selection of a card representing an emotion (which limits the response range). In contrast, a drawing task might allow a broad spectrum of responses without involving language. This study used a drawing task to compare the ability to make emotional inferences in children with and without LI. Twenty-two children with LI and 22 typically developing children ages 6 to 10 years were assessed in school during 3 sessions. They were asked to listen to audio stories. At specific moments, the experimenter stopped the recording and asked children to complete the drawing of a face to depict the emotion felt by the story's character. Three adult study-blind judges were subsequently asked to evaluate the expressiveness of the drawings. Children with LI had more difficulty than typically developing children making emotional inferences. Children with LI also made more errors of different valence than their typically developing peers. Our findings confirm that children with LI show difficulty in producing emotional inferences, even when performing a drawing task--a relatively language-free response mode.
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Choong, Caroline Sm; Doody, Gillian A
2013-01-01
Patients suffering from Alzheimer's dementia develop difficulties in social functioning. This has led to an interest in the study of "theory of mind" in this population. However, difficulty has arisen because the associated cognitive demands of traditional short story theory of mind assessments result in failure per se in this population, making it challenging to test pure theory of mind ability. Simplified, traditional 1st and 2nd order theory of mind short story tasks and a battery of alternative theory of mind cartoon jokes and control slapstick cartoon jokes, without memory components, were administered to 16 participants with mild-moderate Alzheimer's dementia, and 11 age-matched healthy controls. No significant differences were detected between participants with Alzheimer's dementia and controls on the 1st or 2nd order traditional short story theory of mind tasks (p = 0.155 and p = 0.154 respectively). However, in the cartoon joke tasks there were significant differences in performance between the Alzheimer participants and the control group, this was evident for both theory of mind cartoons and the control 'slapstick' jokes. It remains very difficult to assess theory of mind as an isolated phenomenon in populations with global cognitive impairment, such as Alzheimer's dementia, as the tasks used to assess this cognition invariably depend on other cognitive functions. Although a limitation of this study is the small sample size, the results suggest that there is no measurable specific theory of mind deficit in people with Alzheimer's dementia, and that the use of theory of mind representational models to measure social cognitive ability may not be appropriate in this population.
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Processes Involved in Composing a Narration in a First and a Second Language.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Bowie, David G.; Schallert, Diane L.
1988-01-01
In a study of the processes used to compose a story, 12 Portuguese/English bilingual adults created narrations for 2 published, wordless picture stories and, while viewing a videotape of their narration, recalled aloud the processes they used in constructing the stories. One study was narrated in Portuguese and the other in English. The narrations…
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Black, D F; Vachha, B; Mian, A; Faro, S H; Maheshwari, M; Sair, H I; Petrella, J R; Pillai, J J; Welker, K
2017-10-01
Functional MR imaging is increasingly being used for presurgical language assessment in the treatment of patients with brain tumors, epilepsy, vascular malformations, and other conditions. The inherent complexity of fMRI, which includes numerous processing steps and selective analyses, is compounded by institution-unique approaches to patient training, paradigm choice, and an eclectic array of postprocessing options from various vendors. Consequently, institutions perform fMRI in such markedly different manners that data sharing, comparison, and generalization of results are difficult. The American Society of Functional Neuroradiology proposes widespread adoption of common fMRI language paradigms as the first step in countering this lost opportunity to advance our knowledge and improve patient care. A taskforce of American Society of Functional Neuroradiology members from multiple institutions used a broad literature review, member polls, and expert opinion to converge on 2 sets of standard language paradigms that strike a balance between ease of application and clinical usefulness. The taskforce generated an adult language paradigm algorithm for presurgical language assessment including the following tasks: Sentence Completion, Silent Word Generation, Rhyming, Object Naming, and/or Passive Story Listening. The pediatric algorithm includes the following tasks: Sentence Completion, Rhyming, Antonym Generation, or Passive Story Listening. Convergence of fMRI language paradigms across institutions offers the first step in providing a "Rosetta Stone" that provides a common reference point with which to compare and contrast the usefulness and reliability of fMRI data. From this common language task battery, future refinements and improvements are anticipated, particularly as objective measures of reliability become available. Some commonality of practice is a necessary first step to develop a foundation on which to improve the clinical utility of this field. © 2017 by American Journal of Neuroradiology.
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Thorne, Avril; Korobov, Neill; Morgan, Elizabeth M.
2009-01-01
This narrative study examined the process of personal storytelling between college-age friends who were similarly introverted or extraverted. Participants were 19 introverted and 20 extraverted same-sex pairs (49 percent female) who had been friends for an average of 18 months. Stories emerged spontaneously during 10-minute catch-up conversations. Extraverted friends more often told stories that changed the topic, and more often co-constructed story plots. Introverted friends more often told stories that were embedded in a developing theme, and constructed story plots solo. With regard to content, extraverted friends told stories about romance more so than introverted friends, whose stories more often concerned family/hometown, and older events. The findings suggest that the traits of extraversion and introversion channel the identity-making process. PMID:19325709
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Wehbe, Leila; Murphy, Brian; Talukdar, Partha; Fyshe, Alona; Ramdas, Aaditya; Mitchell, Tom
2014-01-01
Story understanding involves many perceptual and cognitive subprocesses, from perceiving individual words, to parsing sentences, to understanding the relationships among the story characters. We present an integrated computational model of reading that incorporates these and additional subprocesses, simultaneously discovering their fMRI signatures. Our model predicts the fMRI activity associated with reading arbitrary text passages, well enough to distinguish which of two story segments is being read with 74% accuracy. This approach is the first to simultaneously track diverse reading subprocesses during complex story processing and predict the detailed neural representation of diverse story features, ranging from visual word properties to the mention of different story characters and different actions they perform. We construct brain representation maps that replicate many results from a wide range of classical studies that focus each on one aspect of language processing and offer new insights on which type of information is processed by different areas involved in language processing. Additionally, this approach is promising for studying individual differences: it can be used to create single subject maps that may potentially be used to measure reading comprehension and diagnose reading disorders.
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Chen, Yuchun; Liu, Huei-Mei
2014-01-01
Children with SLI exhibit overall deficits in novel word learning compared to their age-matched peers. However, the manifestation of the word learning difficulty in SLI was not consistent across tasks and the factors affecting the learning performance were not yet determined. Our aim is to examine the extent of word learning difficulties in Mandarin-speaking preschool children with SLI, and to explore the potent influence of existing lexical knowledge on to the word learning process. Preschool children with SLI (n=37) and typical language development (n=33) were exposed to novel words for unfamiliar objects embedded in stories. Word learning tasks including the initial mapping and short-term repetitive learning were designed. Results revealed that Mandarin-speaking preschool children with SLI performed as well as their age-peers in the initial form-meaning mapping task. Their word learning difficulty was only evidently shown in the short-term repetitive learning task under a production demand, and their learning speed was slower than the control group. Children with SLI learned the novel words with a semantic head better in both the initial mapping and repetitive learning tasks. Moderate correlations between stand word learning performances and scores on standardized vocabulary were found after controlling for children's age and nonverbal IQ. The results suggested that the word learning difficulty in children with SLI occurred in the process of establishing a robust phonological representation at the beginning stage of word learning. Also, implicit compound knowledge is applied to aid word learning process for children with and without SLI. We also provide the empirical data to validate the relationship between preschool children's word learning performance and their existing receptive vocabulary ability. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Kvavilashvili, Lia; Ford, Ruth M
2014-11-01
It is well documented that young children greatly overestimate their performance on tests of retrospective memory (RM), but the current investigation is the first to examine children's prediction accuracy for prospective memory (PM). Three studies were conducted, each testing a different group of 5-year-olds. In Study 1 (N=46), participants were asked to predict their success in a simple event-based PM task (remembering to convey a message to a toy mole if they encountered a particular picture during a picture-naming activity). Before naming the pictures, children listened to either a reminder story or a neutral story. Results showed that children were highly accurate in their PM predictions (78% accuracy) and that the reminder story appeared to benefit PM only in children who predicted they would remember the PM response. In Study 2 (N=80), children showed high PM prediction accuracy (69%) regardless of whether the cue was specific or general and despite typical overoptimism regarding their performance on a 10-item RM task using item-by-item prediction. Study 3 (N=35) showed that children were prone to overestimate RM even when asked about their ability to recall a single item-the mole's unusual name. In light of these findings, we consider possible reasons for children's impressive PM prediction accuracy, including the potential involvement of future thinking in performance predictions and PM. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Hur, Ji-Won; Byun, Min Soo; Shin, Na Young; Shin, Ye Seul; Kim, Sung Nyun; Jang, Joon Hwan; Kwon, Jun Soo
2013-09-01
The influence of neurocognition, including general intelligence, on theory of mind (ToM) among patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder is controversial. The purpose of the present study was to identify the influences of the non-ToM cognition and general intelligence on ToM performance in individuals at ultra-high risk (UHR) for psychosis. Fifty-five UHR subjects and 58 healthy controls (HCs) completed neurocognitive, verbal, and nonverbal ToM tasks. UHR individuals showed poorer performance in the two verbal ToM tasks, the false-belief task and the strange-story tasks. Moreover, the UHR subjects displayed poorer recall on the interference list of the verbal learning test. Linear regression analysis revealed that neurocognitive functioning, including executive functioning, working memory, and general intelligence, accounted for significant amounts of the variance in the results for UHR individuals: 20.4% in the false-belief task, 44.0% in the strange-story task, and 49.0% in the nonverbal cartoon task. Neurocognition, including general intelligence, was not a significant contributor to performance on ToM tasks in HCs. ToM deficits were not noted in UHR individuals with above-average IQ scores (≥ 110) compared with UHR subjects with IQ scores less than 110, who displayed significant differences on all ToM tasks compared with HCs. The present results suggest that ToM deficits in UHR individuals are complex and may be influenced by non-ToM cognition. Our findings are discussed in relation to the role of neurocognitive abilities in ToM-related impairments in UHR individuals. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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A new fun and robust version of an fMRI localizer for the frontotemporal language system.
Scott, Terri L; Gallée, Jeanne; Fedorenko, Evelina
2017-07-01
A set of brain regions in the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes supports high-level linguistic processing. These regions can be reliably identified in individual subjects using fMRI, by contrasting neural responses to meaningful and structured language stimuli vs. stimuli matched for low-level properties but lacking meaning and/or structure. We here present a novel version of a language 'localizer,' which should be suitable for diverse populations including children and/or clinical populations who may have difficulty with reading or cognitively demanding tasks. In particular, we contrast responses to auditorily presented excerpts from engaging interviews or stories, and acoustically degraded versions of these materials. This language localizer is appealing because it uses (a) naturalistic and engaging linguistic materials, (b) auditory presentation, (c) a passive listening task, and can be easily adapted to new stimulus materials enabling comparisons of language activation in children and speakers of diverse languages.
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Panico, James; Healey, E Charles
2009-04-01
To determine how text type, topic familiarity, and stuttering frequency influence listener recall, comprehension, and perceived mental effort. Sixty adults listened to familiar and unfamiliar narrative and expository texts produced with 0%, 5%, 10%, and 15% stuttering. Participants listened to 4 experimental text samples at only 1 stuttering frequency. After hearing the text samples, each listener performed a free recall task, answered cued recall questions, answered story comprehension questions, and rated their perceived mental effort. Free and cued recall as well as story comprehension scores were higher for narrative than for expository texts. Free and cued recall scores were better for familiar than for unfamiliar stories, although topic familiarity did not affect story comprehension scores. Samples with all levels of stuttering resulted in higher mental effort ratings for both text types and topic familiarities. Stuttering has a greater influence on listener recall and comprehension for narrative than for expository texts. Topic familiarity affects free and cued recall but has no influence on story comprehension. Regardless of the amount of stuttering, mental effort was high for both text types and levels of familiarity.
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Who's Who? Memory updating and character reference in children's narratives.
Whitely, Cristy; Colozzo, Paola
2013-10-01
The capacity to update and monitor the contents of working memory is an executive function presumed to play a critical role in language processing. The current study used an individual differences approach to consider the relationship between memory updating and accurate reference to story characters in the narratives of typically developing children. English-speaking children from kindergarten to grade 2 ( N = 63; M age = 7.0 years) completed updating tasks, short-term memory tasks, and narrative productions. The authors used multiple regression to test whether updating accounted for independent variability in referential adequacy. The capacity to update working memory was related to adequate character reference beyond the effects of age and of short-term memory capacity, with the strongest relationship emerging for maintaining reference over multiple utterances. This individual differences study is the first to show a link between updating and performance in a discourse production task for young school-age children. The findings contribute to the growing body of research investigating the role of working memory in shaping language production. This study invites extension to children of different ages and language abilities as well as to other language production tasks.
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The Influence of Age of Acquisition in Word Reading and Other Tasks: A Never Ending Story?
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Bonin, Patrick; Barry, Christopher; Meot, Alain; Chalard, Marylene
2004-01-01
This paper concerns the influence of age of acquisition (AoA) in word reading and other tasks, and attempts to develop a number of issues raised by Zevin and Seidenberg (2002). Analyses performed on both rated and objective measures of AoA show that the frequency trajectory of words is a reliable predictor of their order of acquisition, which…
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The Veils of Clio: Dimensions of a Behavioral Narratology
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Grant, Lyle K.
2007-01-01
This paper outlines a behavior-analysis approach to the field of narratology, the study of the narrative or story, with emphasis on nonfiction stories and the processes by which such stories distort the world they describe. Stories are described in terms of (a) a behavior-analysis adaptation of Todorov's (1977) analysis of the plots of stories in…
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Acheii Bahane': Naaki Gone' Yiltsiligii II = Grandfather Stories: Volume II.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Yellowhair, Marvin
At one time all Navaho stories were handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. Some stories were recorded and then trnsalated into English. In the process of translation, the stories often times lost their meaning. To avoid this, the second volume of "Grandfather Stories," which were told by elders living in the vicinity…
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Self-referenced memory, social cognition, and symptom presentation in autism.
Henderson, Heather A; Zahka, Nicole E; Kojkowski, Nicole M; Inge, Anne P; Schwartz, Caley B; Hileman, Camilla M; Coman, Drew C; Mundy, Peter C
2009-07-01
We examined performance on a self-referenced memory (SRM) task for higher-functioning children with autism (HFA) and a matched comparison group. SRM performance was examined in relation to symptom severity and social cognitive tests of mentalizing. Sixty-two children (31 HFA, 31 comparison; 8-16 years) completed a SRM task in which they read a list of words and decided whether the word described something about them, something about Harry Potter, or contained a certain number of letters. They then identified words that were familiar from a longer list. Dependent measures were memory performance (d') in each of the three encoding conditions as well as a self-memory bias score (d' self-d' other). Children completed The Strange Stories Task and The Children's Eyes Test as measures of social cognition. Parents completed the SCQ and ASSQ as measures of symptom severity. Children in the comparison sample showed the standard SRM effect in which they recognized significantly more self-referenced words relative to words in the other-referenced and letter conditions. In contrast, HFA children showed comparable rates of recognition for self- and other-referenced words. For all children, SRM performance improved with age and enhanced SRM performance was related to lower levels of social problems. These associations were not accounted for by performance on the mentalizing tasks. Children with HFA did not show the standard enhanced processing of self- vs. other-relevant information. Individual differences in the tendency to preferentially process self-relevant information may be associated with social cognitive processes that serve to modify the expression of social symptoms in children with autism.
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Cerami, Chiara; Dodich, Alessandra; Iannaccone, Sandro; Marcone, Alessandra; Lettieri, Giada; Crespi, Chiara; Gianolli, Luigi; Cappa, Stefano F.; Perani, Daniela
2015-01-01
The behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is a rare disease mainly affecting the social brain. FDG-PET fronto-temporal hypometabolism is a supportive feature for the diagnosis. It may also provide specific functional metabolic signatures for altered socio-emotional processing. In this study, we evaluated the emotion recognition and attribution deficits and FDG-PET cerebral metabolic patterns at the group and individual levels in a sample of sporadic bvFTD patients, exploring the cognitive-functional correlations. Seventeen probable mild bvFTD patients (10 male and 7 female; age 67.8±9.9) were administered standardized and validated version of social cognition tasks assessing the recognition of basic emotions and the attribution of emotions and intentions (i.e., Ekman 60-Faces test-Ek60F and Story-based Empathy task-SET). FDG-PET was analysed using an optimized voxel-based SPM method at the single-subject and group levels. Severe deficits of emotion recognition and processing characterized the bvFTD condition. At the group level, metabolic dysfunction in the right amygdala, temporal pole, and middle cingulate cortex was highly correlated to the emotional recognition and attribution performances. At the single-subject level, however, heterogeneous impairments of social cognition tasks emerged, and different metabolic patterns, involving limbic structures and prefrontal cortices, were also observed. The derangement of a right limbic network is associated with altered socio-emotional processing in bvFTD patients, but different hypometabolic FDG-PET patterns and heterogeneous performances on social tasks at an individual level exist. PMID:26513651
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Preschoolers' Processing of False Beliefs within the Context of Picture Book Reading
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Riggio, Mary Mabel; Cassidy, Kimberly W.
2009-01-01
Research Findings: The current study examined preschoolers' processing of false belief situations presented in published picture books. Children were read one story with a plot that revolved around a single false belief occurrence and one story with multiple false belief occurrences. Children's narrative retellings of the stories were utilized as…
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Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Narrative Production in Focal Neurodegenerative Disease
Gola, Kelly A.; Thorne, Avril; Veldhuisen, Lisa D.; Felix, Cordula M.; Hankinson, Sarah; Pham, Julie; Shany-Ur, Tal; Schauer, Guido P.; Stanley, Christine M.; Glenn, Shenly; Miller, Bruce L.; Rankin, Katherine P.
2016-01-01
Conversational storytelling integrates diverse cognitive and socio-emotional abilities that critically differ across neurodegenerative disease groups and may have diagnostic relevance and predict anatomic changes. The present study employed mixed methods discourse and quantitative analyses to delineate patterns of storytelling across focal neurodegenerative disease groups, and to clarify the neuroanatomical contributions to common storytelling characteristics in these patients. Transcripts of spontaneous social interactions of 46 participants (15 behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), 7 semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), 12 Alzheimer's disease (AD), and 12 healthy older normal controls) were analysed for storytelling characteristics and frequency, and videos of the interactions were rated for patients' social attentiveness. Compared to controls, svPPAs also told more stories and autobiographical stories, and perseverated on aspects of self during storytelling. ADs told fewer autobiographical stories than NCs, and svPPAs and bvFTDs failed to attend to social cues. Storytelling characteristics were associated with a processing speed and mental flexibility, and voxel-based anatomic analysis of structural magnetic resonance imaging revealed that temporal organization, evaluations, and social attention correlated with atrophy corresponding to known intrinsic connectivity networks, including the default mode, limbic, salience, and stable task control networks. Differences in spontaneous storytelling among neurodegenerative groups elucidated diverse cognitive, socio-emotional, and neural contributions to narrative production, with implications for diagnostic screening and therapeutic intervention. PMID:26485159
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Sommer, Monika; Döhnel, Katrin; Jarvers, Irina; Blaas, Lore; Singer, Manuela; Nöth, Victoria; Schuwerk, Tobias; Rupprecht, Rainer
2018-01-01
A central diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the qualitative impairment in reciprocal social interaction and a prominent hypotheses that tried to explain this impairment is the Theory of Mind (ToM) deficit hypotheses. On a behavioral level the critical test for having a ToM, the understanding of false beliefs (FB), is often used for testing ToM abilities in individuals with ASD. Investigating the neural underpinnings several neuroimaging studies revealed a network of areas involved in FB reasoning in neurotypical individuals. For ASD individuals the neural correlates of false belief processing are largely unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and an adapted unexpected transfer task, that makes it possible to distinguish between the computation of diverging beliefs and the selection of a belief-associated response, we investigated a group of adult high-functioning individuals with ASD ( N = 15) and an age and IQ matched group of neurotypical adults (NT; N = 15). On the behavioral level we found no group differences. On the neural level, results were two-fold: In the story phase, in which participants had to compute whether the character's belief is congruent or incongruent to their own belief, there were no differences between neurotypical participants and those diagnosed with ASD. But, in the subsequent question phase, participants with ASD showed increased activity in the bilateral anterior prefrontal cortex, the left posterior frontal cortex, the left superior temporal gyrus, and the left temporoparietal area. These results suggest that during the story phase in which the participants processed observable actions the neural correlates do not differ between adult individuals with ASD and NT individuals. But in the question phase in which participants had to infer an unobservable mental state results revealed neural differences between the two groups. Possibly, these subtle neural processing differences may contribute to the fact that adult ASD individuals are able to master explicit false belief tasks but fail to apply their strategies during everyday social interaction.
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Sommer, Monika; Döhnel, Katrin; Jarvers, Irina; Blaas, Lore; Singer, Manuela; Nöth, Victoria; Schuwerk, Tobias; Rupprecht, Rainer
2018-01-01
A central diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the qualitative impairment in reciprocal social interaction and a prominent hypotheses that tried to explain this impairment is the Theory of Mind (ToM) deficit hypotheses. On a behavioral level the critical test for having a ToM, the understanding of false beliefs (FB), is often used for testing ToM abilities in individuals with ASD. Investigating the neural underpinnings several neuroimaging studies revealed a network of areas involved in FB reasoning in neurotypical individuals. For ASD individuals the neural correlates of false belief processing are largely unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and an adapted unexpected transfer task, that makes it possible to distinguish between the computation of diverging beliefs and the selection of a belief-associated response, we investigated a group of adult high-functioning individuals with ASD (N = 15) and an age and IQ matched group of neurotypical adults (NT; N = 15). On the behavioral level we found no group differences. On the neural level, results were two-fold: In the story phase, in which participants had to compute whether the character's belief is congruent or incongruent to their own belief, there were no differences between neurotypical participants and those diagnosed with ASD. But, in the subsequent question phase, participants with ASD showed increased activity in the bilateral anterior prefrontal cortex, the left posterior frontal cortex, the left superior temporal gyrus, and the left temporoparietal area. These results suggest that during the story phase in which the participants processed observable actions the neural correlates do not differ between adult individuals with ASD and NT individuals. But in the question phase in which participants had to infer an unobservable mental state results revealed neural differences between the two groups. Possibly, these subtle neural processing differences may contribute to the fact that adult ASD individuals are able to master explicit false belief tasks but fail to apply their strategies during everyday social interaction. PMID:29503627
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Business plan writing for physicians.
Cohn, Kenneth H; Schwartz, Richard W
2002-08-01
Physicians are practicing in an era in which they are often expected to write business plans in order to acquire, develop, and implement new technology or programs. This task is yet another reminder of the importance of business principles in providing quality patient care amid allocation of increasingly scarce resources. Unfortunately, few physicians receive training during medical school, residencies, or fellowships in performing such tasks. The process of writing business plans follows an established format similar to writing a consultation, in which the risks, benefits, and alternatives to a treatment option are presented. Although administrative assistance may be available in compiling business plans, it is important for physicians to understand the rationale, process, and pitfalls of business planning. Writing a business plan will serve to focus, clarify, and justify a request for scarce resources, and thus, increase its chance of success, both in terms of funding and implementation. A well-written business plan offers a plausible, coherent story of an uncertain future. Therefore, a business plan is not merely an exercise to obtain funding but also a rationale for investment that can help physicians reestablish leadership in health care.
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Syntactic structure building in the anterior temporal lobe during natural story listening.
Brennan, Jonathan; Nir, Yuval; Hasson, Uri; Malach, Rafael; Heeger, David J; Pylkkänen, Liina
2012-02-01
The neural basis of syntax is a matter of substantial debate. In particular, the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), or Broca's area, has been prominently linked to syntactic processing, but the anterior temporal lobe has been reported to be activated instead of IFG when manipulating the presence of syntactic structure. These findings are difficult to reconcile because they rely on different laboratory tasks which tap into distinct computations, and may only indirectly relate to natural sentence processing. Here we assessed neural correlates of syntactic structure building in natural language comprehension, free from artificial task demands. Subjects passively listened to Alice in Wonderland during functional magnetic resonance imaging and we correlated brain activity with a word-by-word measure of the amount syntactic structure analyzed. Syntactic structure building correlated with activity in the left anterior temporal lobe, but there was no evidence for a correlation between syntactic structure building and activity in inferior frontal areas. Our results suggest that the anterior temporal lobe computes syntactic structure under natural conditions. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Cancer Storytelling: A Study of Well-Being Expressions Made by Patients.
Brown, Gregory; de Jong, Jim J W
2018-03-01
Many cancer patients tell their story to help others. This paper reports a study of 160 such stories, which were processed using a grounded theory methodology. The stories were rich in emotional words and in metaphors and these, along with self-talk and meaning-for-life, provided the commonest indications of the patients' well-being. Cancer patients, through the process of telling their story, help themselves and enhance their well-being. The method of active listening is described, with associated risks for professionals.
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Managing Multiplicity: Conceptualizing Physician Cognition in Multipatient Environments.
Chan, Teresa M; Mercuri, Mathew; Van Dewark, Kenneth; Sherbino, Jonathan; Schwartz, Alan; Norman, Geoff; Lineberry, Matthew
2018-05-01
Emergency physicians (EPs) regularly manage multiple patients simultaneously, often making time-sensitive decisions around priorities for multiple patients. Few studies have explored physician cognition in multipatient scenarios. The authors sought to develop a conceptual framework to describe how EPs think in busy, multipatient environments. From July 2014 to May 2015, a qualitative study was conducted at McMaster University, using a think-aloud protocol to examine how 10 attending EPs and 10 junior residents made decisions in multipatient environments. Participants engaged in the think-aloud exercise for five different simulated multipatient scenarios. Transcripts from recorded interviews were analyzed inductively, with an iterative process involving two independent coders, and compared between attendings and residents. The attending EPs and junior residents used similar processes to prioritize patients in these multipatient scenarios. The think-aloud processes demonstrated a similar process used by almost all participants. The cognitive task of patient prioritization consisted of three components: a brief overview of the entire cohort of patients to determine a general strategy; an individual chart review, whereby the participant created a functional patient story from information available in a file (i.e., vitals, brief clinical history); and creation of a relative priority list. Compared with residents, the attendings were better able to construct deeper and more complex patient stories. The authors propose a conceptual framework for how EPs prioritize care for multiple patients in complex environments. This study may be useful to teachers who train physicians to function more efficiently in busy clinical environments.
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The Relation of Story Structure to a Model of Conceptual Change in Science Learning
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Klassen, Stephen
2010-03-01
Although various reasons have been proposed to explain the potential effectiveness of science stories to promote learning, no explicit relationship of stories to learning theory in science has been propounded. In this paper, two structurally analogous models are developed and compared: a structural model of stories and a temporal conceptual change model of learning. On the basis of the similarity of the models, as elaborated, it is proposed that the structure of science stories may promote a re-enactment of the learning process, and, thereby, such stories serve to encourage active learning through the generation of hypotheses and explanations. The practical implications of this theoretical analogy can be applied to the classroom in that the utilization of stories provides the opportunity for a type of re-enactment of the learning process that may encourage both engagement with the material and the development of long-term memory structures.
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Boyden, Paul; Knowles, Rebecca; Corcoran, Rhiannon; Hamilton, Simon; Rowse, Georgina
2015-01-01
A preliminary cognitive model of grandiose delusions has been put forward suggesting that persecutory and grandiose delusions shared distinct, yet overlapping psychological processes. This study aims to test this model and hypothesises that participants experiencing grandiose delusions may demonstrate a theory of mind (ToM) impairment and differences in attributional style compared to a control group. A cross-sectional design compared the performance of 18 individuals with grandiose delusions to a control group of 14 participants with depression. ToM was measured using a non-verbal joke appreciation task and a verbal stories task. Attributional style was measured using the internal, personal and situational attributions questionnaire. Participants experiencing grandiose delusions performed significantly worse on both ToM tasks compared to controls. Furthermore, these participants provided significantly more atypical answers when explaining the joke behind the ToM cartoons. No differences for subjective funniness ratings or attributional style were found. This preliminary study indicated participants experiencing grandiose delusions have ToM impairments which may contribute to the maintenance of this symptom.
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Scheherazade's Secret: The Power of Stories and the Desire to Learn
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Willis, Peter
2011-01-01
In this paper I use a story to introduce the idea of stories in adult educational practice. Telling stories seems to be as old as human culture. MacIntyre referred to humans as "story-telling animals" (1981: 201). The secret is the ways in which this storytelling capacity can be used in a holistic humanistic pedagogy. Education, the process of…
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Goette, William F; Werry, Amy E; Schmitt, Andrew L
2018-08-01
This study aimed to test the theoretical relationships between smell identification and cognitive tasks based on existing neuroimaging and anatomical findings. Utilizing data collected from a memory assessment clinic, theory-derived mediation and moderation models were tested. The sample used in this study consisted of 103 (39 male, 64 female) individuals referred for memory assessments. The sample's mean education was 12.4 years (SD = 3.2), and the mean age of the sample was 77.2 years (SD = 6.3). The University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (UPSIT) was a significant, partial mediator of the relationship between the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) Immediate and Delayed Memory indexes. Olfactory identification did not mediate list learning and retrieval; however, olfactory identification was a significant partial mediator of the relationship between story encoding and later memory retrieval of the story. Olfactory identification also fully mediated the relationship between a visuospatial construction task and its reconstruction from memory after a short delay. The relationship between processing speed and the olfactory identification was significantly mediated by semantic memory. Finally, the UPSIT moderated the relationship between a measure of premorbid ability, the Wechsler Test of Adult Reading, and current global cognitive functioning. Our results support theoretical relationships between olfaction and neuropsychological domains. Additionally, our results suggest that the UPSIT may serve as a proxy for cerebral integrity and is likely related to the duration of neurodegeneration.
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Have I Heard This Before and Is It Worth Knowing? Variations in Political Information Processing.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Graber, Doris A.
How people select and process current events and political information through the media is studied. Throughout 1976, 21 adults were tested for recall of selected news stories; also, participants recorded daily three news stories that had come to their attention. Results indicated that participants totally ignored 67 percent of newspaper stories.…
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When Kids Act Out: A Comparison of Embodied Methods to Improve Children's Memory for a Story
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Berenhaus, Molly; Oakhill, Jane; Rusted, Jennifer
2015-01-01
Over the last decade, embodied cognition, the idea that sensorimotor processes facilitate higher cognitive processes, has proven useful for improving children's memory for a story. In order to compare the benefits of two embodiment techniques, active experiencing (AE) and indexing, for children's memory for a story, we compared the immediate…
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Corcoran, R; Rowse, G; Moore, R; Blackwood, N; Kinderman, P; Howard, R; Cummins, S; Bentall, R P
2008-11-01
A tendency to make hasty decisions on probabilistic reasoning tasks and a difficulty attributing mental states to others are key cognitive features of persecutory delusions (PDs) in the context of schizophrenia. This study examines whether these same psychological anomalies characterize PDs when they present in the context of psychotic depression. Performance on measures of probabilistic reasoning and theory of mind (ToM) was examined in five subgroups differing in diagnostic category and current illness status. The tendency to draw hasty decisions in probabilistic settings and poor ToM tested using story format feature in PDs irrespective of diagnosis. Furthermore, performance on the ToM story task correlated with the degree of distress caused by and preoccupation with the current PDs in the currently deluded groups. By contrast, performance on the non-verbal ToM task appears to be more sensitive to diagnosis, as patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders perform worse on this task than those with depression irrespective of the presence of PDs. The psychological anomalies associated with PDs examined here are transdiagnostic but different measures of ToM may be more or less sensitive to indices of severity of the PDs, diagnosis and trait- or state-related cognitive effects.
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Dictionary Based Machine Translation from Kannada to Telugu
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Sindhu, D. V.; Sagar, B. M.
2017-08-01
Machine Translation is a task of translating from one language to another language. For the languages with less linguistic resources like Kannada and Telugu Dictionary based approach is the best approach. This paper mainly focuses on Dictionary based machine translation for Kannada to Telugu. The proposed methodology uses dictionary for translating word by word without much correlation of semantics between them. The dictionary based machine translation process has the following sub process: Morph analyzer, dictionary, transliteration, transfer grammar and the morph generator. As a part of this work bilingual dictionary with 8000 entries is developed and the suffix mapping table at the tag level is built. This system is tested for the children stories. In near future this system can be further improved by defining transfer grammar rules.
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NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)
2001-01-01
DATASTAR, Inc., of Picayune, Miss., has taken NASA's award-winning Earth Resources Laboratory Applications (ELAS) software program and evolved it to the point that the company is now providing a unique, spatial imagery service over the Internet. ELAS was developed in the early 80's to process satellite and airborne sensor imagery data of the Earth's surface into readable and useable information. While there are several software packages on the market that allow the manipulation of spatial data into useable products, this is usually a laborious task. The new program, called the DATASTAR Image Processing Exploitation, or DIPX, Delivery Service, is a subscription service available over the Internet that takes the work out of the equation and provides normalized geo-spatial data in the form of decision products.
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NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Whitacre, Ian; Pierson Bishop, Jessica; Lamb, Lisa L.; Philipp, Randolph A.; Bagley, Spencer; Schappelle, Bonnie P.
2015-02-01
We interviewed 40 students each in grades 7 and 11 to investigate their integer-related reasoning. In one task, the students were asked to write and interpret equations related to a story problem about borrowing money from a friend. All the students solved the story problem correctly. However, they reasoned about the problem in different ways. Many students represented the situation numerically without invoking negative numbers, whereas others wrote equations involving negative numbers. When asked to interpret equations involving negative numbers in relation to the story, students did so in two ways. Their responses reflect distinct perspectives concerning the relationship between arithmetic equations and borrowing/owing. We discuss these findings and their implications regarding the role of contexts in integer instruction.
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Writing Stories in the Sciences
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Lee, Eunbae; Maerz, John C.
2015-01-01
Writing stories is advocated as an excellent means of learning the process of science; however, little is understood about students' experiences of engaging in story writing in postsecondary science courses. The study described in this article was designed to improve the practice of using stories in science by examining students' lived experience…
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Popcorn Story Frames from a Multicultural Perspective.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
DiLella, Carol Ann
Popcorn story frames from a multicultural perspective are holistic outlines that in the reading/writing process facilitate comprehension for all cultures learning to read and write stories. Popcorn story frames are structured and modeled in a horizontal fashion just like popcorn pops in a horizontal fashion. The frames are designed for learners…
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Engineering the Big Chill: The story of JLab’s Central Helium Liquefier
DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)
Westfall, Catherine
This article tells the story of the Central Helium Liquefier (CHL) at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab), one of the US National Laboratories. JLab’s successful superconducting radio frequency accelerator was only possible because a group of JLab engineers successfully tackled a complex of difficulties to build a cryogenic system that included the CHL, a task that required advancing the frontier of cryogenic technology. Ultimately, these cryogenic advances were applied far beyond JLab to the benefit of cutting-edge programs at other US national laboratories (Oak Ridge, Brookhaven, and the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at MSU) as well asmore » NASA. In addition, this innovation story dramatizes the sort of engineer-driven technological problem solving that allows the successful launch and operation of experimental projects. Along the way, the CHL story also provides an important addition to our understanding of the role played by engineers and industry in creating knowledge at physics laboratories.« less
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Engineering the Big Chill: The story of JLab’s Central Helium Liquefier
Westfall, Catherine
2014-03-29
This article tells the story of the Central Helium Liquefier (CHL) at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab), one of the US National Laboratories. JLab’s successful superconducting radio frequency accelerator was only possible because a group of JLab engineers successfully tackled a complex of difficulties to build a cryogenic system that included the CHL, a task that required advancing the frontier of cryogenic technology. Ultimately, these cryogenic advances were applied far beyond JLab to the benefit of cutting-edge programs at other US national laboratories (Oak Ridge, Brookhaven, and the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at MSU) as well asmore » NASA. In addition, this innovation story dramatizes the sort of engineer-driven technological problem solving that allows the successful launch and operation of experimental projects. Along the way, the CHL story also provides an important addition to our understanding of the role played by engineers and industry in creating knowledge at physics laboratories.« less
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Moral Cognition and Multiple Sclerosis: A Neuropsychological Study.
Realmuto, Sabrina; Dodich, Alessandra; Meli, Riccardo; Canessa, Nicola; Ragonese, Paolo; Salemi, Giuseppe; Cerami, Chiara
2018-05-30
Recent literature proved that social cognition impairments may characterize the neuropsychological profile of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients. However, little is still known about moral cognition in MS. In this study, we evaluated non-social, social, and moral cognitive performances in 45 relapsing-remitting MS patients. Patients underwent the Brief International Cognitive Assessment for Multiple Sclerosis battery, the Cognitive Estimation and Stroop tasks, the Ekman-60 Faces test, the Reading the Mind in the Eye and Story-based Empathy task. Additionally, a task of moral dilemmas including both "instrumental" and "incidental" conditions was administered to patients. Forty-five age-, gender- and education-matched healthy control subjects (HC) were enrolled for comparisons. The majority of patients (i.e., 77.6%) showed deficits at non-social tasks, particularly in the executive domains. A subset of MS sample (i.e., 24%) presented with emotion recognition and socio-affective processing impairments. Overall, MS patients showed comparable levels of moral judgment with respect to HC. The rate of yes/no response in resolution of moral dilemmas and scores of attribution of emotional valence were comparable between groups. Nevertheless, lower moral permissibility and emotional arousal, particularly for the instrumental dilemmas, characterized the MS profile. Significant correlations between the attribution of emotional valence to moral actions and mentalizing scores emerged. Our findings expand current literature on MS supporting not only deficits in executive and socio-emotional domains but also low levels of permissibility of immoral actions and emotional detachment in the moral judgment process.
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450 More Story Stretchers for the Primary Grades: Activities To Expand Children's Favorite Books.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Raines, Shirley C.
This book emphasizes the reading process by suggesting effective ways to read with children, to engage children as thinkers, and to model the processes of studying a text. The book's "story stretchers" are a means to extend children's enthusiasm for stories and to better connect children's books and teaching ideas with other areas of the…
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Peña, Elizabeth D; Gillam, Ronald B; Malek, Melynn; Ruiz-Felter, Roxanna; Resendiz, Maria; Fiestas, Christine; Sabel, Tracy
2006-10-01
Two experiments examined reliability and classification accuracy of a narration-based dynamic assessment task. The first experiment evaluated whether parallel results were obtained from stories created in response to 2 different wordless picture books. If so, the tasks and measures would be appropriate for assessing pretest and posttest change within a dynamic assessment format. The second experiment evaluated the extent to which children with language impairments performed differently than typically developing controls on dynamic assessment of narrative language. In the first experiment, 58 1st- and 2nd-grade children told 2 stories about wordless picture books. Stories were rated on macrostructural and microstructural aspects of language form and content, and the ratings were subjected to reliability analyses. In the second experiment, 71 children participated in dynamic assessment. There were 3 phases: a pretest phase, in which children created a story that corresponded to 1 of the wordless picture books from Experiment 1; a teaching phase, in which children attended 2 short mediation sessions that focused on storytelling ability; and a posttest phase, in which children created a story that corresponded to a second wordless picture book from Experiment 1. Analyses compared the pretest and posttest stories that were told by 2 groups of children who received mediated learning (typical and language impaired groups) and a no-treatment control group of typically developing children from Experiment 1. The results of the first experiment indicated that the narrative measures applied to stories about 2 different wordless picture books had good internal consistency. In Experiment 2, typically developing children who received mediated learning demonstrated a greater amount of pretest to posttest change than children in the language impaired and control groups. Classification analysis indicated better specificity and sensitivity values for measures of response to intervention (modifiability) and posttest storytelling than for measures of pretest storytelling. Observation of modifiability was the single best indicator of language impairment. Posttest measures and modifiability together yielded no misclassifications. The first experiment supported the use of 2 wordless picture books as stimulus materials for collecting narratives before and after mediation within a dynamic assessment paradigm. The second experiment supported the use of dynamic assessment for accurately identifying language impairments in school-age children.
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Dynamic Assessment of School-Age Children’s Narrative Ability
Peña, Elizabeth D.; Gillam, Ronald B.; Malek, Melynn; Ruiz-Felter, Roxanna; Resendiz, Maria; Fiestas, Christine; Sabel, Tracy
2008-01-01
Two experiments examined reliability and classification accuracy of a narration-based dynamic assessment task. Purpose The first experiment evaluated whether parallel results were obtained from stories created in response to 2 different wordless picture books. If so, the tasks and measures would be appropriate for assessing pretest and posttest change within a dynamic assessment format. The second experiment evaluated the extent to which children with language impairments performed differently than typically developing controls on dynamic assessment of narrative language. Method In the first experiment, 58 1st- and 2nd-grade children told 2 stories about wordless picture books. Stories were rated on macrostructural and microstructural aspects of language form and content, and the ratings were subjected to reliability analyses. In the second experiment, 71 children participated in dynamic assessment. There were 3 phases: a pretest phase, in which children created a story that corresponded to 1 of the wordless picture books from Experiment 1; a teaching phase, in which children attended 2 short mediation sessions that focused on storytelling ability; and a posttest phase, in which children created a story that corresponded to a second wordless picture book from Experiment 1. Analyses compared the pretest and posttest stories that were told by 2 groups of children who received mediated learning (typical and language impaired groups) and a no-treatment control group of typically developing children from Experiment 1. Results The results of the first experiment indicated that the narrative measures applied to stories about 2 different wordless picture books had good internal consistency. In Experiment 2, typically developing children who received mediated learning demonstrated a greater amount of pretest to posttest change than children in the language impaired and control groups. Classification analysis indicated better specificity and sensitivity values for measures of response to intervention (modifiability) and posttest storytelling than for measures of pretest storytelling. Observation of modifiability was the single best indicator of language impairment. Posttest measures and modifiability together yielded no misclassifications. Conclusion The first experiment supported the use of 2 wordless picture books as stimulus materials for collecting narratives before and after mediation within a dynamic assessment paradigm. The second experiment supported the use of dynamic assessment for accurately identifying language impairments in school-age children. PMID:17077213
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Folk Stories and Social Identification in Multilingual Classrooms
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Creese, Angela; Wu, Chao-Jung; Blackledge, Adrian
2009-01-01
This paper considers the processes of using folk stories for the teaching of community languages in a UK complementary school. We look at the appropriation of folk stories by teachers to teach young people Mandarin while also considering their possibilities as heritage texts. We consider how the teacher and students use the folk story as…
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The Narrative Process of Improving Vocational Classroom Practice
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Sharman, Kathleen Y.
2011-01-01
This research inquires into the use of stories by vocational teachers. These stories are of interest because they are a fundamental feature of both the subject content and the social structures of vocational classrooms. The trade experiences of vocational teachers are brought to the classroom through stories. These stories have a secondary effect…
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Cultural and School-Grade Differences in Korean and White American Children's Narrative Skills
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Kim, Meesook
2003-03-01
A great deal of ethnographic research describes different communicative styles in Asian and Western countries. Asian cultures emphasise the listener's role in assuring successful communication, whereas Western cultures place the responsibility primarily on the speaker. This pattern suggests that Asian children may develop higher-level receptive skills and Western children may develop higher-level expressive skills. However, the language of children in formal education may develop in certain ways regardless of cultural influences. The present study quantifies the cultural and school-grade differences in language abilities reflected in middle-class Korean and white American children's story-telling and story-listening activities. Thirty-two Korean first- and fourth-grade children and their American counterparts were individually asked to perform two tasks: one producing a story from a series of pictures, and one involving listening to and then retelling a story. The individual interview was transcribed in their native languages and analysed in terms of ambiguity of reference, the number of causal connectors, the amount of information, and the number of central and peripheral idea units that were included in the story retelling. The data provided some empirical evidence for the effects of culture and school education in children's language acquisition.
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Understanding Science: Frameworks for using stories to facilitate systems thinking
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
ElShafie, S. J.; Bean, J. R.
2017-12-01
Studies indicate that using a narrative structure for teaching and learning helps audiences to process and recall new information. Stories also help audiences retain specific information, such as character names or plot points, in the context of a broader narrative. Stories can therefore facilitate high-context systems learning in addition to low-context declarative learning. Here we incorporate a framework for science storytelling, which we use in communication workshops, with the Understanding Science framework developed by the UC Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) to explore the application of storytelling to systems thinking. We translate portions of the Understanding Science flowchart into narrative terms. Placed side by side, the two charts illustrate the parallels between the scientific process and the story development process. They offer a roadmap for developing stories about scientific studies and concepts. We also created a series of worksheets for use with the flowcharts. These new tools can generate stories from any perspective, including a scientist conducting a study; a character that plays a role in a larger system (e.g., foraminifera or a carbon atom); an entire system that interacts with other systems (e.g., the carbon cycle). We will discuss exemplar stories about climate change from each of these perspectives, which we are developing for workshops using content and storyboard models from the new UCMP website Understanding Global Change. This conceptual framework and toolkit will help instructors to develop stories about scientific concepts for use in a classroom setting. It will also help students to analyze stories presented in class, and to create their own stories about new concepts. This approach facilitates student metacognition of the learning process, and can also be used as a form of evaluation. We are testing this flowchart and its use in systems teaching with focus groups, in preparation for use in teacher professional development workshops.
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Schermerhorn, Alice C; Cummings, E Mark; Davies, Patrick T
2008-02-01
The authors examine mutual family influence processes at the level of children's representations of multiple family relationships, as well as the structure of those representations. From a community sample with 3 waves, each spaced 1 year apart, kindergarten-age children (105 boys and 127 girls) completed a story-stem completion task, tapping representations of multiple family relationships. Structural equation modeling with autoregressive controls indicated that representational processes involving different family relationships were interrelated over time, including links between children's representations of marital conflict and reactions to conflict, between representations of security about marital conflict and parent-child relationships, and between representations of security in father-child and mother-child relationships. Mixed support was found for notions of increasing stability in representations during this developmental period. Results are discussed in terms of notions of transactional family dynamics, including family-wide perspectives on mutual influence processes attributable to multiple family relationships.
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Fadda, Roberta; Parisi, Marinella; Ferretti, Luca; Saba, Gessica; Foscoliano, Maria; Salvago, Azzurra; Doneddu, Giuseppe
2016-01-01
This paper adds to the growing research on moral judgment (MJ) by considering whether theory of mind (ToM) might foster children's autonomous MJ achievement. A group of 30 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was compared in MJ and ToM with 30 typically developing (TD) children. Participants were tested for MJ with a classical Piaget's task and for ToM with a second order False Belief task. In the moral task, children were told two versions of a story: in one version the protagonist acted according to a moral intention but the action resulted in a harmful consequence; in the other version the protagonist acted according to an immoral intention, but the action resulted in a harmless consequence. Children were asked which of the two protagonists was the "naughtier." In line with previous studies, the results indicated that, while the majority of TD participants succeeded in the second order False Belief task, only few individuals with ASD showed intact perspective taking abilities. The analysis of the MJ in relation to ToM showed that children with ASD lacking ToM abilities judged guilty the protagonists of the two versions of the story in the moral task because both of them violated a moral rule or because they considered the consequences of the actions, ignoring any psychological information. These results indicate a heteronomous morality in individuals with ASD, based on the respect of learned moral rules and outcomes rather than others' subjective states.
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Self-Referenced Memory, Social Cognition, and Symptom Presentation in Autism
Henderson, Heather A.; Zahka, Nicole E.; Kojkowski, Nicole M.; Inge, Anne P.; Schwartz, Caley B.; Hileman, Camilla M.; Coman, Drew C.; Mundy, Peter C.
2009-01-01
Background We examined performance on a self-referenced memory (SRM) task for higher functioning children with autism (HFA) and a matched comparison group. SRM performance was examined in relation to symptom severity and social cognitive tests of mentalizing. Method Sixty-two children (31 HFA, 31 comparison; 8–16 years) completed a SRM task in which they read a list of words and decided whether the word described something about them, something about Harry Potter, or contained a certain number of letters. They then identified words that were familiar from a longer list. Dependent measures were memory performance (d′) in each of the three encoding conditions as well as a self-memory bias score (d′ self-d′ other). Children completed The Strange Stories Task and The Children’s Eyes Test as measures of social cognition. Parents completed the SCQ and ASSQ as measures of symptom severity. Results Children in the comparison sample showed the standard SRM effect in which they recognized significantly more self-referenced words relative to words in the other-referenced and letter conditions. In contrast, HFA children showed comparable rates of recognition for self- and other-referenced words. For all children, SRM performance improved with age and enhanced SRM performance was related to lower levels of social problems. These associations were not accounted for by performance on the mentalizing tasks. Conclusions Children with HFA did not show the standard enhanced processing of self- vs. other-relevant information. Individual differences in the tendency to preferentially process self-relevant information may be associated with social cognitive processes that serve to modify the expression of social symptoms in children with autism. PMID:19298471
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Story Innovation: An Instructional Strategy for Developing Vocabulary and Fluency
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Griffith, Priscilla L.; Ruan, Jiening
2007-01-01
Story innovation is a form of scaffold writing in which the sentence and text patterns remain intact but the content is altered through the substitution of vocabulary to change the setting, characters, or action in a story. Story innovation is presented as a way to develop vocabulary knowledge through deep processing and to provide fluency…
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Kandylaki, Katerina D; Henrich, Karen; Nagels, Arne; Kircher, Tilo; Domahs, Ulrike; Schlesewsky, Matthias; Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina; Wiese, Richard
2017-07-01
While listening to continuous speech, humans process beat information to correctly identify word boundaries. The beats of language are stress patterns that are created by combining lexical (word-specific) stress patterns and the rhythm of a specific language. Sometimes, the lexical stress pattern needs to be altered to obey the rhythm of the language. This study investigated the interplay of lexical stress patterns and rhythmical well-formedness in natural speech with fMRI. Previous electrophysiological studies on cases in which a regular lexical stress pattern may be altered to obtain rhythmical well-formedness showed that even subtle rhythmic deviations are detected by the brain if attention is directed toward prosody. Here, we present a new approach to this phenomenon by having participants listen to contextually rich stories in the absence of a task targeting the manipulation. For the interaction of lexical stress and rhythmical well-formedness, we found one suprathreshold cluster localized between the cerebellum and the brain stem. For the main effect of lexical stress, we found higher BOLD responses to the retained lexical stress pattern in the bilateral SMA, bilateral postcentral gyrus, bilateral middle fontal gyrus, bilateral inferior and right superior parietal lobule, and right precuneus. These results support the view that lexical stress is processed as part of a sensorimotor network of speech comprehension. Moreover, our results connect beat processing in language to domain-independent timing perception.
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The Veils of Clio: Dimensions of a Behavioral Narratology
Grant, Lyle K
2007-01-01
This paper outlines a behavior-analysis approach to the field of narratology, the study of the narrative or story, with emphasis on nonfiction stories and the processes by which such stories distort the world they describe. Stories are described in terms of (a) a behavior-analysis adaptation of Todorov's (1977) analysis of the plots of stories in terms of states of equilibrium/disequilibrium and (b) Grant's (2005) analysis of the structure of stories in terms of establishing operations and escape contingencies. These two sets of concepts are applied to understanding how and why stories lead to distortions of the events they report. PMID:22477381
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Executive function in middle childhood and the relationship with theory of mind.
Wilson, Jennifer; Andrews, Glenda; Hogan, Christy; Wang, Si; Shum, David H K
2018-01-01
A group of 126 typically developing children (aged 5-12 years) completed three cool executive function tasks (spatial working memory, stop signal, intra-extra dimensional shift), two hot executive function tasks (gambling, delay of gratification), one advanced theory of mind task (strange stories with high versus low affective tone), and a vocabulary test. Older children performed better than younger children, consistent with the protracted development of hot and cool executive functions and theory of mind. Multiple regression analyses showed that hot and cool executive functions were correlated but they predicted theory of mind in different ways.
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Static analysis of masonry kilns built with fictile tubules bricks
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Olivito, Renato S.; Scuro, Carmelo; Codispoti, Rosamaria
2016-12-01
Industrial archeology is a branch that studies all the testimony (tangible and intangible, direct and indirect) related to the process of industrialization since its origins. This technical field is based on an interdisciplinary approach, it has the task of deepening the story, understanding the technological development made by man over the centuries. The present work focused attention on the study and analysis of a masonry kiln, built with the technique of hollow clay fictile tubules. The study, in particular, has been carried out analyzing the stress state caused by the wind on the structure. The kiln is constituted by a particular geometric configuration that develops in height due to the presence of chimney over the dome.
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Heald, A; Parr, C; Gibson, C; O'driscoll, K; Fowler, H
2006-10-01
It has been proposed that exposure to high levels of endogenous steroids in untreated pituitary Cushing's disease damages hippocampal structures leading to impairment in learning and memory processes. We hypothesised that patients with treated pituitary Cushing's disease would perform significantly worse on tests of cognitive ability than those with nonfunctioning pituitary adenomas. Sixteen adults with pituitary Cushing's disease (PCD) and 16 adults with non-functioning pituitary adenomas (NFA) undertook the following comprehensive neuropsychological assessments: National Adult Reading Test (NART: premorbid abilities), California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT 2 UK: learning and recall), Stroop (executive functioning), Trail-Making Test (TMT: executive functioning and attention), Adult Memory and Information Processing Battery (AMIPB: Information Processing Speed and Story Recall subtests). There was no significant difference in premorbid IQ scores (NFA mean=101 SD=13; PCD mean=102, SD=13), in verbal learning nor any significant difference in the percentage of verbal material retained in story recall (AMIPB). Performance on higher executive tasks Stroop and TMT and on measures of information processing was similar. However, there were significant decrements between some mean scores for both groups and published normative data with a clear association between higher HADS depression scores and impaired objective memory and attention which was not specific to PCD. We found no difference in cognitive function between patients with PCD and NFA. The results suggest a discrepancy between patients' subjective perception of functional cognitive impairments and objective findings on psychometric testing and point to the influence of affective symptoms on cognitive performance, particularly in Cushing's disease.
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Career Issues in Organizations.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
1997
This document contains four papers from a symposium on career issues in organizations. "Learning During Downsizing: Stories from the Survivors" (Sharon J. Confessore) describes a study to demonstrate that survivors of corporate downsizings undertake learning activities and use many resources to accomplish the learning tasks.…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Im, Janice; Parlakian, Rebecca; Osborn, Carol
2007-01-01
Storytelling is perhaps the most powerful way that human beings organize experience. The practice is timeless and universal. Stories help everyone understand the world and make sense of their lives. Like adults, children use stories to process and reflect on their experiences. Recognizing and responding to the stories that infants and toddlers…
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Parallel versus sequential processing in print and braille reading.
Veispak, Anneli; Boets, Bart; Ghesquière, Pol
2012-01-01
In the current study we investigated word, pseudoword and story reading in Dutch speaking braille and print readers. To examine developmental patterns, these reading skills were assessed in both children and adults. The results reveal that braille readers read less accurately and fast than print readers. While item length has no impact on word reading accuracy and speed in the group of print readers, it has a significant impact on reading accuracy and speed in the group of braille readers, particularly in the younger sample. This suggests that braille readers rely more strongly on an enduring sequential reading strategy. Comparison of the different reading tasks suggests that the advantage in accuracy and speed of reading in adult as compared to young braille readers is achieved through semantic top-down processing. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Automated Proposition Density Analysis for Discourse in Aphasia.
Fromm, Davida; Greenhouse, Joel; Hou, Kaiyue; Russell, G Austin; Cai, Xizhen; Forbes, Margaret; Holland, Audrey; MacWhinney, Brian
2016-10-01
This study evaluates how proposition density can differentiate between persons with aphasia (PWA) and individuals in a control group, as well as among subtypes of aphasia, on the basis of procedural discourse and personal narratives collected from large samples of participants. Participants were 195 PWA and 168 individuals in a control group from the AphasiaBank database. PWA represented 6 aphasia types on the basis of the Western Aphasia Battery-Revised (Kertesz, 2006). Narrative samples were stroke stories for PWA and illness or injury stories for individuals in the control group. Procedural samples were from the peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich task. Language samples were transcribed using Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts (MacWhinney, 2000) and analyzed using Computerized Language Analysis (MacWhinney, 2000), which automatically computes proposition density (PD) using rules developed for automatic PD measurement by the Computerized Propositional Idea Density Rater program (Brown, Snodgrass, & Covington, 2007; Covington, 2007). Participants in the control group scored significantly higher than PWA on both tasks. PD scores were significantly different among the aphasia types for both tasks. Pairwise comparisons for both discourse tasks revealed that PD scores for the Broca's group were significantly lower than those for all groups except Transcortical Motor. No significant quadratic or linear association between PD and severity was found. Proposition density is differentially sensitive to aphasia type and most clearly differentiates individuals with Broca's aphasia from the other groups.
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Brand, Carrie; Howcroft, Greg; Hoelson, Christopher Norman
2017-09-01
Research on parental divorce suggests that the nature of the divorce process, as experienced by the child, is the most important factor in his or her post-divorce adjustment. Research regarding children's experiences of the divorce process has been limited and the adult perspective has dominated the discourse on divorce; only recently has research started to consider children's viewpoint. This article describes a narrative inquiry into the experiences and perceptions of parental divorce, of 9- to 10-year-old children. Its aim is to use children's stories of parental divorce to inform the practice of professionals working with such children. The research adopted a narrative paradigm. Unstructured interviews were conducted with five children whose parents were divorced. Data were analysed thematically. Seven themes were identified. The first theme explored children's endeavours to describe and explain parental divorce. An additional six themes were developed around the types of stories children told of the divorce process. The seven themes were: (i) What is a divorcement; (ii) Stories of loss; (iii) Stories of gain; (iv) Stories of change; (v) Stories of stability; (vi) Healing stories; and (vii) Complicating stories. On the basis of the narratives elicited from children on parental divorce, this article proposes several guidelines for professionals such as psychologists, registered counsellors, social workers, and teachers as well as parents in their possible interventions with children. Some guidelines may also be of use to family and maintenance courts, and the government departments of health and education.
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Campbell, L E; McCabe, K L; Melville, J L; Strutt, P A; Schall, U
2015-09-01
Social difficulties are often noted among people with intellectual disabilities. Children and adults with 22q.11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS) often have poorer social competence as well as poorer performance on measures of executive and social-cognitive skills compared with typically developing young people. However, the relationship between social functioning and more basic processes of social cognition and executive functioning are not well understood in 22q11DS. The present study examined the relationship between social-cognitive measures of emotion attribution and theory of mind with executive functioning and their contribution to social competence in 22q11DS. The present cross-sectional study measured social cognition and executive performance of 24 adolescents with 22q11DS compared with 27 age-matched typically developing controls. Social cognition was tested using the emotion attribution task (EAT) and a picture sequencing task (PST), which tested mentalising (false-belief), sequencing, cause and effect, and inhibition. Executive functioning was assessed using computerised versions of the Tower of London task and working memory measures of spatial and non-spatial ability. Social competence was also assessed using the parent-reported Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Adolescents with 22q11DS showed impaired false-belief, emotion attribution and executive functioning compared with typically developing control participants. Poorer performance was reported on all story types in the PST, although, patterns of errors and response times across story types were similar in both groups. General sequencing ability was the strongest predictor of false-belief, and performance on the false-belief task predicted emotion attribution accuracy. Intellectual functioning, rather than theory of mind or executive functioning, predicted social competence in 22q11DS. Performance on social-cognitive tasks of theory of mind indicate evidence of a general underlying dysfunction in 22q11DS that includes executive ability to understand cause and effect, to logically reason about social scenarios and also to inhibit responses to salient, but misleading cues. However, general intellectual ability is closely related to actual social competence suggesting that a generalised intellectual deficit coupled with more specific executive impairments may best explain poor social cognition in 22q11DS. © 2015 MENCAP and International Association of the Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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Peña, Elizabeth D; Gillam, Ronald B; Bedore, Lisa M
2014-12-01
To assess the identification accuracy of dynamic assessment (DA) of narrative ability in English for children learning English as a 2nd language. A DA task was administered to 54 children: 18 Spanish-English-speaking children with language impairment (LI); 18 age-, sex-, IQ- and language experience-matched typical control children; and an additional 18 age- and language experience-matched comparison children. A variety of quantitative and qualitative measures were collected in the pretest phase, the mediation phase, and the posttest phase of the study. Exploratory discriminant analysis was used to determine the set of measures that best differentiated among this group of children with and without LI. A combination of examiner ratings of modifiability (compliance, metacognition, and task orientation), DA story scores (setting, dialogue, and complexity of vocabulary), and ungrammaticality (derived from the posttest narrative sample) classified children with 80.6% to 97.2% accuracy. DA conducted in English provides a systematic means for measuring learning processes and learning outcomes, resulting in a clinically useful procedure for identifying LIs in bilingual children who are in the process of learning English as a second language.
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Karns, Christina M; Isbell, Elif; Giuliano, Ryan J; Neville, Helen J
2015-06-01
Auditory selective attention is a critical skill for goal-directed behavior, especially where noisy distractions may impede focusing attention. To better understand the developmental trajectory of auditory spatial selective attention in an acoustically complex environment, in the current study we measured auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) across five age groups: 3-5 years; 10 years; 13 years; 16 years; and young adults. Using a naturalistic dichotic listening paradigm, we characterized the ERP morphology for nonlinguistic and linguistic auditory probes embedded in attended and unattended stories. We documented robust maturational changes in auditory evoked potentials that were specific to the types of probes. Furthermore, we found a remarkable interplay between age and attention-modulation of auditory evoked potentials in terms of morphology and latency from the early years of childhood through young adulthood. The results are consistent with the view that attention can operate across age groups by modulating the amplitude of maturing auditory early-latency evoked potentials or by invoking later endogenous attention processes. Development of these processes is not uniform for probes with different acoustic properties within our acoustically dense speech-based dichotic listening task. In light of the developmental differences we demonstrate, researchers conducting future attention studies of children and adolescents should be wary of combining analyses across diverse ages. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.
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Karns, Christina M.; Isbell, Elif; Giuliano, Ryan J.; Neville, Helen J.
2015-01-01
Auditory selective attention is a critical skill for goal-directed behavior, especially where noisy distractions may impede focusing attention. To better understand the developmental trajectory of auditory spatial selective attention in an acoustically complex environment, in the current study we measured auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) in human children across five age groups: 3–5 years; 10 years; 13 years; 16 years; and young adults using a naturalistic dichotic listening paradigm, characterizing the ERP morphology for nonlinguistic and linguistic auditory probes embedded in attended and unattended stories. We documented robust maturational changes in auditory evoked potentials that were specific to the types of probes. Furthermore, we found a remarkable interplay between age and attention-modulation of auditory evoked potentials in terms of morphology and latency from the early years of childhood through young adulthood. The results are consistent with the view that attention can operate across age groups by modulating the amplitude of maturing auditory early-latency evoked potentials or by invoking later endogenous attention processes. Development of these processes is not uniform for probes with different acoustic properties within our acoustically dense speech-based dichotic listening task. In light of the developmental differences we demonstrate, researchers conducting future attention studies of children and adolescents should be wary of combining analyses across diverse ages. PMID:26002721
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Lamar, Melissa; Charlton, Rebecca; Zhang, Aifeng; Kumar, Anand
2012-07-01
Verbal memory deficits attributed to late life depression (LLD) may result from executive dysfunction that is more detrimental to list-learning than story-based recall when compared to healthy aging. Despite these behavioral dissociations, little work has been done investigating related neuroanatomical dissociations across types of verbal memory performance in LLD. We compared list-learning to story-based memory performance in 24 non-demented individuals with LLD (age ~ 66.1 ± 7.8) and 41 non-demented/non-depressed healthy controls (HC; age ~ 67.6 ± 5.3). We correlated significant results of between-group analyses across memory performance variables with brain volumes of frontal, temporal and parietal regions known to be involved with verbal learning and memory. When compared to the HC group, the LLD group showed significantly lower verbal memory performance for spontaneous recall after repeated exposure and after a long-delay but only for the list-learning task; groups did not differ on story-based memory performance. Despite equivalent brain volumes across regions, only the LLD group showed brain associations with verbal memory performance and only for the list-learning task. Specifically, frontal volumes important for subjective organization and response monitoring correlated with list-learning performance in the LLD group. This study is the first to demonstrate neuroanatomical dissociations across types of verbal memory performance in individuals with LLD. Results provide structural evidence for the behavioral dissociations between list-learning and story-based recall in LLD when compared to healthy aging. More specifically, it points toward a network of predominantly anterior brain regions that may underlie the executive contribution to list-learning in older adults with depression. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Eye movements during listening reveal spontaneous grammatical processing.
Huette, Stephanie; Winter, Bodo; Matlock, Teenie; Ardell, David H; Spivey, Michael
2014-01-01
Recent research using eye-tracking typically relies on constrained visual contexts in particular goal-oriented contexts, viewing a small array of objects on a computer screen and performing some overt decision or identification. Eyetracking paradigms that use pictures as a measure of word or sentence comprehension are sometimes touted as ecologically invalid because pictures and explicit tasks are not always present during language comprehension. This study compared the comprehension of sentences with two different grammatical forms: the past progressive (e.g., was walking), which emphasizes the ongoing nature of actions, and the simple past (e.g., walked), which emphasizes the end-state of an action. The results showed that the distribution and timing of eye movements mirrors the underlying conceptual structure of this linguistic difference in the absence of any visual stimuli or task constraint: Fixations were shorter and saccades were more dispersed across the screen, as if thinking about more dynamic events when listening to the past progressive stories. Thus, eye movement data suggest that visual inputs or an explicit task are unnecessary to solicit analog representations of features such as movement, that could be a key perceptual component to grammatical comprehension.
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How embarrassing! The behavioral and neural correlates of processing social norm violations
van Steenbergen, Henk; Kreuk, Tanja; van der Wee, Nic J. A.; Westenberg, P. Michiel
2017-01-01
Social norms are important for human social interactions, and violations of these norms are evaluated partly on the intention of the actor. Here, we describe the revised Social Norm Processing Task (SNPT-R), a paradigm enabling the study of behavioral and neural responses to intended and unintended social norm violations among both adults and adolescents. We investigated how participants (adolescents and adults, n = 87) rate intentional and unintentional social norm violations with respect to inappropriateness and embarrassment, and we examined the brain activation patterns underlying the processing of these transgressions in an independent sample of 21 adults using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). We hypothesized to find activation within the medial prefrontal cortex, temporo-parietal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex in response to both intentional and unintentional social norm violations, with more pronounced activation for the intentional social norm violations in these regions and in the amygdala. Participants’ ratings confirmed the hypothesis that the three types of stories are evaluated differently with respect to intentionality: intentional social norm violations were rated as the most inappropriate and most embarrassing. Furthermore, fMRI results showed that reading stories on intentional and unintentional social norm violations evoked activation within the frontal pole, the paracingulate gyrus and the superior frontal gyrus. In addition, processing unintentional social norm violations was associated with activation in, among others, the orbitofrontal cortex, middle frontal gyrus and superior parietal lobule, while reading intentional social norm violations was related to activation in the left amygdala. These regions have been previously implicated in thinking about one’s self, thinking about others and moral reasoning. Together, these findings indicate that the SNPT-R could serve as a useful paradigm for examining social norm processing, both at the behavioral and the neural level. PMID:28441460
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Listening and Reading Comprehension at Story Time: How to Build Habits of the Mind
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Moore, Mary Ruth; Hall, Susan
2012-01-01
Understanding a story is an active process, whether children have listened to it being read aloud or, when they are older and read it for themselves. When children grasp a story, they (1) attend to what is important; (2) anticipate what is to come; and (3) build meaningful patterns from the many details. These active interactions with a story can…
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Effects of Age, Acoustic Challenge, and Verbal Working Memory on Recall of Narrative Speech.
Ward, Caitlin M; Rogers, Chad S; Van Engen, Kristin J; Peelle, Jonathan E
2016-01-01
A common goal during speech comprehension is to remember what we have heard. Encoding speech into long-term memory frequently requires processes such as verbal working memory that may also be involved in processing degraded speech. Here the authors tested whether young and older adult listeners' memory for short stories was worse when the stories were acoustically degraded, or whether the additional contextual support provided by a narrative would protect against these effects. The authors tested 30 young adults (aged 18-28 years) and 30 older adults (aged 65-79 years) with good self-reported hearing. Participants heard short stories that were presented as normal (unprocessed) speech or acoustically degraded using a noise vocoding algorithm with 24 or 16 channels. The degraded stories were still fully intelligible. Following each story, participants were asked to repeat the story in as much detail as possible. Recall was scored using a modified idea unit scoring approach, which included separately scoring hierarchical levels of narrative detail. Memory for acoustically degraded stories was significantly worse than for normal stories at some levels of narrative detail. Older adults' memory for the stories was significantly worse overall, but there was no interaction between age and acoustic clarity or level of narrative detail. Verbal working memory (assessed by reading span) significantly correlated with recall accuracy for both young and older adults, whereas hearing ability (better ear pure tone average) did not. The present findings are consistent with a framework in which the additional cognitive demands caused by a degraded acoustic signal use resources that would otherwise be available for memory encoding for both young and older adults. Verbal working memory is a likely candidate for supporting both of these processes.
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Dual Coding and Bilingual Memory.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Paivio, Allan; Lambert, Wallace
1981-01-01
Describes study which tested a dual coding approach to bilingual memory using tasks that permit comparison of the effects of bilingual encoding with verbal-nonverbal dual encoding items. Results provide strong support for a version of the independent or separate stories view of bilingual memory. (Author/BK)
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Szekacs-Weisz, Judit
2016-12-01
Listening to the stories of people belonging to different generations in motion-both in our consulting rooms and our personal lives-served as introductory lectures into the fundamental aspects of changing context. Through these rich and diverse stories, one enters a territory which is not only multilingual but multidimensional: defined and shaped by historical, political, economic and socio-cultural transformations. Giving voice to these silent stories proved helpful for us when going behind walls that traditional analysis could not always penetrate, partly because, in many cases, analysts and analysands have been struggling with the same untouchable issues. It is our professional task to find creative ways to make sense of past and recent experiences of emigration, new prejudices, discriminative forms and attitudes-in order to achieve a better psychoanalytical understanding of the external and internal confusion that has been brought about by the immense changes during the past centuries and the present one.
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Wellman, Rachel L.; Lewis, Barbara A.; Freebairn, Lisa A.; Avrich, Allison A.; Hansen, Amy J.; Stein, Catherine M.
2012-01-01
Purpose The main purpose of this study was to examine how children with isolated speech sound disorders (SSDs; n = 20), children with combined SSDs and language impairment (LI; n = 20), and typically developing children (n = 20), ages 3;3 (years;months) to 6;6, differ in narrative ability. The second purpose was to determine if early narrative ability predicts school-age (8–12 years) literacy skills. Method This study employed a longitudinal cohort design. The children completed a narrative retelling task before their formal literacy instruction began. The narratives were analyzed and compared for group differences. Performance on these early narratives was then used to predict the children’s reading decoding, reading comprehension, and written language ability at school age. Results Significant group differences were found in children’s (a) ability to answer questions about the story, (b) use of story grammars, and (c) number of correct and irrelevant utterances. Regression analysis demonstrated that measures of story structure and accuracy were the best predictors of the decoding of real words, reading comprehension, and written language. Measures of syntax and lexical diversity were the best predictors of the decoding of nonsense words. Conclusion Combined SSDs and LI, and not isolated SSDs, impact a child’s narrative abilities. Narrative retelling is a useful task for predicting which children may be at risk for later literacy problems. PMID:21969531
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The power of emotional valence-from cognitive to affective processes in reading.
Altmann, Ulrike; Bohrn, Isabel C; Lubrich, Oliver; Menninghaus, Winfried; Jacobs, Arthur M
2012-01-01
The comprehension of stories requires the reader to imagine the cognitive and affective states of the characters. The content of many stories is unpleasant, as they often deal with conflict, disturbance or crisis. Nevertheless, unpleasant stories can be liked and enjoyed. In this fMRI study, we used a parametric approach to examine (1) the capacity of increasing negative valence of story contents to activate the mentalizing network (cognitive and affective theory of mind, ToM), and (2) the neural substrate of liking negatively valenced narratives. A set of 80 short narratives was compiled, ranging from neutral to negative emotional valence. For each story mean rating values on valence and liking were obtained from a group of 32 participants in a prestudy, and later included as parametric regressors in the fMRI analysis. Another group of 24 participants passively read the narratives in a three Tesla MRI scanner. Results revealed a stronger engagement of affective ToM-related brain areas with increasingly negative story valence. Stories that were unpleasant, but simultaneously liked, engaged the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), which might reflect the moral exploration of the story content. Further analysis showed that the more the mPFC becomes engaged during the reading of negatively valenced stories, the more coactivation can be observed in other brain areas related to the neural processing of affective ToM and empathy.
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The power of emotional valence—from cognitive to affective processes in reading
Altmann, Ulrike; Bohrn, Isabel C.; Lubrich, Oliver; Menninghaus, Winfried; Jacobs, Arthur M.
2012-01-01
The comprehension of stories requires the reader to imagine the cognitive and affective states of the characters. The content of many stories is unpleasant, as they often deal with conflict, disturbance or crisis. Nevertheless, unpleasant stories can be liked and enjoyed. In this fMRI study, we used a parametric approach to examine (1) the capacity of increasing negative valence of story contents to activate the mentalizing network (cognitive and affective theory of mind, ToM), and (2) the neural substrate of liking negatively valenced narratives. A set of 80 short narratives was compiled, ranging from neutral to negative emotional valence. For each story mean rating values on valence and liking were obtained from a group of 32 participants in a prestudy, and later included as parametric regressors in the fMRI analysis. Another group of 24 participants passively read the narratives in a three Tesla MRI scanner. Results revealed a stronger engagement of affective ToM-related brain areas with increasingly negative story valence. Stories that were unpleasant, but simultaneously liked, engaged the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), which might reflect the moral exploration of the story content. Further analysis showed that the more the mPFC becomes engaged during the reading of negatively valenced stories, the more coactivation can be observed in other brain areas related to the neural processing of affective ToM and empathy. PMID:22754519
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Biological motion perception links diverse facets of theory of mind during middle childhood.
Rice, Katherine; Anderson, Laura C; Velnoskey, Kayla; Thompson, James C; Redcay, Elizabeth
2016-06-01
Two cornerstones of social development--social perception and theory of mind--undergo brain and behavioral changes during middle childhood, but the link between these developing domains is unclear. One theoretical perspective argues that these skills represent domain-specific areas of social development, whereas other perspectives suggest that both skills may reflect a more integrated social system. Given recent evidence from adults that these superficially different domains may be related, the current study examined the developmental relation between these social processes in 52 children aged 7 to 12 years. Controlling for age and IQ, social perception (perception of biological motion in noise) was significantly correlated with two measures of theory of mind: one in which children made mental state inferences based on photographs of the eye region of the face and another in which children made mental state inferences based on stories. Social perception, however, was not correlated with children's ability to make physical inferences from stories about people. Furthermore, the mental state inference tasks were not correlated with each other, suggesting a role for social perception in linking various facets of theory of mind. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Rice, Katherine; Anderson, Laura C; Velnoskey, Kayla; Thompson, James C; Redcay, Elizabeth
2016-09-01
Two cornerstones of social development-social perception and theory of mind-undergo brain and behavioral changes during middle childhood, but the link between these developing domains is unclear. One theoretical perspective argues that these skills represent domain-specific areas of social development, whereas other perspectives suggest that both skills may reflect a more integrated social system. Given recent evidence from adults that these superficially different domains may be related, the current study examined the developmental relation between these social processes in 52 children aged 7 to 12years. Controlling for age and IQ, social perception (perception of biological motion in noise) was significantly correlated with two measures of theory of mind: one in which children made mental state inferences based on photographs of the eye region of the face and another in which children made mental state inferences based on stories. Social perception, however, was not correlated with children's ability to make physical inferences from stories about people. Furthermore, the mental state inference tasks were not correlated with each other, suggesting a role for social perception in linking various facets of theory of mind. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Fadda, Roberta; Parisi, Marinella; Ferretti, Luca; Saba, Gessica; Foscoliano, Maria; Salvago, Azzurra; Doneddu, Giuseppe
2016-01-01
This paper adds to the growing research on moral judgment (MJ) by considering whether theory of mind (ToM) might foster children’s autonomous MJ achievement. A group of 30 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was compared in MJ and ToM with 30 typically developing (TD) children. Participants were tested for MJ with a classical Piaget’s task and for ToM with a second order False Belief task. In the moral task, children were told two versions of a story: in one version the protagonist acted according to a moral intention but the action resulted in a harmful consequence; in the other version the protagonist acted according to an immoral intention, but the action resulted in a harmless consequence. Children were asked which of the two protagonists was the “naughtier.” In line with previous studies, the results indicated that, while the majority of TD participants succeeded in the second order False Belief task, only few individuals with ASD showed intact perspective taking abilities. The analysis of the MJ in relation to ToM showed that children with ASD lacking ToM abilities judged guilty the protagonists of the two versions of the story in the moral task because both of them violated a moral rule or because they considered the consequences of the actions, ignoring any psychological information. These results indicate a heteronomous morality in individuals with ASD, based on the respect of learned moral rules and outcomes rather than others’ subjective states. PMID:27148131
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Measuring preschool learning engagement in the laboratory.
Halliday, Simone E; Calkins, Susan D; Leerkes, Esther M
2018-03-01
Learning engagement is a critical factor for academic achievement and successful school transitioning. However, current methods of assessing learning engagement in young children are limited to teacher report or classroom observation, which may limit the types of research questions one could assess about this construct. The current study investigated the validity of a novel assessment designed to measure behavioral learning engagement among young children in a standardized laboratory setting and examined how learning engagement in the laboratory relates to future classroom adjustment. Preschool-aged children (N = 278) participated in a learning-based Tangrams task and Story sequencing task and were observed based on seven behavioral indicators of engagement. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the construct validity for a behavioral engagement factor composed of six of the original behavioral indicators: attention to instructions, on-task behavior, enthusiasm/energy, persistence, monitoring progress/strategy use, and negative affect. Concurrent validity for this behavioral engagement factor was established through its associations with parent-reported mastery motivation and pre-academic skills in math and literacy measured in the laboratory, and predictive validity was demonstrated through its associations with teacher-reported classroom learning behaviors and performance in math and reading in kindergarten. These associations were found when behavioral engagement was observed during both the nonverbal task and the verbal story sequencing tasks and persisted even after controlling for child minority status, gender, and maternal education. Learning engagement in preschool appears to be successfully measurable in a laboratory setting. This finding has implications for future research on the mechanisms that support successful academic development. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Spiro, Rand J.
Psychological research concerning several aspects of the relationship between existing knowledge schemata and the processing of text is summarized in this report. The first section is concerned with dynamic processes of story understanding, with emphasis on the integration of information. The role of prior knowledge in accommodating parts of…
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Sophie's story: writing missing journeys.
Parr, Hester; Stevenson, Olivia
2014-10-01
'Sophie's story' is a creative rendition of an interview narrative gathered in a research project on missing people. The paper explains why Sophie's story was written and details the wider intention to provide new narrative resources for police officer training, families of missing people and returned missing people. We contextualize this cultural intervention with an argument about the transformative potential of writing trauma stories. It is suggested that trauma stories produce difficult and unknown affects, but ones that may provide new ways of talking about unspeakable events. Sophie's story is thus presented as a hopeful cultural geography in process, and one that seeks to help rewrite existing social scripts about missing people.
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Story retelling skills in Persian speaking hearing-impaired children.
Jarollahi, Farnoush; Mohamadi, Reyhane; Modarresi, Yahya; Agharasouli, Zahra; Rahimzadeh, Shadi; Ahmadi, Tayebeh; Keyhani, Mohammad-Reza
2017-05-01
Since the pragmatic skills of hearing-impaired Persian-speaking children have not yet been investigated particularly through story retelling, this study aimed to evaluate some pragmatic abilities of normal-hearing and hearing-impaired children using a story retelling test. 15 normal-hearing and 15 profound hearing-impaired 7-year-old children were evaluated using the story retelling test with the content validity of 89%, construct validity of 85%, and reliability of 83%. Three macro structure criteria including topic maintenance, event sequencing, explicitness, and four macro structure criteria including referencing, conjunctive cohesion, syntax complexity, and utterance length were assessed. The test was performed with live voice in a quiet room where children were then asked to retell the story. The tasks of the children were recorded on a tape, transcribed, scored and analyzed. In the macro structure criteria, utterances of hearing-impaired students were less consistent, enough information was not given to listeners to have a full understanding of the subject, and the story events were less frequently expressed in a rational order than those of normal-hearing group (P < 0.0001). Regarding the macro structure criteria of the test, unlike the normal-hearing students who obtained high scores, hearing-impaired students failed to gain any scores on the items of this section. These results suggest that Hearing-impaired children were not able to use language as effectively as their hearing peers, and they utilized quite different pragmatic functions. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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78 FR 34154 - Reports, Forms, and Record Keeping Requirements
Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
2013-06-06
..., mechanical, or other technological collection techniques or other forms of information technology, e.g... would be compared. The survey would be conducted primarily on-line, with the on-line technology serving... data applicable to these tasks, they do not tell the entire story. Attitudes, perceptions, knowledge...
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Iterative Authoring Using Story Generation Feedback: Debugging or Co-creation?
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Swartjes, Ivo; Theune, Mariët
We explore the role that story generation feedback may play within the creative process of interactive story authoring. While such feedback is often used as 'debugging' information, we explore here a 'co-creation' view, in which the outcome of the story generator influences authorial intent. We illustrate an iterative authoring approach in which each iteration consists of idea generation, implementation and simulation. We find that the tension between authorial intent and the partially uncontrollable story generation outcome may be relieved by taking such a co-creation approach.
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Munodawafa, Memory; Mall, Sumaya; Lund, Crick; Schneider, Marguerite
2018-03-23
Perinatal depression is common in low and middle income countries (LAMICs). Task sharing interventions have been implemented to treat perinatal depression in these settings, as a way of dealing with staff shortages. Task sharing allows lay health workers to provide services for less complex cases while being trained and supervised by specialists. Randomized controlled trials suggest that these interventions can be effective but there is limited qualitative information exploring barriers and facilitators to their implementation. This systematic review aims to systematically review current qualitative evidence of process evaluations of task sharing interventions for perinatal depression in LAMICs in relation to the United Kingdom (UK) Medical Research Council (MRC) framework for conducting process evaluations. We searched Medline/ PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus, Cochrane Library and Web of science for studies from LAMICS using search terms under the broad categories of: (a) "maternal depression'" (b) "intervention" (c) "lay counsellor" OR "community health worker" OR "non-specialist" and (d) "LAMICs". Abstracts were independently reviewed for inclusion by two authors. Full text articles were screened and data for included articles were extracted using a standard data extraction sheet. Qualitative synthesis of qualitative evidence was conducted. 8420 articles were identified from initial searches. Of these, 26 full text articles were screened for eligibility with only three studies meeting the inclusion criteria. Main findings revealed that participants identified the following crucial factors: contextual factors included physical location, accessibility and cultural norms. Implementation factors included acceptability of the intervention and characteristics of the personnel. Mechanisms included counsellor factors such as motivating and facilitating trust; intervention factors such as use of stories and visual aids, and understandability of the content; and participant factors such as shared experience, meeting learning needs, and meeting expectations. While task sharing has been suggested as an effective way of filling the treatment gap for perinatal depression, there is a paucity of qualitative research exploring barriers and facilitators to implementing these interventions. Qualitative process evaluations are crucial for the development of culturally relevant interventions.
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Haman, Ewa; Wodniecka, Zofia; Marecka, Marta; Szewczyk, Jakub; Białecka-Pikul, Marta; Otwinowska, Agnieszka; Mieszkowska, Karolina; Łuniewska, Magdalena; Kołak, Joanna; Miękisz, Aneta; Kacprzak, Agnieszka; Banasik, Natalia; Foryś-Nogala, Małgorzata
2017-01-01
Most studies on bilingual language development focus on children’s second language (L2). Here, we investigated first language (L1) development of Polish-English early migrant bilinguals in four domains: vocabulary, grammar, phonological processing, and discourse. We first compared Polish language skills between bilinguals and their Polish non-migrant monolingual peers, and then investigated the influence of the cumulative exposure to L1 and L2 on bilinguals’ performance. We then examined whether high exposure to L1 could possibly minimize the gap between monolinguals and bilinguals. We analyzed data from 233 typically developing children (88 bilingual and 145 monolingual) aged 4;0 to 7;5 (years;months) on six language measures in Polish: receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary, receptive grammar, productive grammar (sentence repetition), phonological processing (non-word repetition), and discourse abilities (narration). Information about language exposure was obtained via parental questionnaires. For each language task, we analyzed the data from the subsample of bilinguals who had completed all the tasks in question and from monolinguals matched one-on-one to the bilingual group on age, SES (measured by years of mother’s education), gender, non-verbal IQ, and short-term memory. The bilingual children scored lower than monolinguals in all language domains, except discourse. The group differences were more pronounced on the productive tasks (vocabulary, grammar, and phonological processing) and moderate on the receptive tasks (vocabulary and grammar). L1 exposure correlated positively with the vocabulary size and phonological processing. Grammar scores were not related to the levels of L1 exposure, but were predicted by general cognitive abilities. L2 exposure negatively influenced productive grammar in L1, suggesting possible L2 transfer effects on L1 grammatical performance. Children’s narrative skills benefitted from exposure to two languages: both L1 and L2 exposure influenced story structure scores in L1. Importantly, we did not find any evidence (in any of the tasks in which the gap was present) that the performance gap between monolinguals and bilinguals could be fully closed with high amounts of L1 input. PMID:28928681
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Clidas, Jeanne
2011-01-01
Stories, steeped in science content and full of specific information, can be brought into schools and homes through the power of live video streaming. Video streaming refers to the process of viewing video over the internet. These videos may be live (webcam feeds) or recorded. These stories are engaging and inspiring. They offer opportunities to…
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Dancing a Story: Myth and Movement for Children.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Swaim, Salome
1997-01-01
Outlines a method of storytelling and movement whereby the teacher tells a story and the children rework and dance the story. Describes supporting scholarly and philosophical concepts; classic myths of many cultures are noted as most appropriate for this process. Suggests that this method enhances cognitive function, stimulates imagination,…
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Stories of Innovation: Roles, Perspectives, and Players
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Martens, Jon
2014-01-01
Purpose: This study aims to examine the roles of stories in the innovation process. Design/methodology/approach: An integrative literature review was used to identify and analyze studies that examined stories of innovation in various organizational settings. The conceptual framework of the review was based on three perspectives of organizational…
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The Creative Process, Memoir, and Redemption
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Karn, Lawrence; Hattori, Takahiko
2018-01-01
Stories live to be told to others, Dan McAdams (2008) writes: "Life stories therefore are continually made and remade in social relationships and in the overall social context provided by culture. As psychosocial constructions, life stories reflect the values, norms, and power differentials inherent in societies, wherein they have their…
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Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
2010-07-27
...) FEMA has established the FEMA Mitigation Best Practices success story process to collect and..., FEMA can translate hazard data into useable information for community risk management. The stories... Practices Portfolio (formerly known as FEMA Mitigation Success Story Database). Type of Information...
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Literacy in Our Time: Urban Realities and the Process of Composition
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Totten, Charles F.
1976-01-01
Notes that the changes mentioned produce a confrontation of story, personality, and blank page. Students must fill the page with information about the story, but not before they have gained the confidence that comes with knowing the story well and verifying its worth experientially. (Author/AM)
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NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Kanahele-Mossman, Huihui
Inquiry is defined as "an examination into facts and principles." In science education science inquiry is a process through which important discoveries are made by students through scientific methodology. The most important step in this process is forming the right question. The questions formed by students are usually the wrong questions which deem the remainder of the inquiry process impotent. This research will look at the pedagogy of ancestral stories for a solution. For the researcher, ancestral stories were a source of wonderment and learning not only from the lessons the stories revealed but mainly from the questions that still remained after the stories were told. Questions such as "why does the eel only swim near that part?", or "why does the story only talk about the uhu?" are examples of questions that remained after experiencing an ancestral narrative. The research questions were composed for the purpose of finding compatibility between the two pedagogies. The first research question which reads "how can Native Hawaiian ancestral stories encourage an increased level of student driven interactions at all levels of feedback from Native Hawaiian students in science classroom" focuses the research on the level of student feedback that initiate questions. Question two which reads "how can teachers of Native Hawaiian students facilitate the construction of science inquiry projects from ancestral stories" addresses the skill of the teacher and imbeds the concept of pedagogical knowledge into the literature. The last research question "how do analysis and discussion of the stories connect Native Hawaiian students to their ancestral intelligence" examines the role of identity and identity to ancestral intelligence. The method intended for this research was Grounded theory which allows the researcher to develop principles, concepts and theories based on the data presented. Another method utilized in this research is an undocumented but culturally imbedded method identified as the Native Hawaiian Research method for lack of a better title. The result of the data analysis was the development of the intersection of story and science that occurs when the story line is stripped away to reveal an interconnection of natural phenomena.
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The Cocreation of Crazy Patchworks: Becoming Rhizomatic in Systemic Therapy.
Sermijn, Jasmina; Loots, Gerrit
2015-09-01
In the field of systemic therapy, there has been much discussion recently about the narrative self. This concept refers to the idea that the self is narratively constructed in and through the stories which someone tells about him/herself. The story is thereby not only viewed as a metaphor for selfhood: Selfhood is not compared to a story, it is a story. But what kind of story are we talking about here? If the self is a story, what does that story look like? These questions are explored in this article. Starting from the possibilities and limitations of traditional and postmodern visions on the self as a story, an alternative vision is illustrated. By considering the self as a rhizomatic story, we not only create a useful view of the way narrative selfhood is constructed within a therapy context, but we also stimulate therapists to coconstruct-together with their clients-patchworks of self-stories. By using story fragments of our own practice, we illustrate the rhizomatic thinking and its possibilities in therapy. © 2015 Family Process Institute.
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The Secrets of Scheherazade: Toward a Functional Analysis of Imaginative Literature
Grant, Lyle K
2005-01-01
A functional analysis of selected aspects of imaginative literature is presented. Reading imaginative literature is described as a process in which the reader makes indirect contact with the contingencies operating on the behavior of story characters. A functional story grammar is proposed in which the reader's experience with a story is interpreted in terms of escape contingencies in which the author initially introduces an establishing operation consisting of a source of tension, which is resolved in some way by the outcome of the story. Although escape contingencies represent the functional basis for the structure of stories, they are to be understood in a context of many other reinforcers for reading fiction. Other contingencies that maintain reading are discussed. Functional analyses of imaginative literature have much to offer, both in improving literary education and in understanding the behavioral processes that occur on the part of the reader. PMID:22477324
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NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Sicoe, G. M.; Belu, N.; Rachieru, N.; Nicolae, E. V.
2017-10-01
Presently, in the automotive industry, the tendency is to adapt permanently to the changes and introduce the market tendency in the new products that leads of the customer satisfaction. Many quality techniques were adopted in this field to continuous improvement of product and process quality and advantages were also gained. The present paper has focused on possibilities that offers the use of Quality Assurance Matrix (QAM) and Quality Control Story (QC Story) to provide largest protection against nonconformities in the production process, throughout a case study in the automotive industry. There is a direct relationship from the QAM to a QC Story analysis. The failures identified using QAM are treated with QC Story methodology. Using this methods, will help to decrease the PPM values and will increase the quality performance and the customer satisfaction.
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Hayashi, Atsuko; Nomura, Hiroshi; Mochizuki, Ruriko; Ohnuma, Ayumu; Kimpara, Teiko; Suzuki, Kyoko; Mori, Etsuro
2015-01-01
We investigated writing abilities in patients with the amnestic type of mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). To examine the earliest changes in writing function, we used writing tests for both words and sentences with different types of Japanese characters (Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji). A total of 25 aMCI patients, 38 AD patients, and 22 healthy controls performed writing to dictation for Kana and Kanji words, copied Kanji words, and wrote in response to a picture story task. Analysis of variance was used to test the subject group effects on the scores in the above writing tasks. For the written Kanji words, the mild AD group performed worse than the aMCI group and the controls, but there was no difference between the aMCI group and the controls. For the picture story writing task, the mild AD and aMCI groups performed worse than the controls, but the difference between the AD and the aMCI groups was not significant. The mild AD group showed defects in writing Kanji characters, and the aMCI group showed impairments in narrative writing. Our study suggests that narrative writing, which demands complex integration of multiple cognitive functions, can be used to detect the subtle writing deficits in aMCI patients.
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Theory of mind in children with Neurofibromatosis Type 1.
Payne, Jonathan M; Porter, Melanie; Pride, Natalie A; North, Kathryn N
2016-05-01
Neurofibromatosis Type I (NF1) is a single gene disorder associated with cognitive and behavioral deficits. While there is clear evidence for poorer social outcomes in NF1, the factors underlying reduced social function are not well understood. This study examined theory of mind (ToM) in children with NF1 and unaffected controls. ToM was assessed in children with NF1 (n = 26) and unaffected controls (n = 36) aged 4-12 years using a nonverbal picture sequencing task. The task assessed understanding of ToM (unrealized goals, false belief, pretence, intention), while controlling for social script knowledge and physical cause-and-effect reasoning. Children with NF1 made significantly more errors than unaffected controls on most ToM stories while demonstrating no difficulty sequencing physical cause-and-effect stories. Performance on the picture sequencing task was not related to lower intellectual function, symptoms of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or parent ratings of executive function. Results suggest a generalized ToM deficit in children with NF1 that appears to be independent of general cognitive abilities and ADHD symptoms. The study refines understanding of the clinical presentation of NF1 and identifies psychological constructs that may contribute to the higher prevalence of social dysfunction in children with NF1. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).
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Greenhoot, Andrea Follmer; Beyer, Alisa M.; Curtis, Jennifer
2014-01-01
Previous research showed that story illustrations fail to enhance young preschoolers' memories when they accompany a pre-recorded story (e.g., Greenhoot and Semb, 2008). In this study we tested whether young children might benefit from illustrations in a more interactive story-reading context. For instance, illustrations might influence parent-child reading interactions, and thus children's story comprehension and recall. Twenty-six 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds and their primary caregivers were randomly assigned to an Illustrated or Non-Illustrated story-reading condition, and parents were instructed to “read or tell the story” as they normally would read with their child. Children recalled the story after a distracter and again after 1 week. Analyses of the story-reading interactions showed that the illustrations prompted more interactive story reading and more parent and child behaviors known to predict improved literacy outcomes. Furthermore, in the first memory interview, children in the Illustrated condition recalled more story events than those in the Non-Illustrated condition. Story reading measures predicted recall, but did not completely account for picture effects. These results suggest that illustrations enhance young preschoolers' story recall in an interactive story reading context, perhaps because the joint attention established in this context supports children's processing of the illustrations. PMID:25101018
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Neural Correlates of Bridging Inferences and Coherence Processing
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kim, Sung-il; Yoon, Misun; Kim, Wonsik; Lee, Sunyoung; Kang, Eunjoo
2012-01-01
We explored the neural correlates of bridging inferences and coherence processing during story comprehension using Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Ten healthy right-handed volunteers were visually presented three types of stories (Strong Coherence, Weak Coherence, and Control) consisted of three sentences. The causal connectedness among…
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Belief-desire reasoning in the explanation of behavior: do actions speak louder than words?
Wertz, Annie E; German, Timsin C
2007-10-01
The mechanisms underwriting our commonsense psychology, or 'theory of mind', have been extensively investigated via reasoning tasks that require participants to predict the action of agents based on information about beliefs and desires. However, relatively few studies have investigated the processes contributing to a central component of 'theory of mind' - our ability to explain the action of agents in terms of underlying beliefs and desires. In two studies, we demonstrate a novel phenomenon in adult belief-desire reasoning, capturing the folk notion that 'actions speak louder than words'. When story characters were described as searching in the wrong place for a target object, adult subjects often endorsed mental state explanations referencing a distracter object, but only when that object was approached. We discuss how this phenomenon, alongside other reasoning "errors" (e.g., hindsight bias; the curse of knowledge) can be used to illuminate the architecture of domain specific belief-desire reasoning processes.
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Scott, Rose M.; He, Zijing; Baillargeon, Renée; Cummins, Denise
2011-01-01
Recent research indicates that toddlers and infants succeed at various non-verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks; here we asked whether toddlers would also succeed at verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks that imposed significant linguistic demands. 2.5-year-olds were tested using two novel tasks: a preferential-looking task in which children listened to a false-belief story while looking at a picture book (with matching and non-matching pictures), and a violation-of-expectation task in which children watched an adult “Subject” answer (correctly or incorrectly) a standard false-belief question. Positive results were obtained with both tasks, despite their linguistic demands. These results (1) support the distinction between spontaneous-and elicited-response tasks by showing that toddlers succeed at verbal false-belief tasks that do not require them to answer direct questions about agents’ false beliefs, (2) reinforce claims of robust continuity in early false-belief understanding as assessed by spontaneous-response tasks, and (3) provide researchers with new experimental tasks for exploring early false-belief understanding in neurotypical and autistic populations. PMID:22356174
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Scott, Rose M; He, Zijing; Baillargeon, Renée; Cummins, Denise
2012-03-01
Recent research indicates that toddlers and infants succeed at various non-verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks; here we asked whether toddlers would also succeed at verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks that imposed significant linguistic demands. We tested 2.5-year-olds using two novel tasks: a preferential-looking task in which children listened to a false-belief story while looking at a picture book (with matching and non-matching pictures), and a violation-of-expectation task in which children watched an adult 'Subject' answer (correctly or incorrectly) a standard false-belief question. Positive results were obtained with both tasks, despite their linguistic demands. These results (1) support the distinction between spontaneous- and elicited-response tasks by showing that toddlers succeed at verbal false-belief tasks that do not require them to answer direct questions about agents' false beliefs, (2) reinforce claims of robust continuity in early false-belief understanding as assessed by spontaneous-response tasks, and (3) provide researchers with new experimental tasks for exploring early false-belief understanding in neurotypical and autistic populations. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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The Effects of Secure Attachments on Preschool Children's Conflict Management Skills.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kesner, John
This study examined the relationship between the security of children's attachment relationships to parents and teachers and how children negotiate and manage conflicts. Sixty-six preschool-aged children participated in story completion tasks regarding their attachment relationship with parents and teachers, and in hypothetical situations…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Manavopoulos, Konstantin; Tzouriadou, Maria
1998-01-01
Investigated whether preschoolers had acquired event knowledge schemata, and the impact of an inductive reasoning training program on knowledge transfer in story recall tasks. Found that inductive reasoning training led to knowledge transfer in kindergartners but had only minor influence on prekindergartners. (Author/KB)
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The Task Group on Limited War. Volume 3
1958-09-01
modern two-story building with over 350,000 square feet of work space. At present, the Laboratory emplots approximately 1,100 people, of whi&. 400...election, mishandling of various disabled veterans r and survivors r claims by the Ministry of National Defense cost the government votes in several
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Analyzing Hypermedia and Internet Communication Models in Educational Applications
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Saxena, Anshu; Kothari, D. P.; Jain, Sudhir K.; Khurana, Amulya
2004-01-01
Hypermedia has long been considered to have great potential to support educational tasks and applications. Many success stories of hypermedia support in education have been reported. Much of this work has been done in the context of traditional closed hypermedia systems rather than more contemporary open hypermedia systems. Developing hypermedia…
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The Neural Architecture of Discourse Compression
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Lillywhite, L. M.; Saling, M. M.; Demutska, A.; Masterton, R.; Farquharson, S.; Jackson, G. D.
2010-01-01
Re-telling a story is thought to produce a progressive refinement in the mental representation of the discourse. A neuroanatomical substrate for this compression effect, however, has yet to be identified. We used a discourse re-listening task and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify brain regions responsive to repeated…
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Hungry for Early Spatial and Algebraic Reasoning
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Cross, Dionne I.; Adefope, Olufunke; Lee, Mi Yeon; Perez, Arnulfo
2012-01-01
Tasks that develop spatial and algebraic reasoning are crucial for learning and applying advanced mathematical ideas. In this article, the authors describe how two early childhood teachers used stories as the basis for a unit that supports spatial reasoning in kindergartners and first graders. Having mathematical experiences that go beyond…
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Tackling Production Techniques: Telling Tales with Transparencies.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Martin, Ron
1986-01-01
This lesson introduces students to procedures for creating both hand-drawn and machine-made transparencies and requires each of them to create one example to illustrate the same story. Detailed plans include performance objectives, materials needed, instructions for presenting the lesson, a sample student task card, and suggestions for evaluating…
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6 Essential Questions for Problem Solving
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kress, Nancy Emerson
2017-01-01
One of the primary expectations that the author has for her students is for them to develop greater independence when solving complex and unique mathematical problems. The story of how the author supports her students as they gain confidence and independence with complex and unique problem-solving tasks, while honoring their expectations with…
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A Career Story Approach to Management, Business, and Financial Occupations
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Brott, Pamelia E.
2012-01-01
Business, management, and financial occupations are found in organizations in which individuals direct activities and perform tasks related to business and finance. The career cluster includes 144 occupational titles across 57% of the 23 major Standard Occupational Classification groups, with almost half of the occupations considered "bright…
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Primers As Socializing Agents in American and Finnish Schools.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hyona, Jukka; And Others
1995-01-01
Content analysis of 12 Finnish and 18 American primers for grades 3 through 6 published primarily during the 1980s examined story type, plot setting, protagonist's characteristics, dramatic tasks, portrayals of family structure and parental responsibility, and extrafamilial peer and adult relationships. Results suggest that a nation's cultural…
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Narrative Role-Taking in Autism
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Garcia-Perez, Rosa M.; Hobson, R. Peter; Lee, Anthony
2008-01-01
Are children with autism able to adopt, and shift among, the psychological perspectives of different people? Fifteen children with autism and 15 without autism, matched for chronological age and verbal ability, were given Feffer's (1970) role-taking task in which they were asked to tell and then re-tell stories from different protagonists'…
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Cane, James E; Cauchard, Fabrice; Weger, Ulrich W
2012-01-01
Two experiments examined how interruptions impact reading and how interruption lags and the reader's spatial memory affect the recovery from such interruptions. Participants read paragraphs of text and were interrupted unpredictably by a spoken news story while their eye movements were monitored. Time made available for consolidation prior to responding to the interruption did not aid reading resumption. However, providing readers with a visual cue that indicated the interruption location did aid task resumption substantially in Experiment 2. Taken together, the findings show that the recovery from interruptions during reading draws on spatial memory resources and can be aided by processes that support spatial memory. Practical implications are discussed.
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Making Story Time a Literacy Event for the Young Child.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Weir, Beth
1989-01-01
Reviews research and anecdotal accounts which present instructional techniques and which suggest that the quality of instruction, quality of time, and quality of books are significant factors in ensuring that story reading is a true literacy event. Argues that consistent story readings facilitate the acquisition of the reading process. (RS)
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The Effect of Spoilers on the Enjoyment of Short Stories
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Levine, William H.; Betzner, Michelle; Autry, Kevin S.
2016-01-01
Recent research has provided evidence that the information provided before a story--a spoiler--may increase the enjoyment of that story, perhaps by increasing the processing fluency experienced during reading. In one experiment, we tested the reliability of these findings by closely replicating existing methods and the generality of these findings…
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Modeling the Effects of Reading Lessons on Text Processing.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Omanson, Richard C.; And Others
A study evaluated the effectiveness of various models constructed to account for how children read and comprehended a story presented in a directed reading lesson. A commercial directed reading lesson was revised to introduce information related to the story and to help the children form a "map" of the central story content. Data were…
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Readers' use of source information in text comprehension.
Braasch, Jason L G; Rouet, Jean-François; Vibert, Nicolas; Britt, M Anne
2012-04-01
In two experiments, we examined the role of discrepancy on readers' text processing of and memory for the sources of brief news reports. Each story included two assertions that were attributed to different sources. We manipulated whether the second assertion was either discrepant or consistent with the first assertion. On the basis of the discrepancy-induced source comprehension (D-ISC) assumption, we predicted that discrepant stories would promote deeper processing and better memory for the sources conveying the messages, as compared to consistent stories. As predicted, readers mentioned more sources in summaries of discrepant stories, recalled more sources, made more fixations, and displayed longer gaze times in source areas when reading discrepant than when reading consistent stories. In Experiment 2, we found enhanced memory for source-content links for discrepant stories even when intersentential connectors were absent, and regardless of the reading goals. Discussion was focused on discrepancies as one mechanism by which readers are prompted to encode source-content links more deeply, as a method of integrating disparate pieces of information into a coherent mental representation of a text.
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Event boundaries and anaphoric reference.
Thompson, Alexis N; Radvansky, Gabriel A
2016-06-01
The current study explored the finding that parsing a narrative into separate events impairs anaphor resolution. According to the Event Horizon Model, when a narrative event boundary is encountered, a new event model is created. Information associated with the prior event model is removed from working memory. So long as the event model containing the anaphor referent is currently being processed, this information should still be available when there is no narrative event boundary, even if reading has been disrupted by a working-memory-clearing distractor task. In those cases, readers may reactivate their prior event model, and anaphor resolution would not be affected. Alternatively, comprehension may not be as event oriented as this account suggests. Instead, any disruption of the contents of working memory during comprehension, event related or not, may be sufficient to disrupt anaphor resolution. In this case, reading comprehension would be more strongly guided by other, more basic language processing mechanisms and the event structure of the described events would play a more minor role. In the current experiments, participants were given stories to read in which we included, between the anaphor and its referent, either the presence of a narrative event boundary (Experiment 1) or a narrative event boundary along with a working-memory-clearing distractor task (Experiment 2). The results showed that anaphor resolution was affected by narrative event boundaries but not by a working-memory-clearing distractor task. This is interpreted as being consistent with the Event Horizon Model of event cognition.
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Declarative and Non-declarative Memory Consolidation in Children with Sleep Disorder.
Csábi, Eszter; Benedek, Pálma; Janacsek, Karolina; Zavecz, Zsófia; Katona, Gábor; Nemeth, Dezso
2015-01-01
Healthy sleep is essential in children's cognitive, behavioral, and emotional development. However, remarkably little is known about the influence of sleep disorders on different memory processes in childhood. Such data could give us a deeper insight into the effect of sleep on the developing brain and memory functions and how the relationship between sleep and memory changes from childhood to adulthood. In the present study we examined the effect of sleep disorder on declarative and non-declarative memory consolidation by testing children with sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) which is characterized by disrupted sleep structure. We used a story recall task to measure declarative memory and Alternating Serial Reaction time (ASRT) task to assess non-declarative memory. This task enables us to measure two aspects of non-declarative memory, namely general motor skill learning and sequence-specific learning. There were two sessions: a learning phase and a testing phase, separated by a 12 h offline period with sleep. Our data showed that children with SDB exhibited a generally lower declarative memory performance both in the learning and testing phase; however, both the SDB and control groups exhibited retention of the previously recalled items after the offline period. Here we showed intact non-declarative consolidation in SDB group in both sequence-specific and general motor skill. These findings suggest that sleep disorders in childhood have a differential effect on different memory processes (online vs. offline) and give us insight into how sleep disturbances affects developing brain.
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Declarative and Non-declarative Memory Consolidation in Children with Sleep Disorder
Csábi, Eszter; Benedek, Pálma; Janacsek, Karolina; Zavecz, Zsófia; Katona, Gábor; Nemeth, Dezso
2016-01-01
Healthy sleep is essential in children’s cognitive, behavioral, and emotional development. However, remarkably little is known about the influence of sleep disorders on different memory processes in childhood. Such data could give us a deeper insight into the effect of sleep on the developing brain and memory functions and how the relationship between sleep and memory changes from childhood to adulthood. In the present study we examined the effect of sleep disorder on declarative and non-declarative memory consolidation by testing children with sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) which is characterized by disrupted sleep structure. We used a story recall task to measure declarative memory and Alternating Serial Reaction time (ASRT) task to assess non-declarative memory. This task enables us to measure two aspects of non-declarative memory, namely general motor skill learning and sequence-specific learning. There were two sessions: a learning phase and a testing phase, separated by a 12 h offline period with sleep. Our data showed that children with SDB exhibited a generally lower declarative memory performance both in the learning and testing phase; however, both the SDB and control groups exhibited retention of the previously recalled items after the offline period. Here we showed intact non-declarative consolidation in SDB group in both sequence-specific and general motor skill. These findings suggest that sleep disorders in childhood have a differential effect on different memory processes (online vs. offline) and give us insight into how sleep disturbances affects developing brain. PMID:26793090
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NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Hoebelheinrich, N. J.; Eckman, R.; Teng, W. L.; Beltz, C.
2016-12-01
The classic approach to scientific storytelling, especially for publication, is to establish the research problem, describe the potential solution and the efforts to solve the problem, and end with the results - whether "successful" or not - as the "Ta Da!" of the story. This classic approach, however, does not necessarily adapt well to the kind of storytelling that policy-making and general public end-users find more compelling, i.e., with the "Ta Da!" element of the story immediately evident. Working with the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit (CRT) staff, two collaborative groups of the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), Agriculture and Climate and Energy and Climate, have begun to assist agriculture and energy researchers in making the switch in story telling approach and, thus, get more easily understood and actionable information out to potential end-users about how the research data produced can help them. The CRT is a platform for telling stories based on both end-user needs and the data that are used to meet those needs. The ESIP groups are establishing an ESIP-wide process "pipeline," through which research results and data, with the help of group discussions and the use of CRT templates, are transformed into potential stories. When appropriate, the stories are handed off to the CRT staff to be fully developed. Two case studies that are in the process of being added to the CRT involve (1) the use of the RETScreen tool by Natural Resources Canada and (2) a fallow lands mapping project with the California Department of Water Resources to monitor ongoing drought conditions in California. These two case studies will be used to illustrate the process pipeline being developed, discuss lessons learned to date, and suggest future plans for further refining and expanding the process "pipeline."
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Stories of relative privilege: power and social change in feminist community psychology.
Mulvey, A; Terenzio, M; Hill, J; Bond, M A; Huygens, I; Hamerton, H R; Cahill, S
2000-12-01
Stories about community work in New Zealand and Scotland are presented to describe and reflect on issues central to feminist community psychology. Organizing a lesbian festival, Ingrid Huygens describes feminist processes used to equalize resources across Maori (indigenous) and Pakeha (white) groups. Heather Hamerton presents her experiences as a researcher using collective memory work to reflect on adolescent experiences related to gender, ethnicity, and class. Sharon Cahill chronicles dilemmas and insights from focus groups about anger with women living in public housing in Scotland. Each story chronicles experiences related to oppression and privilege, and describes the author's emotions and reflections. Individually and collectively, the stories illustrate the potential offered by narrative methods and participatory processes for challenging inequalities and encouraging social justice.
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Amplification of local changes along the timescale processing hierarchy.
Yeshurun, Yaara; Nguyen, Mai; Hasson, Uri
2017-08-29
Small changes in word choice can lead to dramatically different interpretations of narratives. How does the brain accumulate and integrate such local changes to construct unique neural representations for different stories? In this study, we created two distinct narratives by changing only a few words in each sentence (e.g., "he" to "she" or "sobbing" to "laughing") while preserving the grammatical structure across stories. We then measured changes in neural responses between the two stories. We found that differences in neural responses between the two stories gradually increased along the hierarchy of processing timescales. For areas with short integration windows, such as early auditory cortex, the differences in neural responses between the two stories were relatively small. In contrast, in areas with the longest integration windows at the top of the hierarchy, such as the precuneus, temporal parietal junction, and medial frontal cortices, there were large differences in neural responses between stories. Furthermore, this gradual increase in neural differences between the stories was highly correlated with an area's ability to integrate information over time. Amplification of neural differences did not occur when changes in words did not alter the interpretation of the story (e.g., sobbing to "crying"). Our results demonstrate how subtle differences in words are gradually accumulated and amplified along the cortical hierarchy as the brain constructs a narrative over time.
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Schema Knowledge for Solving Arithmetic Story Problems: Some Affective Components.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Marshall, Sandra P.
This report discusses the role of affect in cognitive processing. The importance of affect in processing mathematical information is described in the context of solving arithmetic story problems. Some ideas are offered about the way affective responses to mathematical problem solving situations influence the development, maintenance, and retrieval…
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The Linkages across Listening, Speaking, Reading, Drawing, and Writing.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Bartelo, Dennise M.
1990-01-01
Investigates how children represent meaning in their response to stories through listening, speaking, reading, drawing, and writing. Finds no one particular language process to be exclusively used by children to convey meaning in response to story. Discovers sequential and simultaneous linkage patterns of language process modality. (KEH)
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Getting the cocktail party started: masking effects in speech perception
Evans, S; McGettigan, C; Agnew, ZK; Rosen, S; Scott, SK
2016-01-01
Spoken conversations typically take place in noisy environments and different kinds of masking sounds place differing demands on cognitive resources. Previous studies, examining the modulation of neural activity associated with the properties of competing sounds, have shown that additional speech streams engage the superior temporal gyrus. However, the absence of a condition in which target speech was heard without additional masking made it difficult to identify brain networks specific to masking and to ascertain the extent to which competing speech was processed equivalently to target speech. In this study, we scanned young healthy adults with continuous functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), whilst they listened to stories masked by sounds that differed in their similarity to speech. We show that auditory attention and control networks are activated during attentive listening to masked speech in the absence of an overt behavioural task. We demonstrate that competing speech is processed predominantly in the left hemisphere within the same pathway as target speech but is not treated equivalently within that stream, and that individuals who perform better in speech in noise tasks activate the left mid-posterior superior temporal gyrus more. Finally, we identify neural responses associated with the onset of sounds in the auditory environment, activity was found within right lateralised frontal regions consistent with a phasic alerting response. Taken together, these results provide a comprehensive account of the neural processes involved in listening in noise. PMID:26696297
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Sato, Yosuke; Uzuka, Takeo; Aoki, Hiroshi; Natsumeda, Manabu; Oishi, Makoto; Fukuda, Masafumi; Fujii, Yukihiko
2012-02-29
Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) has proven to be useful for the evaluation of language lateralization in healthy subjects, infants, and epileptic patients. This study for the first time investigated the expressive and receptive language functions separately, using NIRS in presurgical glioma patients. We also describe a special case with dissociated pattern of language functions. Ten glioma patients were examined. Using NIRS, the hemodynamic changes during a verb generation task or story listening task were measured in the cerebral hemisphere on either side covering the language areas. Following the NIRS study, the Wada test was performed in all the patients. The NIRS study revealed increases of oxyhemoglobin and decreases of deoxyhemoglobin in the language areas elicited by both tasks. In 9 patients, who were all right-handed, the expressive and receptive language functions were lateralized to the left hemisphere. The results of the NIRS study were completely consistent with those of the Wada test. In the remaining 1 patient with a right sided insular glioma, who was right-handed, the NIRS study revealed stronger activation of the right inferior frontal region during the verb generation task, and stronger activation of the left superior temporal region during the story listening task. This dissociated language function was validated by the Wada test and the postoperative neurological course. These results demonstrate that a NIRS study using our technique is extremely valuable for preoperative assessment of the language functions and exemplifies how a preoperative NIRS study can allow detection of unforeseen language lateralization. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Stories and Gossip in English: The Macro-Structure of Casual Talk.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Slade, Diana
1997-01-01
A discussion of two text-types commonly occurring in casual conversation, stories and gossip, (1) details four kinds of stories told in casual talk, (2) demonstrates that gossip is a culturally-determined process with a distinctive structure, and (3) considers implications for teaching English-as-a- Second-Language. Analysis is based on over three…
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The Storytelling Project: Innovating to Engage Students in Their Learning
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Miley, Frances
2009-01-01
This research explores the development of issues surrounding and reactions to the use of non-accounting stories in accounting to engage and motivate first-year students. The stories were drawn from the students' main areas of study. Students were challenged to draw analogies between a story and accounting. This process allowed them to create…
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Engendering Anthropocentrism: Lessons from Children's Realistic Animal Stories.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Johnson, Kathleen R.
In children's realistic stories about animals a number of wholly and unambiguously anthropocentric assumptions are at work. For instance, in a study most of the books (81%) in one sampling of 50 stories involve a pet or the process of domesticating a wild animal. In most cases the primary animal character is a dog or horse. The predominance of…
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Schechter, Daniel S; Zygmunt, Annette; Trabka, Kimberly A; Davies, Mark; Colon, Elizabeth; Kolodji, Ann; McCaw, Jaime E
2007-01-01
This study examines the relationship between child play-narratives and family drawings by children of violence-exposed mothers with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The Family Attachment Drawing Task (FAD-T) and MacArthur Story Stem Battery (MSSB) were administered. Of the 23 children (ages 4-7 years), 16 (70%) created drawings that were coded as being representative of insecure attachment. Attachment insecurity and disorganization of child-caregiver attachment on the FAD-T were significantly associated with trauma-related dimensions of the MSSB, but not to other factors. This study suggests that the FAD-T provides access to child mental representations, which may affect intergenerational transmission of violent trauma.
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The influence of two cognitive-linguistic variables on incidental word learning in 5-year-olds.
Abel, Alyson D; Schuele, C Melanie
2014-08-01
The relation between incidental word learning and two cognitive-linguistic variables--phonological memory and phonological awareness--is not fully understood. Thirty-five typically developing, 5-year-old, preschool children participated in a study examining the association between phonological memory, phonological awareness, and incidental word learning. Children were exposed to target words in a read-aloud story that accompanied a wordless picture book. Target word comprehension was assessed before and after two readings of the story. Phonological awareness predicted incidental word learning but phonological memory did not. The influence of phonological awareness and phonological memory on word learning may be dependent on the demands of the word learning task.
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Cultural adaptation of the Test of Narrative Language (TNL) into Brazilian Portuguese.
Rossi, Natalia Freitas; Lindau, Tâmara de Andrade; Gillam, Ronald Bradley; Giacheti, Célia Maria
To accomplish the translation and cultural adaptation of the Test of Narrative Language (TNL) into Brazilian Portuguese. The TNL is a formal instrument which assesses narrative comprehension and oral narration of children between the ages of 5-0 and 11-11 (years-months). The TNL translation and adaptation process had the following steps: (1) translation into the target language; (2) summary of the translated versions; (3) back-translation; (4) checking of the conceptual, semantics and cultural equivalence process and (5) pilot study (56 children within the test age range and from both genders). The adapted version maintained the same structure as the original version: number of tasks (both, three comprehension and oral narration), narrative formats (no picture, sequenced pictures and single picture) and scoring system. There were no adjustments to the pictures. The "McDonald's Story" was replaced by the "Snack Bar History" to meet the semantic and experiential equivalence of the target population. The other stories had semantic and grammatical adjustments. Statistically significant difference was found when comparing the raw score (comprehension, narration and total) of age groups from the adapted version. Adjustments were required to meet the equivalence between the original and the translated versions. The adapted version showed it has the potential to identify differences in oral narratives of children in the age range provided by the test. Measurement equivalence for validation and test standardization are in progress and will be able to supplement the study outcomes.
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A cross-modal investigation of the neural substrates for ongoing cognition
Wang, Megan; He, Biyu J.
2014-01-01
What neural mechanisms underlie the seamless flow of our waking consciousness? A necessary albeit insufficient condition for such neural mechanisms is that they should be consistently modulated across time were a segment of the conscious stream to be repeated twice. In this study, we experimentally manipulated the content of a story followed by subjects during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) independently from the modality of sensory input (as visual text or auditory speech) as well as attentional focus. We then extracted brain activity patterns consistently modulated across subjects by the evolving content of the story regardless of whether it was presented visually or auditorily. Specifically, in one experiment we presented the same story to different subjects via either auditory or visual modality. In a second experiment, we presented two different stories simultaneously, one auditorily, one visually, and manipulated the subjects' attentional focus. This experimental design allowed us to dissociate brain activities underlying modality-specific sensory processing from modality-independent story processing. We uncovered a network of brain regions consistently modulated by the evolving content of a story regardless of the sensory modality used for stimulus input, including the superior temporal sulcus/gyrus (STS/STG), the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), the medial frontal cortex (MFC), the temporal pole (TP), and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). Many of these regions have previously been implicated in semantic processing. Interestingly, different stories elicited similar brain activity patterns, but with subtle differences potentially attributable to varying degrees of emotional valence and self-relevance. PMID:25206347
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Alternative Routes to Teacher Certification. Occasional Paper Series 20
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Silin, Jonathan G., Ed.; Snyder, Jon; Barry, Miranda; Samuels, Sarah; Sacks, Ariel; Ellenzweig, Allen
2008-01-01
Alternative routes to teacher preparation are clearly here to stay. A growing research literature on non-traditional pathways suggests the complexity of the task ahead. This report offers new teachers the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words. In "Alternative Certification and Alternative Pathways: A Personal Take on a Core…
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Confessions of an Ethics Committee Chair
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Halse, Christine
2011-01-01
This essay examines the possibilities of being/becoming an ethical researcher in the academy. It tackles this task through the lens of an ethics application by Mary [pseudonym], a PhD student in sociology whose research thesis was investigating the reasons why married men with children use prostitutes. Two analyses are offered of Mary's story. The…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kim, Mijung; Tan, Aik-Ling
2011-01-01
To alleviate teachers' reluctance toward practical work, there has been much discussion on teachers' pedagogical content knowledge, teaching materials, and failsafe strategies for practical work. Despite these efforts, practical work is still regarded as a challenging task for many elementary science teachers. To understand the complexity of…
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Oral and Written Expression in Children with Reading Comprehension Difficulties
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Carretti, Barbara; Motta, Eleonora; Re, Anna Maria
2016-01-01
Several studies have highlighted that children with reading comprehension difficulties also have problems in tasks that involve telling a story, in writing or verbally. The main differences identified regard poor comprehenders' lower level of coherence in their productions by comparison with good comprehenders. Only one study has compared poor and…
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Organization of Chicano Children's Narrative Behavior. Final Report.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Duran, Richard P.
To determine how bilingual children display a sense of story in an oral reading activity at home, researchers video- and audio-taped samples of four bilingual Chicano second grade chidren engaged in matched narrative tasks. While the two male and two female children read aloud storybooks in English and Spanish in the home setting, reseachers…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kapantzoglou, Maria; Fergadiotis, Gerasimos; Restrepo, M. Adelaida
2017-01-01
Purpose: This study examined whether the language sample elicitation technique (i.e., storytelling and story-retelling tasks with pictorial support) affects lexical diversity (D), grammaticality (grammatical errors per communication unit [GE/CU]), sentence length (mean length of utterance in words [MLUw]), and sentence complexity (subordination…
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Sex-Biased Ratio of Avoidant/Ambivalent Attachment in Middle Childhood
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Del Giudice, Marco
2008-01-01
In this study, new evidence is presented of marked sex differences in the distribution of insecure attachment patterns in middle childhood. Attachment was assessed with the Manchester Child Attachment Story Task (MCAST) in a sample of 122 Italian 7-year-olds. The four-way distribution of attachment patterns was significantly unbalanced, with…
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The Effect of Online Planning, Strategic Planning and Rehearsal across Two Proficiency Levels
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Baleghizadeh, Sasan; Shahri, Mohammad Naseh Nasrollahi
2017-01-01
The study presents an investigation of the effect of strategic planning, online planning and rehearsal on the fluency, accuracy and complexity of oral productions at two proficiency levels. Forty EFL participants at low and intermediate levels performed picture story tasks in three different conditions: the online planning only condition,…
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Sociomoral Reasoning in Congenitally Deaf Children as a Function of Cognitive Maturity.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Markoulis, Diomedes; Christoforou, Maria
1991-01-01
Compares the operational and sociomoral reasoning maturity of 70 deaf children with that of a sensory unimpaired control sample. Tests subjects individually on three Piagetian tasks, story pairs, and the concept of justice. Finds slower development of operational reasoning in the deaf children but comparable development in sociomoral reasoning.…
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A Preliminary Investigation of Racial Bias in Early Writing Curriculum-Based Measures
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kondisko, Joseph E.
2017-01-01
Using de-identified data, this study investigated the relationship between racial categories with curriculum-based early writing measures (CBM-W), which included word dictation, picture word sentence writing, and story prompt tasks for over 300 participants in Grades 1, 2, and 3. Words written, words spelled correctly, correct letter sequences,…
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Narrative Development in Monolingual Spanish-Speaking Preschool Children
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Castilla-Earls, Anny; Petersen, Douglas; Spencer, Trina; Hammer, Krista
2015-01-01
Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to describe differences in the narratives produced by 3-, 4-, and 5- year old Spanish-speaking (SS) children. Narrative productions of 104 typically developing children were collected using a story-retelling task and coded using the Index of Narrative Complexity. The results of this study indicate…
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Age-Related Differences in Idiom Production in Adulthood
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Conner, Peggy S.; Hyun, Jungmoon; O'Connor Wells, Barbara; Anema, Inge; Goral, Mira; Monereau-Merry, Marie-Michelle; Rubino, Daniel; Kuckuk, Raija; Obler, Loraine K.
2011-01-01
To investigate whether idiom production was vulnerable to age-related difficulties, we asked 40 younger (ages 18-30) and 40 older healthy adults (ages 60-85) to produce idiomatic expressions in a story-completion task. Younger adults produced significantly more correct idiom responses (73%) than did older adults (60%). When older adults generated…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Murphy, P. Karen; Firetto, Carla M.; Wei, Liwei; Li, Mengyi; Croninger, Rachel M. V.
2016-01-01
Many American students struggle to perform even basic comprehension of text, such as locating information, determining the main idea, or supporting details of a story. Even more students are inadequately prepared to complete more complex tasks, such as critically or analytically interpreting information in text or making reasoned decisions from…
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Young Children's Intonational Marking of New, Given and Contrastive Referents
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Grünloh, Thomas; Lieven, Elena; Tomasello, Michael
2015-01-01
In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…
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Are "All" Teenagers Emotionally Illiterate? Charting a Neuroscientific Storying of Normative Deficit
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Payne, Monica A.
2012-01-01
Defining "emotional illiteracy" is a task located within the broader context of expert (and subsequently public) assumptions regarding the normally expectable competencies of the age group concerned. In the late 1990s a series of neuroscientific studies reporting adolescents' limited ability to recognize emotional states from facial expressions…
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Trying Three-Act Tasks with Primary Students
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Lomax, Kendra; Alfonzo, Kristin; Dietz, Sarah; Kleyman, Ellen; Kazemi, Elham
2017-01-01
The goals of problem-solving activities in the elementary grades often include making sense of story problems, developing a range of strategies, and reaching accurate solutions. These are important mathematical aims, but they do not fully address the demands of modeling with mathematics as described in the fourth of the Common Core's eight…
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Getting Ready Right from the Start. Effective Early Literacy Interventions.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hiebert, Elfrieda H., Ed.; Taylor, Barbara M., Ed.
Presenting descriptions of seven successful emergent literacy programs, this book demonstrates that early literacy intervention programs with a focus on accelerated learning and on authentic reading and writing tasks can prevent many first-grade children from failing to learn to read. Programs described in the book focus on story book reading and…
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Loss of Retrieval Information in Prose Recall.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Sehulster, Jerome R.; And Others
The purpose of this research was to experimentally manipulate input and output orders of information and separate storage and retrieval components of prose free recall. The cued partial recall method, used in word list recall, was adapted to a prose learning task. Four short biographical stories of about 55 words each were systematically combined…
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[Attachment representation and a projective test with pictures of parent-child interaction].
Kubo, M
2000-02-01
The purpose of this study was to assess individual differences in attachment representation. They were assessed, not through direct verbal reports, but indirectly as indicated in a projective test. The test required subjects to tell their impressions of pictures, which depicted daily, routine parent-child interactions. A series of pictures were developed for story-making task, which was named PARS (Picture Attachment Related Study). Three hundred and two (302) undergraduate and vocational students were asked to see the pictures, and freely imagine the situation, think what they would feel, and create the further story. They were then to recall their own experiences with their parents, and fill out a questionnaire of how they see their relationship with others. It was found that those who made a trustful PARS story recalled their own attachment experiences in an autonomous way, and had lower distrust in their relationship with others. Thus, results of the projective test were shown to reflect individual personal attachment experiences, and the test be useful.
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NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Weise, Richard
Decades of research indicate that students at all academic grade and performance levels perform poorly with informational texts and tasks and particularly with locating assignment-relevant information in expository texts. Students have little understanding of the individual tasks required, the arc of the activity, the hierarchical structure of the information they seek, or how to reconstitute and interpret the information they extract. Poor performance begins with the introduction of textbooks and research assignments in fourth grade and continues into adulthood. However, to date, neither educators nor researchers have substantially addressed this problem. In this quasi-experimental study, we ask if first-grade children can perform essential tasks in identifying, extracting, and integrating assignment-relevant information and if instruction improves their performance. To answer this question, we conducted a 15-week, teacher-led, intervention in two first-grade classrooms in an inner-city Nashville elementary school. We created a computer learning environment (NoteTaker) to facilitate children's creation of a mental model of the research process and a narrative/expository bridge curriculum to support the children's transition from all narrative to all expository texts and tasks. We also created a new scaffolding taxonomy and a reading-to-research model to focus our research. Teachers participated in weekly professional development workshops. The results of this quasi-experimental study indicate that at-risk, first-grade children are able to (a) identify relevant information in an expository text, (b) categorize the information they identify, and (c) justify their choice of category. Children's performance in the first and last tasks significantly improved with instruction, and low-performing readers showed the greatest benefits from instruction. We find that the children's performance in categorizing information depended upon content-specific knowledge that was not taught, as well as on the process knowledge that was taught. We also find that children's narrative reading performance predicted their initial-performance for each assessment measure. We argue that first-grade children are developmentally ready to read expository texts and to learn reading-to-research tasks and that primary-school literacy instruction should not be limited to reading and writing stories.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Olkoniemi, Henri; Ranta, Henri; Kaakinen, Johanna K.
2016-01-01
The present study examined individual differences in the processing of different forms of figurative language. Sixty participants read sarcastic, metaphorical, and literal sentences embedded in story contexts while their eye movements were recorded, and responded to a text memory and an inference question after each story. Individual differences…
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Processing of Written Irony: An Eye Movement Study
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kaakinen, Johanna K.; Olkoniemi, Henri; Kinnari, Taina; Hyönä, Jukka
2014-01-01
We examined processing of written irony by recording readers' eye movements while they read target phrases embedded either in ironic or non-ironic story context. After reading each story, participants responded to a text memory question and an inference question tapping into the understanding of the meaning of the target phrase. The results of…
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Scenario Planning at College of Marin.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
College of Marin, Kentfield, CA.
This article reviews the scenario planning process implemented at the College of Marin (California). Scenario planning is a creative process in which a group of people who share a common fate develop stories about different ways their future might unfold, and use these stories to make decisions about what path to take. The Global Business Network…
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Will Microfilm and Computers Replace Clippings?
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Oppendahl, Alison; And Others
Four speeches are presented, each of which deals with the use of conputers to organize and retrieve news stories. The first speech relates in detail the step-by-step process devised by the "Free Press" in Detroit to analyze, categorize, code, film, process, and retrieve news stories through the use of the electronic film retrieval…
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Sexual Abuse and the Grooming Process in Sport: Learning from Bella's Story
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Owton, Helen; Sparkes, Andrew C.
2017-01-01
Through a process of collaborative autoethnography, we explore the experiences of one female athlete named Bella who was groomed and then sexually abused by her male coach. Bella's story signals how the structural conditions and power relationships embedded in competitive sporting environments, specifically the power invested in the coach, provide…
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Digital stories as a tool for health promotion and youth engagement.
Fletcher, Sarah; Mullett, Jennifer
2016-08-15
To provide opportunities for intergenerational knowledge sharing for healthy lifestyles; to facilitate youth and Elder mentorship; and to increase the self-esteem of youth by celebrating identity, cultural practices and community connection through the creation and sharing of digital stories. A youth research team (8 youth) aged 13-25, youth participants (60 core participants and 170 workshop participants) and Elders (14) from First Nations communities. The project was conducted with participants from several communities on Vancouver Island through on-site workshops and presentations. Youth and Elders were invited to a 3-day digital story workshop consisting of knowledge-sharing sessions by Elders and digital story training by the youth research team. Workshop attendees returned to their communities to develop stories. The group re-convened at the university to create digital stories focused on community connections, family histories and healthy lifestyles. During the following year the research team delivered instructional sessions in communities on the digital story process. The youth involved reported increased pride in community as well as new or enhanced relationships with Elders. The digital stories method facilitated intergenerational interactions and engaged community members in creating a digital representation of healthy lifestyles. The process itself is an intervention, as it affords critical reflection on historical, cultural and spiritual ideas of health and what it means to be healthy in an Aboriginal community. It is a particularly relevant health promotion tool in First Nations communities with strong oral history traditions.
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Story Starters on the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas. A Creative Writing Program.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Henrich, Steve; Henrich, Jean
Designed to supplement an established language arts and social studies program, this books deals with the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas of Latin America. All of the "Story Starter" books are intended to give a variety of vocabulary and story ideas to help with the writing process. Each of the books is divided into four main sections: (1) an…
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Stories and Science: Stirring Children's Imagination
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Seeley, Claire; Gallagher, Sarah
2014-01-01
Stories are a place where magical things happen, where ideas are challenged, where the imagination runs free and questions are asked. They are a safe place, where the reader can walk about with new identities, try new ideas, process life's ups and downs and make new meanings. This makes stories the perfect place for creative learning. In this…
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Tales for Trainers. Using Stories and Metaphors to Facilitate Learning.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Parkin, Margaret
This book is a resource for trainers or managers who provide training. The book is divided into two parts. Part one provides a brief overview of stories, metaphors, and myths and the purpose they have played over the years--and still do today. It explains how and why stories help to facilitate the learning process, and it gives guidance on where…
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Fossard, Marion; Achim, Amélie M; Rousier-Vercruyssen, Lucie; Gonzalez, Sylvia; Bureau, Alexandre; Champagne-Lavau, Maud
2018-01-01
During a narrative discourse, accessibility of the referents is rarely fixed once and for all. Rather, each referent varies in accessibility as the discourse unfolds, depending on the presence and prominence of the other referents. This leads the speaker to use various referential expressions to refer to the main protagonists of the story at different moments in the narrative. This study relies on a new, collaborative storytelling in sequence task designed to assess how speakers adjust their referential choices when they refer to different characters at specific discourse stages corresponding to the introduction, maintaining, or shift of the character in focus, in increasingly complex referential contexts. Referential complexity of the stories was manipulated through variations in the number of characters (1 vs. 2) and, for stories in which there were two characters, in their ambiguity in gender (different vs. same gender). Data were coded for the type of reference markers as well as the type of reference content (i.e., the extent of the information provided in the referential expression). Results showed that, beyond the expected effects of discourse stages on reference markers (more indefinite markers at the introduction stage, more pronouns at the maintaining stage, and more definite markers at the shift stage), the number of characters and their ambiguity in gender also modulated speakers' referential choices at specific discourse stages, For the maintaining stage, an effect of the number of characters was observed for the use of pronouns and of definite markers, with more pronouns when there was a single character, sometimes replaced by definite expressions when two characters were present in the story. For the shift stage, an effect of gender ambiguity was specifically noted for the reference content with more specific information provided in the referential expression when there was referential ambiguity. Reference content is an aspect of referential marking that is rarely addressed in a narrative context, yet it revealed a quite flexible referential behavior by the speakers.
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Fossard, Marion; Achim, Amélie M.; Rousier-Vercruyssen, Lucie; Gonzalez, Sylvia; Bureau, Alexandre; Champagne-Lavau, Maud
2018-01-01
During a narrative discourse, accessibility of the referents is rarely fixed once and for all. Rather, each referent varies in accessibility as the discourse unfolds, depending on the presence and prominence of the other referents. This leads the speaker to use various referential expressions to refer to the main protagonists of the story at different moments in the narrative. This study relies on a new, collaborative storytelling in sequence task designed to assess how speakers adjust their referential choices when they refer to different characters at specific discourse stages corresponding to the introduction, maintaining, or shift of the character in focus, in increasingly complex referential contexts. Referential complexity of the stories was manipulated through variations in the number of characters (1 vs. 2) and, for stories in which there were two characters, in their ambiguity in gender (different vs. same gender). Data were coded for the type of reference markers as well as the type of reference content (i.e., the extent of the information provided in the referential expression). Results showed that, beyond the expected effects of discourse stages on reference markers (more indefinite markers at the introduction stage, more pronouns at the maintaining stage, and more definite markers at the shift stage), the number of characters and their ambiguity in gender also modulated speakers' referential choices at specific discourse stages, For the maintaining stage, an effect of the number of characters was observed for the use of pronouns and of definite markers, with more pronouns when there was a single character, sometimes replaced by definite expressions when two characters were present in the story. For the shift stage, an effect of gender ambiguity was specifically noted for the reference content with more specific information provided in the referential expression when there was referential ambiguity. Reference content is an aspect of referential marking that is rarely addressed in a narrative context, yet it revealed a quite flexible referential behavior by the speakers. PMID:29515493
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Perceived Conventionality in Co-speech Gestures Involves the Fronto-Temporal Language Network.
Wolf, Dhana; Rekittke, Linn-Marlen; Mittelberg, Irene; Klasen, Martin; Mathiak, Klaus
2017-01-01
Face-to-face communication is multimodal; it encompasses spoken words, facial expressions, gaze, and co-speech gestures. In contrast to linguistic symbols (e.g., spoken words or signs in sign language) relying on mostly explicit conventions, gestures vary in their degree of conventionality. Bodily signs may have a general accepted or conventionalized meaning (e.g., a head shake) or less so (e.g., self-grooming). We hypothesized that subjective perception of conventionality in co-speech gestures relies on the classical language network, i.e., the left hemispheric inferior frontal gyrus (IFG, Broca's area) and the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG, Wernicke's area) and studied 36 subjects watching video-recorded story retellings during a behavioral and an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment. It is well documented that neural correlates of such naturalistic videos emerge as intersubject covariance (ISC) in fMRI even without involving a stimulus (model-free analysis). The subjects attended either to perceived conventionality or to a control condition (any hand movements or gesture-speech relations). Such tasks modulate ISC in contributing neural structures and thus we studied ISC changes to task demands in language networks. Indeed, the conventionality task significantly increased covariance of the button press time series and neuronal synchronization in the left IFG over the comparison with other tasks. In the left IFG, synchronous activity was observed during the conventionality task only. In contrast, the left pSTG exhibited correlated activation patterns during all conditions with an increase in the conventionality task at the trend level only. Conceivably, the left IFG can be considered a core region for the processing of perceived conventionality in co-speech gestures similar to spoken language. In general, the interpretation of conventionalized signs may rely on neural mechanisms that engage during language comprehension.
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Perceived Conventionality in Co-speech Gestures Involves the Fronto-Temporal Language Network
Wolf, Dhana; Rekittke, Linn-Marlen; Mittelberg, Irene; Klasen, Martin; Mathiak, Klaus
2017-01-01
Face-to-face communication is multimodal; it encompasses spoken words, facial expressions, gaze, and co-speech gestures. In contrast to linguistic symbols (e.g., spoken words or signs in sign language) relying on mostly explicit conventions, gestures vary in their degree of conventionality. Bodily signs may have a general accepted or conventionalized meaning (e.g., a head shake) or less so (e.g., self-grooming). We hypothesized that subjective perception of conventionality in co-speech gestures relies on the classical language network, i.e., the left hemispheric inferior frontal gyrus (IFG, Broca's area) and the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG, Wernicke's area) and studied 36 subjects watching video-recorded story retellings during a behavioral and an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment. It is well documented that neural correlates of such naturalistic videos emerge as intersubject covariance (ISC) in fMRI even without involving a stimulus (model-free analysis). The subjects attended either to perceived conventionality or to a control condition (any hand movements or gesture-speech relations). Such tasks modulate ISC in contributing neural structures and thus we studied ISC changes to task demands in language networks. Indeed, the conventionality task significantly increased covariance of the button press time series and neuronal synchronization in the left IFG over the comparison with other tasks. In the left IFG, synchronous activity was observed during the conventionality task only. In contrast, the left pSTG exhibited correlated activation patterns during all conditions with an increase in the conventionality task at the trend level only. Conceivably, the left IFG can be considered a core region for the processing of perceived conventionality in co-speech gestures similar to spoken language. In general, the interpretation of conventionalized signs may rely on neural mechanisms that engage during language comprehension. PMID:29249945
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Yogev-Seligmann, Galit; Oren, Noga; Ash, Elissa L; Hendler, Talma; Giladi, Nir; Lerner, Yulia
2016-05-03
The ability to store, integrate, and manipulate information declines with aging. These changes occur earlier, faster, and to a greater degree as a result of neurodegeneration. One of the most common and early characteristics of cognitive decline is difficulty with comprehension of information. The neural mechanisms underlying this breakdown of information processing are poorly understood. Using functional MRI and natural stimuli (e.g., stories), we mapped the neural mechanisms by which the human brain accumulates and processes information with increasing duration and complexity in participants with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and healthy older adults. To explore the mechanisms of information processing, we measured the reliability of brain responses elicited by listening to different versions of a narrated story created by segmenting the story into words, sentences, and paragraphs and then scrambling the segments. Comparing healthy older adults and participants with aMCI revealed that in both groups, all types of stimuli similarly recruited primary auditory areas. However, prominent differences between groups were found at the level of processing long and complex stimuli. In healthy older adults, parietal and frontal regions demonstrated highly synchronized responses in both the paragraph and full story conditions, as has been previously reported in young adults. Participants with aMCI, however, exhibited a robust functional shift of long time scale processing to the pre- and post-central sulci. Our results suggest that participants with aMCI experienced a functional shift of higher order auditory information processing, possibly reflecting a functional response to concurrent or impending neuronal or synaptic loss. This observation might assist in understanding mechanisms of cognitive decline in aMCI.
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Narratives of recovery from addictive behaviours.
Hänninen, V; Koski-Jännes, A
1999-12-01
The purpose of this study was to look for the ways in which people who have recovered from various addictions understand and present their change process. The research material consisted of 51 autobiographical stories of people who had been able to quit their addiction to alcohol, multiple drugs, binge eating, smoking, sex and gambling. The basic logic of each narrative was first defined. The narratives were then categorized according to what they presented as the key to recovery. Composite stories were then constructed and analysed with regard to their emotional, causal, moral and ethical meanings. The analysis revealed five different story types among these self-narratives: the AA story, the growth story, the co-dependence story, the love story and the mastery story. All of them helped to make the addiction and recovery understandable, they released the protagonist from guilt and had a happy ending by which the values of the story were realized. Each story type was told predominantly by representatives of a particular gender and addiction. As there are several ways out of addictive behaviours there are also several ways to construe the change. People who try to quit addictive behaviours could be encouraged to make full use of the cultural stock of stories in creating an account that fits their own experience of defeating their particular addiction.
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Hayashi, Atsuko; Nomura, Hiroshi; Mochizuki, Ruriko; Ohnuma, Ayumu; Kimpara, Teiko; Suzuki, Kyoko; Mori, Etsuro
2015-01-01
Background/Aims We investigated writing abilities in patients with the amnestic type of mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). To examine the earliest changes in writing function, we used writing tests for both words and sentences with different types of Japanese characters (Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji). Methods A total of 25 aMCI patients, 38 AD patients, and 22 healthy controls performed writing to dictation for Kana and Kanji words, copied Kanji words, and wrote in response to a picture story task. Analysis of variance was used to test the subject group effects on the scores in the above writing tasks. Results For the written Kanji words, the mild AD group performed worse than the aMCI group and the controls, but there was no difference between the aMCI group and the controls. For the picture story writing task, the mild AD and aMCI groups performed worse than the controls, but the difference between the AD and the aMCI groups was not significant. Conclusions The mild AD group showed defects in writing Kanji characters, and the aMCI group showed impairments in narrative writing. Our study suggests that narrative writing, which demands complex integration of multiple cognitive functions, can be used to detect the subtle writing deficits in aMCI patients. PMID:26483830
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Tracking speakers' false beliefs: is theory of mind available earlier for word learning?
Houston-Price, Carmel; Goddard, Kate; Séclier, Catherine; Grant, Sally C; Reid, Caitlin J B; Boyden, Laura E; Williams, Rhiannon
2011-07-01
Happé and Loth (2002) describe word learning as a 'privileged domain' in the development of a theory of mind. We test this claim in a series of experiments based on the Sally-Anne paradigm. Three- and 4-year-old children's ability to represent others' false beliefs was investigated in tasks that required the child either to predict the actions of a protagonist in a story or to learn the meaning of a new word used by the protagonist. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings of better performance in a false belief word-learning task compared to a false belief action-prediction task. However, systematic manipulation of the task parameters in Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that this performance discrepancy disappeared when tasks were equated in their 'referential pull' (Perner, Rendl & Garnham, 2007). We conclude that the notion of a precocious theory of mind for word learning is not required to explain dissociations in performance on false belief tasks. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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Missing Stories: The Messy Processes, Multifaceted Risks, & Multiple Roles of Critical Ethnographers
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Howard, Joy; Thompson, Candace; Nash, Kindel; Rodriguez, Sophia
2016-01-01
In this article, four critical ethnographers reflect on dilemmas that arose during individual research projects. We grappled with the question: What does critical ethnography require from us as we work to represent stories that emerge in contexts where students and/or teachers have been marginalized? After engaging in a three-year process of…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Yuksekyalcin, Gozen; Tanriseven, Isil; Sancar-Tokmak, Hatice
2016-01-01
This case study investigated math and science teachers' perceptions about the use of creative drama during a digital story (DS) creation process for educational purposes. A total of 25 secondary science and math teachers were selected according to criterion sampling strategy to participate in the study. Data were collected through an open-ended…
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Ethical Issues in Covering Teen Suicide Stories: Deadly Dilemmas and Fatal Flaws.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Willey, Susan
A study examined news coverage by "The Saint Petersburg Times" of a local double teen suicide in August 1993. Focusing on how the story was covered, the study explored the newspaper's decision-making process, analyzing the process in relation to standard philosophical methods in ethics and recognized journalistic principles. As background,…
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The Need for (Digital) Story: First Graders Using Digital Tools to Tell Stories
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Solomon, Marva Jeanine
2010-01-01
The purpose of this study was to explore the process and product of African American First Graders as they participated in digital storytelling. Of interest was the role digital tools played in the creation process. Eight participants participated in 18 study sessions during which they composed, recorded, and then shared their digital texts with…
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Sophie’s story: writing missing journeys
Stevenson, Olivia
2014-01-01
‘Sophie’s story’ is a creative rendition of an interview narrative gathered in a research project on missing people. The paper explains why Sophie’s story was written and details the wider intention to provide new narrative resources for police officer training, families of missing people and returned missing people. We contextualize this cultural intervention with an argument about the transformative potential of writing trauma stories. It is suggested that trauma stories produce difficult and unknown affects, but ones that may provide new ways of talking about unspeakable events. Sophie’s story is thus presented as a hopeful cultural geography in process, and one that seeks to help rewrite existing social scripts about missing people. PMID:29710880
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Fujimoto, Toru
2010-01-01
The purpose of this research was to design and evaluate a web-based self-learning environment for historical inquiry embedded with different types of instructional support featuring story-based pedagogical agents. This research focused on designing a learning environment by integrating story-based instruction and pedagogical agents as a means to…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Strasser, Katherine; del Río, Francisca
2014-01-01
Recent studies have revealed that preschoolers' story comprehension is influenced by several basic as well as complex cognitive and linguistic processes. Among the abilities known to be relevant for young children's understanding of stories are the size of their vocabulary, their inference-making ability, and their working memory. In this study,…
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Phonological Activation of Word Meanings in Grade 5 Readers
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Jared, Debra; Ashby, Jane; Agauas, Stephen J.; Levy, Betty Ann
2016-01-01
Three experiments examined the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 students. In Experiment 1, homophone and spelling control errors were embedded in a story context and participants performed a proofreading task as they read for meaning. For both good and poor readers, more homophone errors went undetected than spelling…
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The Use of Reported Speech in Children's Narratives: A Priming Study
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Serratrice, Ludovica; Hesketh, Anne; Ashworth, Rachel
2015-01-01
This study investigated the long-term effects of structural priming on children's use of indirect speech clauses in a narrative context. Forty-two monolingual English-speaking 5-year-olds in two primary classrooms took part in a story-retelling task including reported speech. Testing took place in three individual sessions (pre-test, post-test 1,…
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Narrative Discourse in Adults with High-Functioning Autism or Asperger Syndrome
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Colle, Livia; Baron-Cohen, Simon; Wheelwright, Sally; van der Lely, Heather K. J.
2008-01-01
We report a study comparing the narrative abilities of 12 adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger Syndrome (AS) versus 12 matched controls. The study focuses on the use of referential expressions (temporal expressions and anaphoric pronouns) during a story-telling task. The aim was to assess pragmatics skills in people with HFA/AS in…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Page, Timothy; Buchanan, Teresa K.; Verbovaya, Olga
2016-01-01
The central focus of this study was the perceptions of emotional security among 64 elementary school-aged children exposed to the hurricanes that affected the US Gulf Coast in 2005. Specifically, we examined the representational qualities of attachment, exploration, and caregiving as assessed with a narrative story-stem task in relation to…
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Putting Raters in Ratees' Shoes: Perspective Taking and Assessment of Creative Products
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Han, Jiantao; Long, Haiying; Pang, Weiguo
2017-01-01
This study reported 2 experiments that studied the effect of perspective taking on assessment of creative products by using human raters. Forty responses of 2 alternative uses tasks (AUTs) and 15 alien stories generated by 6th-grade students were used as assessment materials. Undergraduate students as the novice raters assessed the products under…
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Bayesian Just-So Stories in Psychology and Neuroscience
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Bowers, Jeffrey S.; Davis, Colin J.
2012-01-01
According to Bayesian theories in psychology and neuroscience, minds and brains are (near) optimal in solving a wide range of tasks. We challenge this view and argue that more traditional, non-Bayesian approaches are more promising. We make 3 main arguments. First, we show that the empirical evidence for Bayesian theories in psychology is weak.…
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Any Added Value? Co-Constructing Life Stories of and with People with Intellectual Disabilities
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Koenig, Oliver
2012-01-01
Despite considerable achievement in inclusive research, people with intellectual disabilities have been largely excluded from the critical area of data analysis and theory development. Next to the undoubted complexity of these tasks, this can partly be attributed to higher demands of representativeness that are used to judge the validity of…
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Encouraging Use of Subordination in Children's Narratives: A Classroom-Based Priming Study
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hesketh, Anne; Serratrice, Ludovica; Ashworth, Rachel
2016-01-01
This study investigated the long-term effect of classroom-based input manipulation on children's use of subordination in a story re-telling task; it also explored the role of receptive vocabulary skills and expressive grammatical abilities in predicting the likelihood of priming. During a two-week priming phase, 47 monolingual English-speaking…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Deno, Stanley; And Others
Simple measures of reading, spelling, and written expression were administered to 566 elementary students from the states of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Washington. Each child was individually administered three reading word lists, three reading passages, two dictated spelling lists, and two story starters. Approximately 25 minutes was needed for…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Warmington, Sally; McColl, Geoffrey
2017-01-01
Professional identity formation is acknowledged as one of the fundamental tasks of contemporary medical education. Identity is a social phenomenon, constructed through participation in everyday activities and an integral part of every learning interaction. In this paper we report from an Australian ethnographic study into how medical students and…
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On the Origins, Stages and Prospects of the Kazakh Philosophy
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Sydykov, Yerlan B.; Nysanbaev, Abdumalik N.; Tuleshov, Valikhan T.
2016-01-01
Perception of a single chain of the Kazakh history as the history of their ethnic consciousness and self-awareness, and not as a history of the events or stories of artefacts presents the most important political task, which could be solved only through the metaphysical, philosophical synthesis of views from the primitive to modern times. The…
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Social Studies in Motion: Learning with the Whole Person
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Schulte, Paige L.
2005-01-01
Total Physical Response (TPR), developed by James Asher, is defined as a teaching technique whereby a learner responds to language input with body motions. Performing a chant or the game "Robot" is an example of a TPR activity, where the teacher commands her robots to do some task in the classroom. Acting out stories and giving imperative commands…
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The Whys, Hows, and Lessons Learned from Our 780-Person Writing Class
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Bowse, Robert; Lawrence, Holly
2017-01-01
Two business communication faculty share the story of teaching a 780-person business writing class. The article discusses the challenges of teaching such a large writing class. Challenges ranged from adopting a hybrid course model to hiring adjunct faculty for help with the task of grading. The article offers lessons learned, and recommends that…
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Grade-Aligned Math Instruction for Secondary Students with Moderate Intellectual Disability
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Browder, Diane M.; Jimenez, Bree A.; Trela, Katherine
2012-01-01
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of grade-aligned math instruction on math skill acquisition of four middle schools with moderate intellectual disability. Teachers were trained to follow a task analysis to teach grade-aligned math to middle school students using adapted math problem stories and graphic organizers. The teacher…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Vu, Jennifer A.; Howes, Carollee
2012-01-01
Using narrative story-completion tasks with a sample of 97 preschool-age Mexican-heritage children from a large urban area, the authors examined differences in children's representations about their mothers and teachers. The authors also looked at teachers' perceptions to determine whether teachers viewed children in the same way as children…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Du Rocher Schudlich, Tina D.; Shamir, Haya; Cummings, E. Mark
2004-01-01
The links among marital relations and children's representations were examined. Forty-seven children between the ages of 5 and 8 completed the Family Stories Task (FAST) to obtain their narrative representations of family relations and performed a variation of a puppet procedure (Mize & Ladd, 1988) to assess children's dispositions towards peer…
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Making Stories, Making Sense. Reading Education Report No. 14.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Rubin, Andee
Three characteristics of school writing activities that may make it difficult for students to learn to write with skill and enthusiasm are identified in this paper. They are: the solitary nature of most writing tasks, a lopsided emphasis on low-level details of text such as grammar and spelling, and the isolation of writing from reading in the…
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Preparing Students with Learning Disabilities for Writing Tasks: Introduction to a Special Issue
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Sperling, Marko; Grünke, Matthias
2017-01-01
Just as composing a story, a report, or an argumentative essay is challenging for most students with LD, so it is challenging for teachers in inclusive settings to instruct them (Gillespie & Kiuhara, 2017; Grünke & Leonard Zabel, 2015). The articles in this issue of "Insights into Learning Disabilities" are geared towards special…
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Zekveld, Adriana A.; Kramer, Sophia E.; Kessens, Judith M.; Vlaming, Marcel S. M. G.; Houtgast, Tammo
2009-01-01
This study examined the subjective benefit obtained from automatically generated captions during telephone-speech comprehension in the presence of babble noise. Short stories were presented by telephone either with or without captions that were generated offline by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. To simulate online ASR, the word accuracy (WA) level of the captions was 60% or 70% and the text was presented delayed to the speech. After each test, the hearing impaired participants (n = 20) completed the NASA-Task Load Index and several rating scales evaluating the support from the captions. Participants indicated that using the erroneous text in speech comprehension was difficult and the reported task load did not differ between the audio + text and audio-only conditions. In a follow-up experiment (n = 10), the perceived benefit of presenting captions increased with an increase of WA levels to 80% and 90%, and elimination of the text delay. However, in general, the task load did not decrease when captions were presented. These results suggest that the extra effort required to process the text could have been compensated for by less effort required to comprehend the speech. Future research should aim at reducing the complexity of the task to increase the willingness of hearing impaired persons to use an assistive communication system automatically providing captions. The current results underline the need for obtaining both objective and subjective measures of benefit when evaluating assistive communication systems. PMID:19126551
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Wexler, Lisa; Gubrium, Aline; Griffin, Megan; DiFulvio, Gloria
2013-07-01
Using a positive youth development framework, this article describes how a 3-year digital storytelling project and the 566 digital stories produced from it in Northwest Alaska promote protective factors in the lives of Alaska Native youth and serve as digital "hope kits," a suicide prevention approach that emphasizes young people's reasons for living. Digital stories are short, participant-produced videos that combine photos, music, and voice. We present process data that indicate the ways that digital stories serve as a platform for youth to reflect on and represent their lives, important relationships and achievements. In so doing, youth use the digital storytelling process to identify and highlight encouraging aspects of their lives, and develop more certain and positive identity formations. These processes are correlated with positive youth health outcomes. In addition, the digital stories themselves serve as reminders of the young people's personal assets--their reasons for living--after the workshop ends. Young people in this project often showed their digital stories to those who were featured positively within as a way to strengthen these interpersonal relationships. Evaluation data from the project show that digital storytelling workshops and outputs are a promising positive youth development approach. The project and the qualitative data demonstrate the need for further studies focusing on outcomes related to suicide prevention.
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Kapantzoglou, Maria; Fergadiotis, Gerasimos; Restrepo, M Adelaida
2017-10-17
This study examined whether the language sample elicitation technique (i.e., storytelling and story-retelling tasks with pictorial support) affects lexical diversity (D), grammaticality (grammatical errors per communication unit [GE/CU]), sentence length (mean length of utterance in words [MLUw]), and sentence complexity (subordination index [SI]), which are commonly used indices for diagnosing primary language impairment in Spanish-English-speaking children in the United States. Twenty bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children with typical language development and 20 with primary language impairment participated in the study. Four analyses of variance were conducted to evaluate the effect of language elicitation technique and group on D, GE/CU, MLUw, and SI. Also, 2 discriminant analyses were conducted to assess which indices were more effective for story retelling and storytelling and their classification accuracy across elicitation techniques. D, MLUw, and SI were influenced by the type of elicitation technique, but GE/CU was not. The classification accuracy of language sample analysis was greater in story retelling than in storytelling, with GE/CU and D being useful indicators of language abilities in story retelling and GE/CU and SI in storytelling. Two indices in language sample analysis may be sufficient for diagnosis in 4- to 5-year-old bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children.
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NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)
Rumbaugh, D. M.
1995-01-01
The author reviews and comments on the book Equivalence relations and behavior: a research story by Murray Sidman. Sidman's book reports his research about equivalence relations and competencies in children with mental retardation and how it relates to behavior. Sidman used the idea of stimulus-stimulus relations among features of the environment to develop his theories about equivalence relations. Experimental work with children and animals demonstrated their ability to use equivalence relations to learn new tasks. The subject received feedback and reinforcement for specific choices made during training, then was presented with new choices during testing. Results of the tests indicate that subjects were able to establish relations and retrieve them in different situations.
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Short-term and long-term memory in early temporal lobe dysfunction.
Hershey, T; Craft, S; Glauser, T A; Hale, S
1998-01-01
Following medial temporal damage, mature humans are impaired in retaining new information over long delays but not short delays. The question of whether a similar dissociation occurs in children was addressed by testing children (ages 7-16) with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and controls on short- and long-term memory tasks, including a spatial delayed response task (SDR). Early-onset TLE did not affect performance on short delays on SDR, but it did impair performance at the longest delay (60 s), similar to adults with unilateral medial temporal damage. In addition, early-onset TLE affected performance on pattern recall, spatial span, and verbal span with rehearsal interference. No differences were found on story recall or on a response inhibition task.
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A medical perspective on the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Reed, J
2001-12-01
The adventures of Sherlock Holmes, although primarily famous as stories of detection of crime, offer a considerable amount to interest the medical reader. There are many medical references in the stories, and the influence of Conan Doyle's medical background is clearly seen in the main characters. Aspects of the stories also reflect Conan Doyle's medical career, and also something of his attitude towards the profession. From Holmes's sayings and accounts of his methods, parallels can be drawn between Holmesian deduction and the diagnostic process. It is concluded, however, that deduction cannot be used as a direct paradigm since medical problems are rarely soluble through a process of logic alone.
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The lived experience of violence: using storytelling as a teaching tool with middle school students.
Werle, Gretchen D
2004-04-01
This qualitative study explored 8th-grade students' responses to hearing stories about the lived experience of violence. A convenience sample of 13 students attending health education classes at a public middle school was used. After hearing each story, students answered a series of questions using the process of free writing. Free writing is a technique that allows students to explore their thoughts and reactions while promoting critical thinking. Student free writing samples were analyzed using a process of constant comparison. Three themes emerged from the data: (a) students gain insights into the realities of violence through hearing these stories, (b) students respond on an emotional level to both the stories and the storytellers, and (c) students respond positively to and are engaged by these stories. The findings lend support to the use of storytelling in teaching youth about violence. School nurses can develop and implement violence prevention education programs using the storytelling model, seek grant and community support for such programs, and conduct further research into the use of the storytelling model.
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Handbook for Implementing Agile in Department of Defense Information Technology Acquisition
2010-12-15
Wire-frame Mockup of iTunes Cover Flow Feature (source: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/examples#mytunez...programming. The JOPES customer was included early in the development process in order to understand requirements management (story cards ), observe...transition by teaching the new members Agile processes, such as story card development, refactoring, and pair programming. Additionally, the team worked to
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Marvels of Science: 50 Fascinating 5-minute Reads.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Haven, Kendall
This book is a collection of 50 stories of the people, events, and processes that give us our rich scientific heritage with the goal of fostering an appreciation for the process of science and for the great variety of personalities that have graced the world of science. In addition to the actual text, each story in this book contains focusing and…
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Negotiations of the Ageing Process: Older Adults' Stories of Sports Participation
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Dionigi, Rylee A.; Horton, Sean; Baker, Joseph
2013-01-01
The purpose of this paper is to examine the talk of older athletes, with particular focus on how the context of sport helps them negotiate the ageing process. It draws on personal stories provided by 44 World Masters Games competitors (23 women; 21 men; aged 56-90 years; "M" = 72). Four themes emerged: "There's no such thing as…
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Becoming a Runner: Big, Middle and Small Stories about Physical Activity Participation in Later Life
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Griffin, Meridith; Phoenix, Cassandra
2016-01-01
How do older adults learn to tell a "new" story about, through, and with the body? We know that narratives are embodied, lived and central to the process of meaning-making--and as such, they do not lie in the waiting for telling, but are an active part of everyday interaction. Telling stories about ourselves to others is one way in which…
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Using personal narrative to deepen emotional awareness of practice.
Edwards, Sharon L
2014-08-19
Storytelling is intrinsic to human beings, and stories can explain events, stances taken and actions engaged in. When experience is represented as story it can become more organised and be used for analysis, critique and learning. Experience is important in nursing, as it is in many other practice-based professions, and it can contribute much to nurses' learning. Through a process of sharing and engaging with the author's personal stories, this article encourages nurses to begin to organise their own experiences in story form for use in learning and as part of their personal and professional development.
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Dual tasking and stuttering: from the laboratory to the clinic.
Metten, Christine; Bosshardt, Hans-Georg; Jones, Mark; Eisenhuth, John; Block, Susan; Carey, Brenda; O'Brian, Sue; Packman, Ann; Onslow, Mark; Menzies, Ross
2011-01-01
The aim of the three studies in this article was to develop a way to include dual tasking in speech restructuring treatment for persons who stutter (PWS). It is thought that this may help clients maintain the benefits of treatment in the real world, where attentional resources are frequently diverted away from controlling fluency by the demands of other tasks. In Part 1, 17 PWS performed a story-telling task and a computer semantic task simultaneously. Part 2 reports the incorporation of the Part 1 protocol into a handy device for use in a clinical setting (the Dual Task and Stuttering Device, DAS-D). Part 3 is a proof of concept study in which three PWS reported on their experiences of using the device during treatment. In Part 1, stuttering frequency and errors on the computer task both increased under dual task conditions, indicating that the protocol would be appropriate for use in a clinical setting. All three participants in Part 3 reported positively on their experiences using the DAS-D. Dual tasking during treatment using the DAS-D appears to be a viable clinical procedure. Further research is required to establish effectiveness.
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The role of stories in understanding life events: poststructural construction of the 'self'.
Carolan, Mary
2005-07-01
An appreciation of the construction of the 'self' has the potential to enhance nursing practice. The 'self' within post-structuralism is fashioned through the social discourses and beliefs of the day. These socio-cultural determinants shape the individual and provide meaning for life events. Storytelling and the sharing of stories about these events play a key role in this process. In integrating narrative stories about 'self', individuals are provided with a link to their culture and cultural practices. Events, such as accommodating change or coming to terms with an illness diagnosis, require complex adjustments to the individual's already held identity of 'self'. Sharing stories plays a part in this adjustment and is the principal means by which individuals make sense of their experiences. This understanding of storytelling when caring for patients can encourage the nurse to exchange stories in order to provide opportunities for patients to tell their own stories.
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Response Conflict and Affective Responses in the Control and Expression of Race Bias
Bartholow, Bruce D.; Henry, Erika A.
2010-01-01
Models of racial attitudes traditionally have assumed that individual differences in the strength of underlying, ‘implicit’ associations between racial categories and stereotypical traits are the primary determinant of the expression of race bias. Thus, individual differences in performance on laboratory tasks designed to assess implicit race bias tend to be interpreted in terms of association strength. Here, we argue that such associations tell only part of the story, and probably the least interesting part. We posit that response conflict and its regulation are critical to understanding the need for control, and that affect-related processes help to determine the extent to which control resources will be implemented to overcome biased associations. We present data from a number of recent behavioral and psychophysiological studies in support of this idea, as well as conceptual accounts that point toward a model of race bias regulation that depends upon processes identified as important for regulation of thought, affect and action more generally. PMID:21278910
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Language processing and executive functions in early treated adults with phenylketonuria (PKU).
De Felice, Sara; Romani, Cristina; Geberhiwot, Tarekegn; MacDonald, Anita; Palermo, Liana
We provide an in-depth analysis of language functions in early-treated adults with phenylketonuria (AwPKUs, N = 15-33), as compared to age- and education-matched controls (N = 24-32; N varying across tasks), through: a. narrative production (the Cinderella story), b. language pragmatics comprehension (humour, metaphors, inferred meaning), c. prosody discrimination d. lexical inhibitory control and planning (Blocked Cyclic Naming; Hayling Sentence Completion Test, Burgess & Shallice, 1997). AwPKUs exhibited intact basic language processing (lexical retrieval, phonology/articulation, sentence construction). Instead, deficits emerged in planning and reasoning abilities. Compared to controls, AwPKUs were: less informative in narrative production (lower rate of Correct Information Units); slower in metaphorical understanding and inferred meaning; less accurate in focused lexical-search (Hayling test). These results suggest that i) executive deficits in PKU cannot be explained by an accumulation of lower-order deficits and/or general speed impairments, ii) executive functions engage dedicated neurophysiological resources, rather than simply being an emergent property of lower-level systems.
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Response Conflict and Affective Responses in the Control and Expression of Race Bias.
Bartholow, Bruce D; Henry, Erika A
2010-10-01
Models of racial attitudes traditionally have assumed that individual differences in the strength of underlying, 'implicit' associations between racial categories and stereotypical traits are the primary determinant of the expression of race bias. Thus, individual differences in performance on laboratory tasks designed to assess implicit race bias tend to be interpreted in terms of association strength. Here, we argue that such associations tell only part of the story, and probably the least interesting part. We posit that response conflict and its regulation are critical to understanding the need for control, and that affect-related processes help to determine the extent to which control resources will be implemented to overcome biased associations. We present data from a number of recent behavioral and psychophysiological studies in support of this idea, as well as conceptual accounts that point toward a model of race bias regulation that depends upon processes identified as important for regulation of thought, affect and action more generally.
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Schwartz, David D.; Katzenstein, Jennifer M.; Hopkins, Elisabeth; Stabley, Deborah L.; Sol-Church, Katia; Gripp, Karen W.; Axelrad, Marni E.
2013-01-01
Costello syndrome (CS) is a rare genetic disorder caused by germline mutations in the HRAS proto-oncogene which belongs to the family of syndromes called rasopathies. HRAS plays a key role in synaptic long-term potentiation (LTP) and memory formation. Prior research has found impaired recall memory in CS despite enhancement in LTP that would predict memory preservation. Based on findings in other rasopathies, we hypothesized that the memory deficit in CS would be specific to recall, and that recognition memory would show relative preservation. Memory was tested using word-list learning and story memory tasks with both recall and recognition trials, a design that allowed us to examine these processes separately. Participants were 11 adolescents and young adults with molecularly confirmed CS, all of whom fell in the mild to moderate range of intellectual disability. Results indicated a clear dissociation between verbal recall, which was impaired (M = 69 ± 14), and recognition memory, which was relatively intact (M = 86 ± 14). Story recognition was highly correlated with listening comprehension (r = .986), which also fell in the low-average range (M = 80 ± 12.9). Performance on other measures of linguistic ability and academic skills was impaired. The findings suggest relatively preserved recognition memory that also provides some support for verbal comprehension. This is the first report of relatively normal performance in a cognitive domain in CS. Further research is needed to better understand the mechanisms by which altered RAS-MAPK signaling affects neuronal plasticity and memory processes in the brain. PMID:23918324
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A Home for Toad: Using Storytelling To Teach Big6 Skills.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Jansen, Barbara
1998-01-01
Describes how to use storytelling in elementary education to teach the Big6 research process. Strategies for implementation are presented, including modifying a story, writing a story based on the curriculum connection, and using puppets. (LRW)
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The Cost of Disengagement: Examining the Real Story of Absenteeism in Two Michigan Counties
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Rencher, Charles L.
2016-01-01
This Capstone project intended to create a greater awareness and develop an understanding of the impact of attendance on academic performance. Schools are faced with the tasks of ensuring students attend school and keeping them engaged while they are at school. This project encourages the reader to look past school attendance as a mere student…
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Analysis of Narratives Produced by Four Children Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Soto, Gloria; Hartmann, Elizabeth
2006-01-01
The ability to narrate a story is fundamental to the development of overall communicative competence and involves the coordination of a variety of knowledge structures and linguistic abilities. In this study, the narrative discourse abilities of four children who use AAC are described in the context of five tasks designed to elicit a spectrum of…
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Social Studies in an Age of Reform: Symbolic and Substantive Change.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Mehaffy, George L.
1992-01-01
Contends recent efforts in social studies reform have been mostly rhetorical and have not changed day-to-day work of teachers. Argues changes in teaching and learning may be real reform story of 1980s and 1990s. Describes work of the National Council for the Social Studies Task Force on Teaching and Learning and predicts it will have significant…
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Theory of Mind and Mental State Discourse during Book Reading and Story-Telling Tasks
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Symons, Douglas K.; Peterson, Candida C.; Slaughter, Virginia; Roche, Jackie; Doyle, Emily
2005-01-01
This article presents three studies conducted in Canada and Australia that relate theory of mind (ToM) development to mental state discourse. In Study 1, mental state discourse was examined while parents and their 5-7-year-old children jointly read a storybook which had a surprise ending about the identity of the main character. Comments specific…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Thomas, Ruthann C.; Hasher, Lynn
2012-01-01
Three studies explored whether younger and older adults' free recall performance can benefit from prior exposure to distraction that becomes relevant in a memory task. Participants initially read stories that included distracting text. Later, they studied a list of words for free recall, with half of the list consisting of previously distracting…
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Dalla Barba, Gianfranco; Attali, Eve; La Corte, Valentina
2010-07-01
Normal aging is characterized by reduced performance on tasks of long-term memory. Older adults (OA) not only show reduced performance on tasks of recall and recognition memory, but also, compared to young adults (YA), are more vulnerable to memory distortions. In this study we describe the performance of a group of OA and a group of YA on the recall of three different types of story: a previously unknown story, a well-known fairy tale (Sleeping Beauty), and a modified well-known fairy tale (Little Red Riding Hood is not eaten by the wolf). The aim of our study was to test the hypothesis that in OA strongly represented, overlearned information interferes with episodic recall-that is, the retrieval of specific, unique past episodes. OA produced significantly more confabulations than YA and in particular in the recall of the modified fairy tale. Our findings indicate that the interference of strongly represented, overlearned information in episodic memory recall is implicated in the production of confabulations in OA. This effect is particularly prominent when the to-be remembered episodic information shows strong semantic similarities with preexisting, overlearned information.
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Making sense of it: intensive care patients' phenomenological accounts of story construction.
Stayt, Louise C; Seers, Kate; Tutton, Liz
2016-07-01
Patients entering intensive care encounter physical and psychological stress that may lead to psychological morbidity such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. It has been suggested that constructing a story may assist psychological recovery. However, this has been minimally investigated in intensive care patients. The aim of this article is to examine the process of story construction in people's phenomenological accounts of being a patient in the technological environment of intensive care. The study design was informed by Heideggerian phenomenology. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 patients who had been in intensive care for at least 4 days. Interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed and analysed utilizing Van Manen's framework for thematic analysis. Making sense of their experiences in an intensive care unit appeared to be fundamental to story construction. Themes that arose were 'why am I here?', 'filling in the gaps', 'sorting the real from the unreal' and 'searching for familiarity'. These themes describe how participants sought temporal and causal coherence in order to construct their integrated and understandable story. Families appeared to play a critical role in helping participants fill in the gaps, sorting the real from the unreal and their subsequent psychological recovery. The importance of early support from health care professionals to facilitate patients' story construction is highlighted. The study also emphasizes the role families play in supporting patients while they make sense of their experiences and the associated psychological recovery process. Further research to evaluate methods of facilitating story construction, such as nurse-led debriefing and patient diaries, is recommended. In addition, an investigation of families' perceptions of their role in assisting patients construct their story may facilitate the development of strategies by health care professionals to effectively support families in their role. © 2015 British Association of Critical Care Nurses.
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Wang, Xiaojuan; Yang, Jianfeng; Yang, Jie; Mencl, W Einar; Shu, Hua; Zevin, Jason David
2015-01-01
Differences in how writing systems represent language raise important questions about whether there could be a universal functional architecture for reading across languages. In order to study potential language differences in the neural networks that support reading skill, we collected fMRI data from readers of alphabetic (English) and morpho-syllabic (Chinese) writing systems during two reading tasks. In one, participants read short stories under conditions that approximate natural reading, and in the other, participants decided whether individual stimuli were real words or not. Prior work comparing these two writing systems has overwhelmingly used meta-linguistic tasks, generally supporting the conclusion that the reading system is organized differently for skilled readers of Chinese and English. We observed that language differences in the reading network were greatly dependent on task. In lexical decision, a pattern consistent with prior research was observed in which the Middle Frontal Gyrus (MFG) and right Fusiform Gyrus (rFFG) were more active for Chinese than for English, whereas the posterior temporal sulcus was more active for English than for Chinese. We found a very different pattern of language effects in a naturalistic reading paradigm, during which significant differences were only observed in visual regions not typically considered specific to the reading network, and the middle temporal gyrus, which is thought to be important for direct mapping of orthography to semantics. Indeed, in areas that are often discussed as supporting distinct cognitive or linguistic functions between the two languages, we observed interaction. Specifically, language differences were most pronounced in MFG and rFFG during the lexical decision task, whereas no language differences were observed in these areas during silent reading of text for comprehension.
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Emotionality in response to aircraft noise: A report of development work
NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)
Klaus, P. A.
1975-01-01
A literature search and pilot study conducted to investigate the topic of emotional response to aircraft noise are described. A Tell-A-Story Technique was developed for use in the pilot study which required respondents to make up stories for a series of aircraft-related and non-aircraft-related pictures. A content analysis of these stories was made. The major finding was that response patterns varied among three groups of respondents - those currently living near airports, those who had lived near airports in the past, and those who had never lived near airports. Negative emotional feelings toward aircraft were greatest among respondents who had lived near airports in the past but no longer did. A possible explanation offered for this finding was that people currently living near airports might adapt to the situation by denying some of their negative feelings, which they might feel more free to express after they had moved away from the situation. Other techniques used in the pilot study are also described, including group interviews and a word association task.
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Faux-Pas Test: A Proposal of a Standardized Short Version.
Fernández-Modamio, Mar; Arrieta-Rodríguez, Marta; Bengochea-Seco, Rosario; Santacoloma-Cabero, Iciar; Gómez de Tojeiro-Roce, Juan; García-Polavieja, Bárbara; González-Fraile, Eduardo; Martín-Carrasco, Manuel; Griffin, Kim; Gil-Sanz, David
2018-06-26
Previous research on theory of mind suggests that people with schizophrenia have difficulties with complex mentalization tasks that involve the integration of cognition and affective mental states. One of the tools most commonly used to assess theory of mind is the Faux-Pas Test. However, it presents two main methodological problems: 1) the lack of a standard scoring system; 2) the different versions are not comparable due to a lack of information on the stories used. These methodological problems make it difficult to draw conclusions about performance on this test by people with schizophrenia. The aim of this study was to develop a reduced version of the Faux-Pas test with adequate psychometric properties. The test was administered to control and clinical groups. Interrater and test-retest reliability were analyzed for each story in order to select the set of 10 stories included in the final reduced version. The shortened version showed good psychometric properties for controls and patients: test-retest reliability of 0.97 and 0.78, inter-rater reliability of 0.95 and 0.87 and Cronbach's alpha of 0.82 and 0.72.
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NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Ferreira, Louise Brandes Moura
This study was an application of Philosophy for Children pedagogy to science education. It was designed to answer the question, What roles do a science story (Harry Discovers Science), multi-sensorial activities designed to accompany the story, and classroom dialogue associated with the story---all modeled on the Philosophy for Children curriculum---play in the learning processes of a class of fifth graders with regard to the basic science process skills of classification, observation, and inference? To answer the question, I collected qualitative data as I carried out a participatory study in which I taught science to fifth graders at an international, bilingual private religious school in Brasilia, Brazil for a period of one semester. Twenty-one (n = 21) children participated in the study, 10 females and 11 males, who came from a predominantly middle and upper class social background. Data were collected through student interviews, student class reflection sheets, written learning assessments, audiotapes of all class sessions, including whole-class and small-class group discussions, and a videotape of one class session. Some of the key findings were that the story, activities and dialogue facilitated the children's learning in a number of ways. The story modeled the performance of classification, observation and inference skills for the children as well as reflection on the meaning of inference. The majority of the students identified with the fictional characters, particularly regarding traits such as cleverness and inquisitiveness, and with the learning context of the story. The multi-sensorial activities helped children learn observation and inference skills as well as dialogue. Dialogue also helped children self-correct and build upon each other's ideas. Some students developed theories about how ideal dialogue should work. In spite of the inherent limitations of qualitative and teacher research studies, as well as the limitations of this particular study, and despite the fact that there is a need for further research to confirm the transferability of findings, this study both supports and expands to the domain of basic science process skills the claim that Philosophy for Children helps students develop thinking skills.
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Critical care physician cognitive task analysis: an exploratory study
Fackler, James C; Watts, Charles; Grome, Anna; Miller, Thomas; Crandall, Beth; Pronovost, Peter
2009-01-01
Introduction For better or worse, the imposition of work-hour limitations on house-staff has imperiled continuity and/or improved decision-making. Regardless, the workflow of every physician team in every academic medical centre has been irrevocably altered. We explored the use of cognitive task analysis (CTA) techniques, most commonly used in other high-stress and time-sensitive environments, to analyse key cognitive activities in critical care medicine. The study objective was to assess the usefulness of CTA as an analytical tool in order that physician cognitive tasks may be understood and redistributed within the work-hour limited medical decision-making teams. Methods After approval from each Institutional Review Board, two intensive care units (ICUs) within major university teaching hospitals served as data collection sites for CTA observations and interviews of critical care providers. Results Five broad categories of cognitive activities were identified: pattern recognition; uncertainty management; strategic vs. tactical thinking; team coordination and maintenance of common ground; and creation and transfer of meaning through stories. Conclusions CTA within the framework of Naturalistic Decision Making is a useful tool to understand the critical care process of decision-making and communication. The separation of strategic and tactical thinking has implications for workflow redesign. Given the global push for work-hour limitations, such workflow redesign is occurring. Further work with CTA techniques will provide important insights toward rational, rather than random, workflow changes. PMID:19265517
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Critical care physician cognitive task analysis: an exploratory study.
Fackler, James C; Watts, Charles; Grome, Anna; Miller, Thomas; Crandall, Beth; Pronovost, Peter
2009-01-01
For better or worse, the imposition of work-hour limitations on house-staff has imperiled continuity and/or improved decision-making. Regardless, the workflow of every physician team in every academic medical centre has been irrevocably altered. We explored the use of cognitive task analysis (CTA) techniques, most commonly used in other high-stress and time-sensitive environments, to analyse key cognitive activities in critical care medicine. The study objective was to assess the usefulness of CTA as an analytical tool in order that physician cognitive tasks may be understood and redistributed within the work-hour limited medical decision-making teams. After approval from each Institutional Review Board, two intensive care units (ICUs) within major university teaching hospitals served as data collection sites for CTA observations and interviews of critical care providers. Five broad categories of cognitive activities were identified: pattern recognition; uncertainty management; strategic vs. tactical thinking; team coordination and maintenance of common ground; and creation and transfer of meaning through stories. CTA within the framework of Naturalistic Decision Making is a useful tool to understand the critical care process of decision-making and communication. The separation of strategic and tactical thinking has implications for workflow redesign. Given the global push for work-hour limitations, such workflow redesign is occurring. Further work with CTA techniques will provide important insights toward rational, rather than random, workflow changes.
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Realmuto, Sabrina; Zummo, Leila; Cerami, Chiara; Agrò, Luigi; Dodich, Alessandra; Canessa, Nicola; Zizzo, Andrea; Fierro, Brigida; Daniele, Ornella
2015-06-01
Despite an extensive literature on cognitive impairments in focal and generalized epilepsy, only a few number of studies specifically explored social cognition disorders in epilepsy syndromes. The aim of our study was to investigate social cognition abilities in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE). Thirty-nine patients (21 patients with TLE and 18 patients with IGE) and 21 matched healthy controls (HCs) were recruited. All subjects underwent a basic neuropsychological battery plus two experimental tasks evaluating emotion recognition from facial expression (Ekman-60-Faces test, Ek-60F) and mental state attribution (Story-based Empathy Task, SET). In particular, the latter is a newly developed task that assesses the ability to infer others' intentions (i.e., intention attribution - IA) and emotions (i.e., emotion attribution - EA) compared with a control condition of physical causality (i.e., causal inferences - CI). Compared with HCs, patients with TLE showed significantly lower performances on both social cognition tasks. In particular, all SET subconditions as well as the recognition of negative emotions were significantly impaired in patients with TLE vs. HCs. On the contrary, patients with IGE showed impairments on anger recognition only without any deficit at the SET task. Emotion recognition deficits occur in patients with epilepsy, possibly because of a global disruption of a pathway involving frontal, temporal, and limbic regions. Impairments of mental state attribution specifically characterize the neuropsychological profile of patients with TLE in the context of the in-depth temporal dysfunction typical of such patients. Impairments of socioemotional processing have to be considered as part of the neuropsychological assessment in both TLE and IGE in view of a correct management and for future therapeutic interventions. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Who Are We, But for the Stories We Tell: Family Stories and Healing
Kiser, Laurel J.; Baumgardner, Barbara; Dorado, Joyce
2010-01-01
Storytelling is a notable part of family life. Families share stories that illuminate and combine their separate experiences into a meaningful whole. Families narrate both their best and worst life experiences and in this way pass down a heritage of remembrances from one generation to the next. Clinicians working with families who have been impacted by trauma can use family storytelling to aid healing. This article reviews the functions of family storytelling and the skills used by family members in the act of storying to illustrate how therapists can facilitate families' use of their storytelling skills in the healing process. PMID:21197420
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Decreased susceptibility to false memories from misinformation in hormonal contraception users.
Petersen, Nicole; Patihis, Lawrence; Nielsen, Shawn E
2015-01-01
Sex hormones are increasingly implicated in memory formation. Recent literature has documented a relationship between hormones and emotional memory and sex differences, which are likely related to hormones, have long been demonstrated in a variety of mnemonic domains, including false memories. Hormonal contraception (HC), which alters sex hormones, has been associated with a bias towards gist memory and away from detailed memory in women who use it during an emotional memory task. Here, we investigated whether HC was associated with changes in susceptibility to false memories, which may be related to the formation of gist memories. We tested false memory susceptibility using two well-validated false memory paradigms: the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task, and a story-based misinformation task. We found that hormonal contraceptive users were less susceptible to false memories compared to non-users in the misinformation task, and no differences were seen between groups on the DRM task. We hypothesise that the differences in false memories from the misinformation task may be related to hormonal contraceptive users' memory bias away from details, towards gist memory.
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Surface Information Loss in Comprehension
Gernsbacher, Morton Ann
2014-01-01
Shortly after a sentence has been comprehended, information about its exact surface form (e.g., its word order) becomes less available. The present research demonstrated this phenomenon during the comprehension of nonverbal stimuli (picture stories). In Experiment 1, significantly more surface (left/right orientation) information was lost after comprehending several picture stories than just one; in Experiment 2, more was lost after comprehending an entire picture story than half of one. In Experiment 3, subjects segmented the picture stories into their constituents; in Experiment 4, significantly more surface information was lost after crossing these constituents’ boundaries than before. The present research also investigated why surface information is lost. Four explanations were considered: Surface information loss is the result of performing grammatical transformations (the linguistic hypothesis), exceeding short-term memory limitations (the memory limitations hypothesis), integrating information into gist (the integration hypothesis), shifting from building one substructure to initiating another (the processing shift hypothesis). The linguistic and memory limitations hypotheses were considered inadequate; the integration and the processing shift hypotheses were tested in the last set of experiments. In Experiment 5 (using nonverbal stimuli), the predictions made by the processing shift hypothesis were confirmed; in Experiment 6 (using verbal stimuli), these results were replicated. Other implications of the processing shift hypothesis concerning surface information loss are discussed. PMID:25308975
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Love stories can be unpredictable: Jules et Jim in the vortex of life.
Dercole, Fabio; Rinaldi, Sergio
2014-06-01
Love stories are dynamic processes that begin, develop, and often stay for a relatively long time in a stationary or fluctuating regime, before possibly fading. Although they are, undoubtedly, the most important dynamic process in our life, they have only recently been cast in the formal frame of dynamical systems theory. In particular, why it is so difficult to predict the evolution of sentimental relationships continues to be largely unexplained. A common reason for this is that love stories reflect the turbulence of the surrounding social environment. But we can also imagine that the interplay of the characters involved contributes to make the story unpredictable-that is, chaotic. In other words, we conjecture that sentimental chaos can have a relevant endogenous origin. To support this intriguing conjecture, we mimic a real and well-documented love story with a mathematical model in which the environment is kept constant, and show that the model is chaotic. The case we analyze is the triangle described in Jules et Jim, an autobiographic novel by Henri-Pierre Roché that became famous worldwide after the success of the homonymous film directed by François Truffaut.
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Cross-Cultural Invariance in Story Recall.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Mandler, Jean M.; And Others
1980-01-01
Compares data on recall of stories by Liberian nonschooled children, nonliterate adults, nonschooled literate adults and schooled literate adults to similar data on American children and adults. Results indicate a universality of certain kinds of schematic organization and their control of memorial processes. (CM)
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Goodall, Catherine E; Reed, Phillip
2013-01-01
An experiment was conducted from the perspective of the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM) investigating readers' responses to print news stories about the issue of bed bugs. Stories containing reference to (a) the threat of bed bugs and (b) efficacy of the solution were manipulated to vary the level of certainty with which the variables were discussed. Results suggest that stories referencing uncertainty regarding presence of the bed-bug threat may be more likely to motivate intention to seek information than stories referencing certainty of the threat. Results also suggest that stories referencing uncertainty regarding feasibility/effectiveness of proposed solutions may be more likely to motivate intention to avoid information than stories referencing certainty of proposed solutions. Given that information avoidance is one of various types of maladaptive responses to fear appeal messages (according to EPPM), results suggest that the presence of uncertainty when discussing solutions to threats in news stories might result in problematic avoidance responses that discourage people from taking protective action.
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Farar, Johannes; Schüssler, Gerhard
2011-01-01
Do some life story patterns exist, which are associated with depression? Can some life story factors be identified, which influence or determine a special kind of personality, predisposing to depression? Retrospective, cross sectional study with nonexperimental character, using a number of 60 nonmelancholic depressed patients. First, they were asked to give an interview on their life story. Then, they were asked to fill in questionnaires about personality, parental style of raising, clinical symptoms and personality disorders. Significant correlations could be found between parental style of raising, a family history affected by depression, a dysfunctional household, the family composition, negative school experience and all investigated styles of personality. Further, clusters of personality, clusters of parental style of raising and clusters of specific life story factors could be detected. Results show a strong relation between life story factors and personality styles, predisposing to depression and emphasize the importance of considering personality, when exploring special life story factors. Vice versa, actual personality styles can point to different patterns of life story and thus, show the relevance for the diagnostic and therapeutic process.
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A theoretical framework for the incorporation of history in science education
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Klassen, James Stephen
This thesis formulates a theoretical framework for the incorporation of history of science in science teaching, which, it is argued, is essential to laying a stable foundation for instructional design and future empirical studies. It is assumed that the historical approach to teaching science no longer needs defending and that contextual methods are a pedagogically sound approach to learning. Various cognitive and learning theories suggest that there are five distinct contexts that are important in engaging learners: the theoretical, practical, social, historical, and affective. On the basis of these five contexts, a model for teaching and learning is constructed, in which the story assumes a major role in engaging the learner affectively. This model is named the Story-Driven Contextual Approach (SDCA). The SDCA is introduced to students by means of a narrative, encouraging students to become actively engaged with the five contexts. In the SDCA, students are seen as novice researchers and the teacher as a research director. The place and nature of the historical science story in science education is a relatively undeveloped area in the literature. This thesis argues that the development of the events in a story proceed in the same fashion as the steps in learning a concept. A structural model of a story consisting of a three-stage temporal sequence, which includes a causative element, is presented and developed. It is argued that the conceptual change process, from a temporal perspective, can also be viewed as a three-stage sequence similar to the story. The story can, in this light, be thought of as the re-enactment of a particular type of learning process. This knowledge about the nature of stories can serve as a guiding principle in the designing and writing of effective stories based on the history of science, which are to be incorporated with the SDCA. The SDCA was tested in a university physics class using a constructed story which portrays the heroic personal and scientific efforts of the nineteenth century physicist Lord Kelvin in laying the first successful trans-Atlantic cable. Students designed and undertook various practical and theoretical exercises in the SDCA and observations on its implementation are reported.
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The attention-getting capacity of whines and child-directed speech.
Chang, Rosemarie Sokol; Thompson, Nicholas S
2010-06-03
The current study tested the ability of whines and child-directed speech to attract the attention of listeners involved in a story repetition task. Twenty non-parents and 17 parents were presented with two dull stories, each playing to a separate ear, and asked to repeat one of the stories verbatim. The story that participants were instructed to ignore was interrupted occasionally with the reader whining and using child-directed speech. While repeating the passage, participants were monitored for Galvanic skin response, heart rate, and blood pressure. Based on 4 measures, participants tuned in more to whining, and to a lesser extent child-directed speech, than neutral speech segments that served as a control. Participants, regardless of gender or parental status, made more mistakes when presented with the whine or child-directed speech, they recalled hearing those vocalizations, they recognized more words from the whining segment than the neutral control segment, and they exhibited higher Galvanic skin response during the presence of whines and child- directed speech than neutral speech segments. Whines and child-directed speech appear to be integral members of a suite of vocalizations designed to get the attention of attachment partners by playing to an auditory sensitivity among humans. Whines in particular may serve the function of eliciting care at a time when caregivers switch from primarily mothers to greater care from other caregivers.
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The S&T Lecture: An Introduction to the 9th Congress of WSRM.
Hallock, Geoffrey G
2018-05-03
Just what is the S&T lecture? In the beginning it appeared to be a dubious distinction, another task thrust upon me but different in that I had absolutely no idea what was wanted or would be appropriate. At the least, it seemed reasonable to recite a simple introductory story for what would be an extraordinary conclave. First, an appreciation was due to our dedicated leaders of World Society of Reconstructive Microsurgery (WSRM), who this year (2017) have put together the most extravagant meeting ever, intended to include not just the glamorous but the entire scope of rudimentary reconstructive microsurgery. We know we must acquire all this knowledge to succeed today and tomorrow, but also need not to overlook the struggles and sacrifices our predecessors had to overcome. Too often the past is forgotten, only to then inefficiently be repeated. Today then, this will be a short story, a story of our past that must never be cast aside. The WSRM here today is a great international forum where we can then mingle with all of our colleagues to help dictate the present, but also define the future role of all specialities here where the ultimate goal is to help those most in need. This S&T lecture will just be a history story, subject to your interpretation. Enjoy! Thieme Medical Publishers 333 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001, USA.
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Artists concept of Apollo 15 crewmen performing deployment of LRV
1971-06-26
S71-38189 (26 June 1971) --- An artist's concept showing the final steps of readying the Apollo 15 Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) or Rover 1 for mobility on the lunar surface. Performing the last few LRV deployment tasks here are, left to right, astronauts James B. Irwin, lunar module pilot, and David R. Scott, commander. More specifically the tasks depicted here include the setting up of the seats and the total releasing of the LRV from the LM. (This is the fourth in a series of four Grumman Aerospace Corporation artist's concepts telling the lunar surface LRV deployment story for Apollo 15).
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Fabricio, Aline Teixeira; Yassuda, Mônica Sanches
2011-01-01
Memory plays a fundamental role in the identity of people and in human life, as it enables us to interpret our surroundings and make decisions. It is known that the aging process can be accompanied by cognitive decline in some memory sub systems. However, the use of memory strategies can help encoding and retrieval of new information. The aim of this study was to identify and compare, using objective and subjective measures, which recall strategies are used spontaneously by young and older adults. Twenty-six first-year college students, and thirty-three seniors enrolled at the Third Age University of the same campus, completed a visual memory test including 18 black and white pictures, memorized a short story, and completed an open question about memory strategies, a memory check list to indicate strategies used, and a memory self-efficacy scale. The Bousfield categorization measure was also calculated from the recall protocol. Young adults demonstrated better performance than the older adults on the memory tasks, and were also more confident. Both groups reported using similar strategies. Young and older adults seem to tackle memory tasks in similar ways but young adults outperform seniors.
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Resting state EEG correlates of memory consolidation.
Brokaw, Kate; Tishler, Ward; Manceor, Stephanie; Hamilton, Kelly; Gaulden, Andrew; Parr, Elaine; Wamsley, Erin J
2016-04-01
Numerous studies demonstrate that post-training sleep benefits human memory. At the same time, emerging data suggest that other resting states may similarly facilitate consolidation. In order to identify the conditions under which non-sleep resting states benefit memory, we conducted an EEG (electroencephalographic) study of verbal memory retention across 15min of eyes-closed rest. Participants (n=26) listened to a short story and then either rested with their eyes closed, or else completed a distractor task for 15min. A delayed recall test was administered immediately following the rest period. We found, first, that quiet rest enhanced memory for the short story. Improved memory was associated with a particular EEG signature of increased slow oscillatory activity (<1Hz), in concert with reduced alpha (8-12Hz) activity. Mindwandering during the retention interval was also associated with improved memory. These observations suggest that a short period of quiet rest can facilitate memory, and that this may occur via an active process of consolidation supported by slow oscillatory EEG activity and characterized by decreased attention to the external environment. Slow oscillatory EEG rhythms are proposed to facilitate memory consolidation during sleep by promoting hippocampal-cortical communication. Our findings suggest that EEG slow oscillations could play a significant role in memory consolidation during other resting states as well. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Talking to the Beat: Six-Year-Olds' Use of Stroke-Defined Non-Referential Gestures
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Mathew, Mili; Yuen, Ivan; Demuth, Katherine
2018-01-01
Children are known to use different types of referential gestures (e.g., deictic, iconic) from a very young age. In contrast, their use of non-referential gestures is not well established. This study investigated the use of "stroke-defined non-referential" 'beat' gestures in a story-retelling and an exposition task by twelve 6-year-olds,…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Loth, Eva; Happe, Francesca; Gomez, Juan Carlos
2010-01-01
This study used a novel rating task to investigate whether high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties distinguishing essential from variable aspects of familiar events. Participants read stories about everyday events and judged how often central, variable, and inappropriate event-components normally occur in…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Doan, Stacey N.; Wang, Qi
2010-01-01
This study examined in a cross-cultural context mothers' discussions of mental states and external behaviors in a story-telling task with their 3-year-old children and the relations of such discussions to children's emotion situation knowledge (ESK). The participants were 71 European American and 60 Chinese immigrant mother-child pairs in the…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Cederlund, Rio; Ost, Lars-Goran
2011-01-01
The present study investigated interpretation bias and reduced evidence for danger (RED) bias in 49 children with social phobia and 49 nonsocially anxious children between the ages of 8 and 14 years, using an ambiguous stories task. A posttreatment and follow-up measure was included for 26 of the socially phobic children to examine whether there…
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To Enter the Castle of Fear: Engendering Children's Story Writing from Home to School at KS2
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Millard, Elaine
2005-01-01
This paper describes a small-scale writing project in which a class of KS 2 primary pupils were invited to import their own narrative interests into a task designed by their teacher and the researcher within the constraints of the National Literacy Strategy. By employing an adventure genre, based on problem and puzzle solving, pupils were…
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How Children with Autism Reason about Other's Intentions: False-Belief and Counterfactual Inferences
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Rasga, Célia; Quelhas, Ana Cristina; Byrne, Ruth M. J.
2017-01-01
We examine false belief and counterfactual reasoning in children with autism with a new change-of-intentions task. Children listened to stories, for example, Anne is picking up toys and John hears her say she wants to find her ball. John goes away and the reason for Anne's action changes--Anne's mother tells her to tidy her bedroom. We asked,…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Lecce, Serena; Zocchi, Silvia; Pagnin, Adriano; Palladino, Paola; Taumoepeau, Mele
2010-01-01
The relation between children's mental state knowledge and metaknowledge about reading was examined in 2 studies. In Study 1, 196 children (mean age = 9 years) were tested for verbal ability (VA), metaknowledge about reading, and mental state words in a story task. In Study 2, the results of Study 1 were extended by using a cross-lagged design and…
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2007-12-14
13 It was not until 2 July 1944, that General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, the Supreme Allied Commander, Mediterranean Theater, was ordered to launch...John. I Remember, Stories of a Combat Infantrymen in World War II. Livermore: Camino Press, 1993. Summer, Ian . The French Army 1939-45 (1). Men-at
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Mind Mirror Projects: A Tool for Integrating Critical Thinking into the English Language Classroom
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Tully, Matthew M.
2009-01-01
Identifying a point of view can be a complex task in any language. By analyzing what characters say, think, and do throughout a story, readers can observe how points of view tend to change over time. Easier said than done, this ability to climb inside the mind of a character can help students as they analyze personalities found in literature,…
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From a Bird's Eye View: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Migration
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Benson, Juliann
2007-01-01
Inspiring students to learn about birds can be a daunting task--students see birds just about every day and often don't think twice about them. The activity described here is designed to excite students to "become" birds. Students are asked to create a model and tell the life story of a bird by mapping its migration pattern. (Contains 6 figures, 6…
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Gains to L2 Listeners from Reading while Listening vs. Listening Only in Comprehending Short Stories
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Chang, Anna C.-S.
2009-01-01
This study builds on the concept that aural-written verification helps L2 learners develop auditory discrimination skills, refine word recognition and gain awareness of form-meaning relationships, by comparing two modes of aural input: reading while listening (R/L) vs. listening only (L/O). Two test tasks (sequencing and gap filling) of 95 items,…
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Building Interagency Partnerships Curriculum: Instructor’s Guide
2016-03-01
includes instructor-led components, documentary -style footage of subject matter experts, and true stories from the field to elicit reflection and discussion...context. The documentary -style films included in the curriculum are based on an analysis of interviews with military personnel, U.S. government... management tasks while collaborating with interagency partners. 29 Lesson 1: Boundary-Spanning OBJECTIVES The student will be: • Introduced to the
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hackett, Bessie, Comp.
This document addresses correctional education, its effect on recidivism, and the cost of crime in the state of Illinois. COmmendations about current efforts, as well as recommendations for fiscal year 1991 are listed. Commendations are made: (1) for the work of the task force on released inmates; (2) to the competent and committed correctional…
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Kawakami, Naoaki; Yoshida, Fujio
2015-05-01
Perceiving a story behind successive movements plays an important role in our lives. From a general perspective, such higher mental activity would seem to depend on conscious processes. Using a subliminal priming paradigm, we demonstrated that such story perception occurs without conscious awareness. In the experiments, participants were subliminally presented with sequential pictures that represented a story in which one geometrical figure was chased by the other figure, and in which one fictitious character defeated the other character in a tug-of-war. Although the participants could not report having seen the pictures, their automatic mental associations (i.e., associations that are activated unintentionally, difficult to control, and not necessarily endorsed at a conscious level) were shifted to line up with the story. The results suggest that story perception operates outside of conscious awareness. Implications for research on the unconscious were also briefly discussed. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Mira, William A; Schwanenflugel, Paula J
2013-04-01
The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of oral reading expressiveness on the comprehension of storybooks by 4- and 5-year-old prekindergarten children. The possible impact of prosody on listening comprehension was explored. Ninety-two prekindergarten children (M age = 57.26 months, SD = 3.89 months) listened to an expressive or inexpressive recording of 1 of 2 similar stories. Story comprehension was tested using assessments of both free recall and cued recall. Children showed statistically significantly better cued recall for the expressive readings of stories compared to the inexpressive readings of stories. This effect generalized across stories and when story length was controlled across both expressive and inexpressive versions. The effect of expressiveness on children's free recall was not significant. Highly expressive readings resulted in better comprehension of storybooks by prekindergarten children. Further, because recordings were used, this effect might be attributed to the facilitation of language processing rather than to enhanced social interaction between the reader and the child.
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Active listening to cancer patients' stories.
ten Kroode, H F
1998-08-01
Approximately two thirds of all Dutch cancer patients have severe emotional problems; shortly after their change from the treatment regime into the regime of medical controls. Half of them even need professional support. It is, therefore, important that a professional listens with empathy to the patient's version of the illness story. Story telling helps to overcome the existential crisis of being a cancer patient; it is an essential step in the revalidation process. Themes and open questions which structure the communication are suggested in this article.
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Life story resources in dementia care: a review.
Kindell, Jacqueline; Burrow, Simon; Wilkinson, Ray; Keady, John David
2014-01-01
Life story work has a relatively long tradition in the caring sciences and is recognised as an important component of dementia care and practice. However, to date, there has not been a review of accessible life story resources. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Following a systematic approach to identification and inclusion, 11 life story resources were reviewed to ascertain areas of commonality and divergence between the materials. The authors were able to group the analysis under eight areas and at the end of this process, it was uncertain if life story work is a formal staff intervention or an informal activity that people with dementia and their families could engage in. Resources also varied in terms of whether the life story information was organised in a chronological way, or with topics of interest/discussion or with a combination of both. Life story evaluation and its impact on the life of the person with dementia is in need of development. Across the resources the authors identified four reasons to do life story work which the authors have named as: emotional connections; interactional connections; building new connections and practical care connections. There was limited guidance aimed at helping people with dementia to develop and compile their own life story. This paper provides new insights into the usefulness, future directions and content of life story resources in dementia care. It will be of interest to those in health and social care as well as people living with dementia.
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How Analysts Cognitively “Connect the Dots”
DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)
Bradel, Lauren; Self, Jessica S.; Endert, Alexander
2013-06-04
As analysts attempt to make sense of a collection of documents, such as intelligence analysis reports, they may wish to “connect the dots” between pieces of information that may initially seem unrelated. This process of synthesizing information between information requires users to make connections between pairs of documents, creating a conceptual story. We conducted a user study to analyze the process by which users connect pairs of documents and how they spatially arrange information. Users created conceptual stories that connected the dots using organizational strategies that ranged in complexity. We propose taxonomies for cognitive connections and physical structures used whenmore » trying to “connect the dots” between two documents. We compared the user-created stories with a data-mining algorithm that constructs chains of documents using co-occurrence metrics. Using the insight gained into the storytelling process, we offer design considerations for the existing data mining algorithm and corresponding tools to combine the power of data mining and the complex cognitive processing of analysts.« less
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Fact vs fiction--how paratextual information shapes our reading processes.
Altmann, Ulrike; Bohrn, Isabel C; Lubrich, Oliver; Menninghaus, Winfried; Jacobs, Arthur M
2014-01-01
Our life is full of stories: some of them depict real-life events and were reported, e.g. in the daily news or in autobiographies, whereas other stories, as often presented to us in movies and novels, are fictional. However, we have only little insights in the neurocognitive processes underlying the reading of factual as compared to fictional contents. We investigated the neurocognitive effects of reading short narratives, labeled to be either factual or fictional. Reading in a factual mode engaged an activation pattern suggesting an action-based reconstruction of the events depicted in a story. This process seems to be past-oriented and leads to shorter reaction times at the behavioral level. In contrast, the brain activation patterns corresponding to reading fiction seem to reflect a constructive simulation of what might have happened. This is in line with studies on imagination of possible past or future events.
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LeBron, Alana M; Schulz, Amy J; Bernal, Cristina; Gamboa, Cindy; Wright, Conja; Sand, Sharon; Valerio, Melissa; Caver, Deanna
2014-01-01
Contextually and culturally congruent interventions are urgently needed to reduce racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic inequities in physical activity and cardiovascular disease. To examine a community-based participatory research (CBPR) process that incorporated storytelling into a physical activity intervention, and consider implications for reducing health inequities. We used a CBPR process to incorporate storytelling in an existing walking group intervention. Stories conveyed social support and problem-solving intervention themes designed to maintain increases in physical activity over time, and were adapted to the walking group context, group dynamics, challenges, and traditions. After describing of the CBPR process used to adapt stories to walking group sites, we discuss challenges and lessons learned regarding the adaptation and implementation of stories to convey key intervention themes. A CBPR approach to incorporating storytelling to convey intervention themes offers an innovative and flexible strategy to promote health toward the elimination of health inequities.
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Inference or Enaction? The Impact of Genre on the Narrative Processing of Other Minds
Carney, James; Wlodarski, Rafael; Dunbar, Robin
2014-01-01
Do narratives shape how humans process other minds or do they presuppose an existing theory of mind? This study experimentally investigated this problem by assessing subject responses to systematic alterations in the genre, levels of intentionality, and linguistic complexity of narratives. It showed that the interaction of genre and intentionality level are crucial in determining how narratives are cognitively processed. Specifically, genres that deployed evolutionarily familiar scenarios (relationship stories) were rated as being higher in quality when levels of intentionality were increased; conversely, stories that lacked evolutionary familiarity (espionage stories) were rated as being lower in quality with increases in intentionality level. Overall, the study showed that narrative is not solely either the origin or the product of our intuitions about other minds; instead, different genres will have different—even opposite—effects on how we understand the mind states of others. PMID:25470279
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Inference or enaction? The impact of genre on the narrative processing of other minds.
Carney, James; Wlodarski, Rafael; Dunbar, Robin
2014-01-01
Do narratives shape how humans process other minds or do they presuppose an existing theory of mind? This study experimentally investigated this problem by assessing subject responses to systematic alterations in the genre, levels of intentionality, and linguistic complexity of narratives. It showed that the interaction of genre and intentionality level are crucial in determining how narratives are cognitively processed. Specifically, genres that deployed evolutionarily familiar scenarios (relationship stories) were rated as being higher in quality when levels of intentionality were increased; conversely, stories that lacked evolutionary familiarity (espionage stories) were rated as being lower in quality with increases in intentionality level. Overall, the study showed that narrative is not solely either the origin or the product of our intuitions about other minds; instead, different genres will have different-even opposite-effects on how we understand the mind states of others.
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Fact vs fiction—how paratextual information shapes our reading processes
Altmann, Ulrike; Bohrn, Isabel C.; Lubrich, Oliver; Menninghaus, Winfried; Jacobs, Arthur M.
2014-01-01
Our life is full of stories: some of them depict real-life events and were reported, e.g. in the daily news or in autobiographies, whereas other stories, as often presented to us in movies and novels, are fictional. However, we have only little insights in the neurocognitive processes underlying the reading of factual as compared to fictional contents. We investigated the neurocognitive effects of reading short narratives, labeled to be either factual or fictional. Reading in a factual mode engaged an activation pattern suggesting an action-based reconstruction of the events depicted in a story. This process seems to be past-oriented and leads to shorter reaction times at the behavioral level. In contrast, the brain activation patterns corresponding to reading fiction seem to reflect a constructive simulation of what might have happened. This is in line with studies on imagination of possible past or future events. PMID:22956671
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Frontal brain activation in young children during picture book reading with their mothers
Ohgi, Shohei; Loo, Kek Khee; Mizuike, Chihiro
2010-01-01
Aim This study was to measure changes in frontal brain activation in young children during picture book reading with their mothers. Methods The cross-sectional sample consisted of 15 young Japanese children (8 girls and 7 boys, mean age 23.1±3.4). Two experimental tasks were presented as follows: Task 1 (picture book reading with their mothers); Task 2 (viewing of book-on-video). Duration of task stimulus was 180 sec and the 60 sec interval was filled. Brain activation was measured using an optical topography system. Results Significant increases in oxy-Hb were observed in both right and left frontal areas in response to Task 1 compared to Task 2. There were significant correlations between child’s brain activity and mothers’ and children’s verbal – nonverbal behaviors. Conclusion There was greater frontal lobe activation in children when they were engaged in a picture book reading task with their mothers, as opposed to passive viewing of a videotape in which the story was read to them. Social and verbal engagement of the mother in reading picture books with her young child may mediate frontal brain activity in the child. PMID:19849672
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Experiencing Violence and Enacting Resilience: The Case Story of a Transgender Youth.
DiFulvio, Gloria T
2015-11-01
Research about victimization among sexual minority youth has focused on documenting the prevalence and consequences of such experiences. Lacking in the literature is an in-depth exploration of the social context of both risk and resilience in the face of violence. This is especially true for transgender youth who are largely absent from the dominant discourse. This case story provides an example of how one transgender youth interpreted and adaptively responded to the discrimination and prejudice she encountered. Katie's story illustrates the process of resilience. Despite the adversity she has faced, she shares stories of pride and strength in a culture that considers her as "other." © The Author(s) 2014.
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hall, Kristen
1988-01-01
Describes the dramatization of Katherine Anne Porter's story,"The Fig Tree's Lessons." Discusses the process by which this story was made accessible to an audience of 8- to 12-year-old children. Notes that this program attempts to avoid the simplification of the profound human experience of dealing with death. (KO)
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The Story of a Volunteer Librarian in South Africa.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Fryling, Margo J.
2003-01-01
Describes experiences of a librarian who participated in the World Library Partnership to volunteer in a South African elementary school library during a summer. Discusses classroom teaching techniques; library technical processes; training library staff and teachers; student workers; story times; library instruction; and library policy. (LRW)
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Essley, Roger
2005-01-01
Essley was a "different learner," and now he works in schools showing teachers how visual/verbal tools can help all students, including their "different learners," succeed. One valuable tool is storyboarding, a process by which students build a story through visual stages--drafts, conferences, revisions--before writing even begins. Essley shares…
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INSIGHTS FROM THE FRONT LINES: A COLLECTION OF STORIES OF HTA IMPACT FROM INAHTA MEMBER AGENCIES.
Schuller, Tara; Söderholm Werkö, Sophie
2017-01-01
This mini-theme contains six stories of health technology assessment (HTA) impact from member agencies of The International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment (INAHTA), which were originally shared at the 2015 and 2016 INAHTA Congresses. The INAHTA impact story sharing is an innovative network activity where member agency representatives share experiences of HTA impact in a loosely structured story format. Through this process, members gain insights from other agencies on new ways of thinking about and approaching HTA impact assessment. A guide is provided to members to prepare their story, and the best story receives the David Hailey Award for Best Impact Story. This mini-theme contains stories of HTA impact from six member agencies in different parts of the world: the Health Assessment Division of the Ministry of Public Health (Uruguay), the Institute of Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (Germany), the Health Information and Quality Authority (Ireland), the Finnish Office for Health Technology Assessment (Finland), the Australian Safety and Efficacy Register of New Interventional Procedures-Surgical (Australia), and the Institut national d'excellence en santé et en services sociaux (Canada). Across the papers, common themes emerge about the importance of appropriate engagement of stakeholders and the broadening scope of HTA beyond reimbursement decision making.
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Holistic nurses' stories of healing of another.
Enzman Hines, Mary; Wardell, Diane Wind; Engebretson, Joan; Zahourek, Rothlyn; Smith, Marlaine C
2015-03-01
The purpose of this study was to uncover the essence and meaning of healing through narrative accounts of holistic nurses, using a qualitative, descriptive design integrating narrative and story inquiry. Twenty-five stories were collected. Seven stories revealed personal healing and have been published in a prior article. Eighteen stories, the focus of this analysis, revealed healing of another. A hybrid method blending narrative and story guided the overall process for the study. Nine themes emerged describing healing of another within three story segments: The Call to Healing, The Experience of Healing, and Insights. The theme within The Call to the Healing Encounter was Drawn by Compassion to the Vulnerability and/or Suffering of Another. Five themes describe the Experience of Healing: Connection: Cocreating Relationships; Taking Risks and Dealing With Skeptical Colleagues; Use of Modalities and Actions as Tools in Developing Self as an Instrument of Healing; Profound, Ineffable Events; and Using Metaphor and Rituals to Describe Healing. Three themes describe Insights: Mutual Transformation, Change, and Reciprocity; Gratitude for the Healing Encounter; and Leaving a Legacy. The metastory, a reconstructed story created by the researchers, was the final phase of research synthesizing and demonstrating themes of healing of another. Results were compared to existing healing literature. © The Author(s) 2014.
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Nataniel, NAFTA, and Public Health at the U.S.-Mexico Border.
Olson, Tom; Tapia, Sergio
2009-01-01
Advocating overall improvements in health for individuals and communities is a daunting but important task for nurses in particular, and for health care professionals in general. This is particularly true when focusing on the population along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, a unique region in which distinct cultures, economies, and political systems meet. The purpose of this paper is to confront the assumption that trade and economic expansion automatically translate into improved public health, and to explore policy implications of the public health situation at the border. It uses a meta-narrative, an overarching story that draws on and illustrates collective stories from 300 participants in a study of mental health disparities, to argue for a more nuanced and complex understanding of health among the largely Hispanic population in this region.
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Measuring Theory of Mind in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Brewer, Neil; Young, Robyn L; Barnett, Emily
2017-07-01
Deficits in Theory of Mind (ToM)-the ability to interpret others' beliefs, intentions and emotions-undermine the ability of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to interact in socially normative ways. This study provides psychometric data for the Adult-Theory of Mind (A-ToM) measure using video-scenarios based in part on Happé's (Instructions for theory of mind story task, 1999) Strange Stories test. The final items discriminated IQ-matched adults with ASD from controls on the social but not the physical items. Additional validity data included a two-component principal components solution, correlations with existing ToM scales, and the absence of correlations with self-report measures of empathy and social anxiety (not requiring inferences about the intent of others). The expected group differences in ToM were accompanied by marked variability in the ASD sample.
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Lera-Miguel, Sara; Rosa, Mireia; Puig, Olga; Kaland, Nils; Lázaro, Luisa; Castro-Formieles, Josefina; Calvo, Rosa
2016-01-01
Most individuals with autism spectrum disorders often fail in tasks of theory of mind (ToM). However, those with normal intellectual functioning known as high functioning ASD (HF-ASD) sometimes succeed in mentalizing inferences. Some tools have been developed to more accurately test their ToM abilities. The aims of this study were to examine the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of Stories of Everyday Life Test (SEL) in a sample of 29 children and adolescents with HF-ASD and 25 typically developing controls and to compare their performance. The Spanish-SEL demonstrated good internal consistency, strong convergence with clinical severity and another ToM test, and adequate discriminant validity from intellectual capability and age, identifying the condition of 70 % of participants.
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From Madeira to the Sandwich Islands: The Story of a Portuguese Family in Hawaii.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Gouveia, Anna Martins; Araujo, Margaret F.
In this picture story, a woman describes her family's migration from the Portuguese island of Madeira to Hawaii and the process of acculturation that she and her family went througn while retaining aspects of their cultural background. Many photographs are included. (EB)
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"Aren't We Going to Write Today?": Using Parody in Grade Three.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Stange, Terrence V.; Wyant, Susan L.
1999-01-01
Relates how parody is useful with third-grade children. Shows how children composed personal and meaningful stories based on selected literature. Compares parody and other writing strategies. Defines the parody process, including listening to literature stories, examining picture books, peer editing, and learning language. Includes comments from…
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Classroom Success Stories: Exposing Students to Time Bonding.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Papaleo, Ralph J.
1996-01-01
Recommends using time bonding (finding a role model and researching the process and story behind that individual's accomplishments) as a means to interest students in history. Outlines the instructions covering the objectives of the writing assignments. Students researched a variety of biographies including Jackie Robinson and Lyndon Johnson. (MJP)
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Just a Good Story? Shaping Organizational Learning through Storytelling
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Whitener, J. Kori
2007-01-01
Organizational learning is a complex phenomenon, the collective nature of which makes it difficult to study and examine. Organizational stories are cultural forms that facilitate the sensemaking processes and capabilities of the individuals and teams that form the collective organization. This paper utilizes literature to suggest possible impacts…
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Sound Stories for General Music
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Cardany, Audrey Berger
2013-01-01
Language and music literacy share a similar process of understanding that progresses from sensory experience to symbolic representation. The author identifies Bruner’s modes of understanding as they relate to using narrative in the music classroom to enhance music reading at iconic and symbolic levels. Two sound stories are included for…
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Using Storytelling as a Job-Search Strategy
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Smart, Karl L.; DiMaria, Jerry
2018-01-01
This article demonstrates and reinforces the role that well-told stories play in the success of the job-search process. Building on narrative theory, impression management, and an increased use of behavioral-based questions in interviews, well-crafted stories about work and educational experiences demonstrate skills applicants possess and convey…
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Digital Story Creation: Its Impact towards Academic Performance
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Ong, Charito G.
2017-01-01
When students are engaged in the process of creating a digital story, they synthesize a variety of literacy skills for the authentic product: researching, writing, organizing, presenting, interviewing, problem-solving, assessing, as well as employing interpersonal and technology skills (Baggett, 2007). With all these skills to be developed among…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Danzak, Robin L.
2011-01-01
Based on a framework of identity-as-narrative and multiliteracies, this article describes "Graphic Journeys," a multimedia literacy project in which English learners (ELs) in middle school created graphic stories that expressed their families' immigration experiences. The process involved reading graphic novels, journaling, interviewing, and…
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[Mentalization and theory of mind].
Wyl, Agnes
2014-01-01
Both concepts, mentalization and the theory of mind, describe metacognitive processes. Mentalization mainly concerns the reflection of affective mental states. In contrast, theory of mind focuses on epistemic states such as beliefs, intentions and persuasions. Gender differences have proved to be relevant for both, the development of mentalization and the theory of mind. However, there are few studies and findings are inconsistent. In an own study, we investigated the relationship between early competences in metacognition (tested in a false-belief-task second order) and narrative skills of kindergarten children. Results show that children who had successfully passed the theory of mind test tended to face conflicts more directly in the stories. In consequence, these children showed less narrative avoidance. However, differences were only found in girls and not in boys. The precise understanding of developmental differences in metacognition between girls and boys may be an important aspect with regards to improving mentalization based therapy of children.
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2010-01-01
Background Stories may be an effective tool to communicate with and influence patients because of their ability to engage the reader. The objective of this paper is to describe the development of a story-based intervention for delivery of health evidence to parents of children with croup for use in a randomized controlled trial. Methods A creative writer interviewed parents of children with croup presenting to the pediatric emergency department (ED) and drafted stories. We revised the stories based on written participant feedback and edited the stories to incorporate research evidence and health information. An illustrator and graphic designer developed story booklets which were evaluated through focus groups. Results Ten participants provided feedback on the five stories drafted by the creative writer. Participants liked the concept but found the writing overly sophisticated and wanted more character development and more medical/health information. Participants highlighted specific story content that they liked and disliked. The revised stories were evaluated through focus groups involving eight individuals. Feedback was generally positive; one participant questioned the associated costs. Participants liked the graphics and layout; felt that they could identify with the stories; and felt that it was easier to get information compared to a standard medical information sheet. Participants provided feedback on the story content, errors and inconsistencies, and preferences of writing style and booklet format. Feedback on how to package the stories was provided by attendees at a national meeting of pediatric emergency researchers. Conclusions Several challenges arose during the development of the stories including: staying true to the story versus being evidence based; addressing the use of the internet by consumers as a source of health information; balancing the need to be comprehensive and widely applicable while being succinct; considerations such as story length, reading level, narrative mode, representation of different demographics and illness experiences, graphics and layout. The process was greatly informed by feedback from the end-user group. This allowed us to shape our products to ensure accuracy, credibility, and relevance. Our experience is valuable for further work in the area of stories and narratives, as well as more broadly for identifying and developing communication strategies for healthcare consumers. PMID:20813044
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Nudzor, Hope Pius
2015-01-01
In many sub-Saharan African countries, the endorsement of the 1990 Education for All (EFA) and the 2000 Millennium Development Goals agreements have resulted in the introduction of "fee-free" education policies in recent time. Yet, in 2015 it is becoming unlikely that education for all will be attained, as it has not been achieved…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Lorch, Elizabeth P.; Milich, Richard; Astrin, Clarese C.; Berthiaume, Kristen S.
2006-01-01
The present study examined children's cognitive engagement with television as a function of the continuity of central or incidental content and whether this varied with age and clinical status. In Experiment 1, 9- to 11-year-old children's response times on a secondary task were slower the later a probe occurred in a sequence of central events,…
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Talking about Illness: Mothers' and Toddlers' Conversations during a Joint Book-Reading Task
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
White, Carmel Parker; Bellamy, Roberta Woodlief; Powell, Monica Creech; Wittenauer, Ashley Rae
2011-01-01
This study examined the language used by mothers to talk about acute and chronic illness while engaged in a joint book-reading of a story where the main character had a cold. Thirty-four toddlers and their mothers participated in the study. Some of the mothers had a chronic illness, and some of the families or the children had had an acute illness…
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ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Lera-Miguel, Sara; Rosa, Mireia; Puig, Olga; Kaland, Nils; Lázaro, Luisa; Castro-Formieles, Josefina; Calvo, Rosa
2016-01-01
Most individuals with autism spectrum disorders often fail in tasks of theory of mind (ToM). However, those with normal intellectual functioning known as high functioning ASD (HF-ASD) sometimes succeed in mentalizing inferences. Some tools have been developed to more accurately test their ToM abilities. The aims of this study were to examine the…
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Two takes on the social brain: a comparison of theory of mind tasks.
Gobbini, Maria Ida; Koralek, Aaron C; Bryan, Ronald E; Montgomery, Kimberly J; Haxby, James V
2007-11-01
We compared two tasks that are widely used in research on mentalizing--false belief stories and animations of rigid geometric shapes that depict social interactions--to investigate whether the neural systems that mediate the representation of others' mental states are consistent across these tasks. Whereas false belief stories activated primarily the anterior paracingulate cortex (APC), the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (PCC/PC), and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ)--components of the distributed neural system for theory of mind (ToM)--the social animations activated an extensive region along nearly the full extent of the superior temporal sulcus, including a locus in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), as well as the frontal operculum and inferior parietal lobule (IPL)--components of the distributed neural system for action understanding--and the fusiform gyrus. These results suggest that the representation of covert mental states that may predict behavior and the representation of intentions that are implied by perceived actions involve distinct neural systems. These results show that the TPJ and the pSTS play dissociable roles in mentalizing and are parts of different distributed neural systems. Because the social animations do not depict articulated body movements, these results also highlight that the perception of the kinematics of actions is not necessary to activate the mirror neuron system, suggesting that this system plays a general role in the representation of intentions and goals of actions. Furthermore, these results suggest that the fusiform gyrus plays a general role in the representation of visual stimuli that signify agency, independent of visual form.
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Kirk, Elizabeth; Pine, Karen; Wheatley, Lisa; Howlett, Neil; Schulz, Joerg; Fletcher, Ben C
2015-11-01
Data are presented from a longitudinal investigation examining the relationship between maternal mind-mindedness (MM) in infancy and socio-cognitive development in childhood. We revisited children (n = 18) who had taken part in a longitudinal study as infants. MM had been assessed at 10, 12, 16, and 20 months of age. We followed up these children at 5-6 years of age to test their higher order theory of mind (ToM) (using the strange stories task). The convergent validity, temporal stability, and predictive validity of the construct of MM were examined in a longitudinal data set. The five measures of MM were not significantly correlated. Mother's production of appropriate mind-related comments (but no other measures) showed evidence of temporal stability throughout infancy. Thus, MM (as measured by appropriate mind-related comments) was confirmed as a stable construct. Children's ToM at 5-6 years of age was significantly predicted by their mother's MM up to 4 years earlier, with MM accounting for 40% of the variance of the strange stories task scores. These findings identify a relationship between MM across a protracted period of infancy and socio-cognitive development at 5-6 years of age. © 2015 The British Psychological Society.
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Life story resources in dementia care: a review
Kindell, Jacqueline; Burrow, Simon; Wilkinson, Ray; Keady, John David
2014-01-01
Purpose Life story work has a relatively long tradition in the caring sciences and is recognised as an important component of dementia care and practice. However, to date, there has not been a review of accessible life story resources. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Following a systematic approach to identification and inclusion, 11 life story resources were reviewed to ascertain areas of commonality and divergence between the materials. Findings The authors were able to group the analysis under eight areas and at the end of this process, it was uncertain if life story work is a formal staff intervention or an informal activity that people with dementia and their families could engage in. Resources also varied in terms of whether the life story information was organised in a chronological way, or with topics of interest/discussion or with a combination of both. Life story evaluation and its impact on the life of the person with dementia is in need of development. Practical implications Across the resources the authors identified four reasons to do life story work which the authors have named as: emotional connections; interactional connections; building new connections and practical care connections. Social implications There was limited guidance aimed at helping people with dementia to develop and compile their own life story. Originality/value This paper provides new insights into the usefulness, future directions and content of life story resources in dementia care. It will be of interest to those in health and social care as well as people living with dementia. PMID:25419453
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Verbal and nonverbal communication of events in learning-disability subtypes.
Loveland, K A; Fletcher, J M; Bailey, V
1990-08-01
This study compared a group of nondisabled children (ND) with groups of learning-disabled children who were primarily impaired in reading and arithmetic skills (Reading-Arithmetic Disabled; RAD) and arithmetic but not reading (Arithmetic Disabled; AD) on a set of tasks involving comprehension and production of verbally and nonverbally presented events. Children viewed videotaped scenarios presented in verbal (narrative) and nonverbal (puppet actors) formats and were asked to describe or enact with puppets the events depicted in the stories. Rourke (1978, 1982) has shown that RAD children have problems with verbal skills, whereas AD children have problems with nonverbal skills. Consequently, it was hypothesized that children's performance in comprehending and reproducing stories would be related to the type of learning disability. Results showed that RAD children made more errors than AD children with verbal presentations and describe-responses, whereas AD children made more errors than RAD children with nonverbal presentations and enact-responses. In addition, learning disabled children were more likely than controls to misinterpret affect and motivation depicted in the stories. These results show that learning disabled children have problems with social communication skills, but that the nature of these problems varies with the type of learning disability.
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Geology of the Woods Hole area, Massachusetts; the story behind the landscape
Hutchinson, D.R.; Schwarzman, Beth
2001-01-01
The geologic story of the Woods Hole area, Cape Cod, Mass., was written by glacial ice during the last ice age and edited by the ocean waves. If you learn to read today's landscape, you can see the fascinating history it records. The features of Cape Cod, from the ponds and cranberry bogs to the gently sloping sandy uplands and rocky, irregular hills to the beaches, result from the glacial processes that built the cape and the marine processes that still shape it. Many geologists since the late 19th century have contributed to telling this story. The U.S. Geological Survey has studied the geology of Cape Cod in order to provide people with objective scientific data that can be applied to wise stewardship of the land and coasts.
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Taking a narrative approach to grief research: finding meaning in stories.
Gilbert, Kathleen R
2002-04-01
This article explores the concepts of narrative as story, of storytelling, and of the narrative approach to qualitative research. Within this, I will also examine the social nature of narrative and the implications of this for research. I will look at the process of conducting a narrative study and the implications for participation in such a project and for the researcher investigating a phenomenon through this frame. In particular, the need to create stories to make order of disorder and find meaning in the meaningless is particularly relevant to the study of grief. In looking at the process of conducting a narrative study, questions about what can be analyzed and how it might be presented, some strengths and limitations of the narrative approach, and ethical questions also are considered.
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Episodic memory change in late adulthood: generalizability across samples and performance indices.
Dixon, Roger A; Wahlin, Ake; Maitland, Scott B; Hultsch, David F; Hertzog, Christopher; Bäckman, Lars
2004-07-01
Younger adults recall more information from episodic memory tasks than do older adults. Because longitudinal studies are rare and often incompatible, the extent of actual late-life memory change is not well established. We assemble two different longitudinal samples of normal older adults, each of which is tested twice at a 3-year interval, using a large battery of episodic memory indicators. Together, two-wave data from both the Victoria Longitudinal Study in Canada (n = 400) and the Kungsholmen Project in Sweden (n = 168) cover a 40-year span of adulthood, ranging from 54 to 94 years of age. Principal memory tasks include categorizable word lists, story recall, and random word lists, as well as indicators of cognitive support. Overall, an examination of performance on sets of common and complementary episodic tasks reveals that, for both samples, actual 3-year changes are modest and that, when decline occurs, it is gradual. The exception-greater decline for more supported tasks-suggests that these may be especially sensitive to late-life changes.
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Effects of monetary reward and punishment on information checking behaviour.
Li, Simon Y W; Cox, Anna L; Or, Calvin; Blandford, Ann
2016-03-01
Two experiments were conducted to examine whether checking one's own work can be motivated by monetary reward and punishment. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a flat-rate payment for completing the task (Control); payment increased for error-free performance (Reward); payment decreased for error performance (Punishment). Experiment 1 (N = 90) was conducted with liberal arts students, using a general data-entry task. Experiment 2 (N = 90) replicated Experiment 1 with clinical students and a safety-critical 'cover story' for the task. In both studies, Reward and Punishment resulted in significantly fewer errors, more frequent and longer checking, than Control. No such differences were obtained between the Reward and Punishment conditions. It is concluded that error consequences in terms of monetary reward and punishment can result in more accurate task performance and more rigorous checking behaviour than errors without consequences. However, whether punishment is more effective than reward, or vice versa, remains inconclusive. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd and The Ergonomics Society. All rights reserved.
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Taking Perspective: Personal Pronouns Affect Experiential Aspects of Literary Reading
Burke, Michael; Hagoort, Peter; Willems, Roel M.
2016-01-01
Personal pronouns have been shown to influence cognitive perspective taking during comprehension. Studies using single sentences found that 3rd person pronouns facilitate the construction of a mental model from an observer’s perspective, whereas 2nd person pronouns support an actor’s perspective. The direction of the effect for 1st person pronouns seems to depend on the situational context. In the present study, we investigated how personal pronouns influence discourse comprehension when people read fiction stories and if this has consequences for affective components like emotion during reading or appreciation of the story. We wanted to find out if personal pronouns affect immersion and arousal, as well as appreciation of fiction. In a natural reading paradigm, we measured electrodermal activity and story immersion, while participants read literary stories with 1st and 3rd person pronouns referring to the protagonist. In addition, participants rated and ranked the stories for appreciation. Our results show that stories with 1st person pronouns lead to higher immersion. Two factors—transportation into the story world and mental imagery during reading—in particular showed higher scores for 1st person as compared to 3rd person pronoun stories. In contrast, arousal as measured by electrodermal activity seemed tentatively higher for 3rd person pronoun stories. The two measures of appreciation were not affected by the pronoun manipulation. Our findings underscore the importance of perspective for language processing, and additionally show which aspects of the narrative experience are influenced by a change in perspective. PMID:27192060
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False Belief vs. False Photographs: A Test of Theory of Mind or Working Memory?
Callejas, Alicia; Shulman, Gordon L; Corbetta, Maurizio
2011-01-01
Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to reason about other people's thoughts and beliefs, has been traditionally studied in behavioral and neuroimaging experiments by comparing performance in "false belief" and "false photograph" (control) stories. However, some evidence suggests that these stories are not matched in difficulty, complicating the interpretation of results. Here, we more fully evaluated the relative difficulty of comprehending these stories and drawing inferences from them. Subjects read false belief and false photograph stories followed by comprehension questions that probed true ("reality" questions) or false beliefs ("representation" questions) appropriate to the stories. Stories and comprehension questions were read and answered, respectively, more slowly in the false photograph than false belief conditions, indicating their greater difficulty. Interestingly, accuracy on representation questions for false photograph stories was significantly lower than for all other conditions and correlated positively with participants' working memory span scores. These results suggest that drawing representational inferences from false photo stories is particularly difficult and places heavy demands on working memory. Extensive naturalistic practice with ToM reasoning may enable a more flexible and efficient mental representation of false belief stories, resulting in lower memory load requirements. An important implication of these results is that the differential modulation of right temporal-parietal junction (RTPJ) during ToM and "false photo" control conditions may reflect the documented negative correlation of RTPJ activity with working memory load rather than a specialized involvement in ToM processes.
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Belief and sign, true and false: the unique of false belief reasoning.
Zhang, Ting; Zhang, Qin; Li, Yiyuan; Long, Changquan; Li, Hong
2013-11-01
For a long time, a controversy has been proposed that whether the process of theory of mind is a result of domain-specific or domain-general changes (Wellman in The handbook of childhood cognitive development. Blackwell Publication, New Jersey, 2011). This event-related potential study explored the neural time course of domain-general and domain-specific components in belief reasoning. Fourteen participants completed location transfer false belief (FB), true belief (TB), false sign (FS) and true sign (TS) tasks, in which two pictures told a story related to a dog that ran from a green into a red box. In the TB and FB tasks, a boy saw or did not see the transfer of the dog, respectively. In the FS and TS tasks, an arrow that pointed to the green box either altered its direction to the red box or did not alter following the transfer of the dog. Participants then inferred where the boy thought of, or the arrow indicated the location of the dog. FB and TB reasoning elicited lower N2 amplitudes than FS and TS reasoning, which is associated with domain-general components, the detection, and classification. The late slow wave (LSW) for FB was more positive at frontal, central, and parietal sites than FS because of the domain-specific component involved in FB reasoning. However, the LSW was less positive for TB than for FB but did not differ from the TS condition, which implies that mental representation might not be involved in TB reasoning.
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Training for generalization in Theory of Mind: a study with older adults
Cavallini, Elena; Bianco, Federica; Bottiroli, Sara; Rosi, Alessia; Vecchi, Tomaso; Lecce, Serena
2015-01-01
Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to attribute independent mental states to self and others in order to explain and predict social behavior. Recent research in this area has shown a decline in ToM abilities associated with normal aging that is of a moderate magnitude or greater. Very few studies have investigated whether it is possible to improve older adults’ ToM abilities. The present study was designed to address this gap in the literature by evaluating the impact of a ToM training on practiced and transfer tasks. We provided older adults with a variety of activities designed to facilitate the generalization of benefits to other ToM-demanding tasks. Participants were 63 healthy older adults, native Italian speakers (Mage = 71.44, SD = 5.24, age range: 63–81 years). Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the ToM training (age range: 63–81 years) and the physical-conversation training (age range: 64–81 years). Training effects were measured using the strange stories (practiced task) and the animation task (transfer task). Results revealed the efficacy of the training in producing improvements on practiced but also on transfer tasks. PMID:26300818
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Lewis, L C; Honea, S H; Kanter, D F; Haney, P E
1993-10-01
In preparation for the 1993 Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations (JCAHO) survey, Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans Hospital Nursing Service was faced with determining the best approach to presenting their Total Quality Improvement/Total Quality Management (TQI/TQM) process. Nursing Service management and staff, Quality Improvement Clinicians, and medical staff used the Storyboard concept and the accompanying Story Notebooks to organize and to communicate their TQI/TQM process and findings. This concept was extremely beneficial, enabling staff to successfully present the multidisciplinary TQI/TQM data to the JCAHO surveyors.
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Yeari, Menahem; Avramovich, Adi; Schiff, Rachel
2017-06-01
Previous studies have demonstrated that students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) struggle particularly with grasping the implicit, inferential level of narratives that is crucial for story comprehension. However, these studies used offline tasks (i.e., after story presentation), used indirect measurements (e.g., identifying main ideas), and/or yielded inconclusive results using think-aloud techniques. Moreover, most studies were conducted with preschool or elementary school children with ADHD, using listening or televised story comprehension. In this study, we were interested in examining the spontaneous, immediate activation and/or suppression of forward-predictive inferences, backward-explanatory inferences, and inference-evoking textual information, as they occur online during reading comprehension by adolescents with ADHD. Participants with and without ADHD read short narrative texts, each of which included a predictive sentence, a bridging sentence that referred back to the predictive sentence via actualization of the predicted event, and two intervening sentences positioned between the predictive and bridging sentences that introduced a temporary transition from the main (predictive) episode. Activation and suppression of inferential and/or textual information were assessed using naming times of word probes that were implied by the preceding text, explicitly mentioned in it, or neither when following control texts. In some cases, a true-false inferential or textual question followed the probe. Naming facilitations were observed for the control but not for the ADHD group, in responding to inference probes that followed the predictive and bridging sentences, and to text probes that followed the predictive sentences. Participants with ADHD were accurate, albeit slower, than controls in answering the true-false questions. Adolescents with ADHD have difficulties in generating predictive and explanatory inferences and in retaining relevant textual information in working memory while reading, although they can answer questions after reading when texts are relatively short. These findings are discussed with regard to development of comprehension strategies for individuals with ADHD.
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Andersen, Ditte
2015-06-01
Addiction research has demonstrated how recovering individuals need narratives that make sense of past drug use and enable constructions of future, non-addict identities. However, there has not been much investigation into how these recovery narratives actually develop moment-to-moment in drug treatment. Building on the sociology of storytelling and ethnographic fieldwork conducted at two drug treatment institutions for young people in Denmark, this article argues that studying stories in the context of their telling brings forth novel insights. Through a narrative analysis of both 'the whats' (story content) and 'the hows' (storying process) the article presents four findings: (1) stories of change function locally as an institutional requirement; (2) professional drug treatment providers edit young people's storytelling through different techniques; (3) the narrative environment of the drug treatment institution shapes how particular stories make sense of the past, present and future; and (4) storytelling in drug treatment is an interactive achievement. A fine-grained analysis illuminates in particular how some stories on gender and drug use are silenced, while others are encouraged. The demonstration of how local narrative environments shape stories contributes to the general understanding of interactive storytelling in encounters between professionals and clients in treatment settings. © 2015 The Author. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. on behalf of Foundation for Sociology of Health & Illness.
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Digital Storytelling: Kizoa, Animoto, and Photo Story 3
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Yee, Kevin; Hargis, Jace
2012-01-01
Educators know that students create better projects when they are personally invested in the material. The rewards are particularly significant when students can exercise some degree of creativity in the process of developing their projects. One tried-and-true avenue for creative expression is through the use of stories or narratives. Simply…
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My Family, My Story: Representing Identities in Time and Space through Digital Storytelling
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Pahl, Kate
2011-01-01
Digital storytelling is increasingly used within educational and out-of-school settings, particularly in informal learning contexts such as after-school projects and those involving young people. The process of making digital stories harnesses I/identities, including affect, emotion, and home funds of knowledge (identities), as well as "ways…
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The Life Review in Five Short Stories about Characters Facing Death.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Nicholl, Grier
1985-01-01
Uses five modern short stories about people facing death to illustrate and connect various observations of and theories about the dying process developed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Robert N. Butler. In response to the imminence of their deaths, the characters survey their past, attempting to reintegrate their life's experiences. (JAC)
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Stories that Teach Life Lessons
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Jalongo, Mary
2004-01-01
Children's lives are infused with stories at home, at school or the library, and in the media. This article discusses how to harness the power of literature and use it to develop positive character traits in young children. Storytelling is a fundamental way in which human beings process and share events as well as the feelings surrounding those…
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Storytelling as Research Praxis, and Conversations that Enabled It to Emerge
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
de Carteret, Phoenix
2008-01-01
This paper introduces conversations and stories that were central to my PhD research. Journal writing, poetry, story and transcribed conversations became texts and data I reproduced in response to the research questions, dreams, memory work and collective biography workshops with my participants. The paper rechoreographs the process that enabled…
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From Storyboard to Story: Animation Content Development
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Mou, Tsai-Yun; Jeng, Tay-Sheng; Chen, Chien-Hsu
2013-01-01
This research focused on a new method in the development of animation story content, which could shorten the creation process and arouse new ideas. Two phases of experiments were conducted to explore this reversed model. The first phase is a pretest of participants' creativity, which was a base for further examination the relationship between…
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Literary Ideas and Scripts for Young Playwrights
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kaniut Cobb, Lisa
2006-01-01
This collection presents techniques for tapping a broad range of literary sources to inspire young writers. Drawing upon poetry, folk tales, story jokes, and more, Literary Ideas walks students in grades 3-8 through the process of creating new stories and developing them as scripts for choral readings, readers theatre, and classroom plays. The…
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Stories about Children with Disabilities: The Writing Process and the Opinions of the Storywriters
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Vuran, Sezgin
2014-01-01
Problem Statement: Successful inclusion is established through understanding and respecting differences among individuals. This study emerged from the idea that books play an important role in this understanding and from the lack of published children's books about disabilities. Although, stories are very important in any educational curriculum,…
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The Impact of Ideology on Translation of News Stories
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Azodi, Javad; Salmani, Bahloul
2015-01-01
Translation has always undergone the impact of various metalinguistic factors which impose their impact during the process of translation and rendering its final linguistic product. News stories or better to say political discourses are among those linguistic materials that more than other textual materials undergo the impact of factors such as…
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Online Narratives by Adults with ADHD Who Were Diagnosed in Adulthood
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Fleischmann, Amos; Miller, Erez C.
2013-01-01
This study systematically analyzed life stories of adults with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who were diagnosed in adulthood, using an adapted version of Labov's textual-analysis method. These life stories provided an opportunity to examine the processes experienced by these individuals before and after the diagnosis of ADHD,…
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Jenny's story: reinventing oneself through occupation and narrative configuration.
Price-Lackey, P; Cashman, J
1996-04-01
Two life history interviews were conducted to discover how one women, Jenny, experienced a traumatic head injury, rehabilitation, and recovery. Narrative analysis of the transcribed interviews revealed a rich story of how Jenny had fashioned her identity and character through childhood occupations, including studying classical literature and music, and of how she drew upon resources developed in childhood to engineer her recovery. It also illustrated how Jenny used a recursive process of narrative construction and engagement in self-devised graduated occupations, including studying, playing music, writing, computer graphics, and theater production, to create a new identity and develop capacities to process complex information and exercise creativity. Jenny's story illustrates the usefulness of gaining a perspective on patients as occupational beings through the gathering of life histories focused on occupation, the importance of collaborative patient-therapist goal setting, and the necessity for considering both the doing (practic) and the meaning (narrative) aspects of occupation. Her story supports many scholars' arguments that the therapeutic relationship, and thus occupational therapy practice, may be enhanced through the use of life history interviewing in occupational therapy evaluation and treatment.
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Newsmaking on drugs: a qualitative study with journalism professionals.
Mastroianni, Fabio C; Noto, Ana Regina
2008-09-01
Drugs are a frequent subject in the news media. Despite the existence of an important dynamic interplay between the print media, public opinion, and public policies, studies on these relationships are still scarce regarding the drug issue. The objective of this study is to understand the newsmaking process regarding drugs from the vantage point of Brazilian journalism professionals. Using qualitative research, semistructured interviews were conducted among an intentional sample of 22 professionals who write news stories and articles about drugs in nationwide news media. Interviewees mentioned illegality and crime as the main factors leading to the production of stories and articles. They claimed that by instilling fear among readers, newspapers and magazines tend to increase their audiences and/or sales. Most interviewees considered the coverage of drugs in Brazil as weak. Main problems reported include lack of knowledge on the subject, and not enough time to prepare the stories. It was concluded that the newsmaking process regarding drugs undergoes a series of interferences that compromise the content of the stories, therefore social strategies are needed in order to improve the quality of the material published in Brazil.
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The differential contributions of visual imagery constructs on autobiographical thinking.
Aydin, Cagla
2018-02-01
There is a growing theoretical and empirical consensus on the central role of visual imagery in autobiographical memory. However, findings from studies that explore how individual differences in visual imagery are reflected on autobiographical thinking do not present a coherent story. One reason for the mixed findings was suggested to be the treatment of visual imagery as an undifferentiated construct while evidence shows that there is more than one type of visual imagery. The present study investigates the relative contributions of different imagery constructs; namely, object and spatial imagery, on autobiographical memory processes. Additionally, it explores whether a similar relation extends to imagining the future. The results indicate that while object imagery was significantly correlated with several phenomenological characteristics, such as the level of sensory and perceptual details for past events - but not for future events - spatial imagery predicted the level of episodic specificity for both past and future events. We interpret these findings as object imagery being recruited in tasks of autobiographical memory that employ reflective processes while spatial imagery is engaged during direct retrieval of event details. Implications for the role of visual imagery in autobiographical thinking processes are discussed.
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Kaneda, Takumi; Shigemune, Yayoi; Tsukiura, Takashi
2017-02-01
Memories for emotion-laden stimuli are remembered more accurately than those for neutral stimuli. Although this enhancement reflects stimulus-driven modulation of memory by emotions, functional neuroimaging evidence of the interacting mechanisms between emotions generated by intentional processes, such as semantic elaboration, and memory is scarce. The present fMRI study investigated how encoding-related activation is modulated by emotions generated during the process of semantic elaboration. During encoding with fMRI, healthy young adults viewed neutral (target) pictures either passively or with semantic elaboration. In semantic elaboration, participants imagined background stories related to the pictures. Encoding trials with semantic elaboration were subdivided into conditions in which participants imagined negative, positive, or neutral stories. One week later, memories for target pictures were tested. In behavioral results, memories for target pictures were significantly enhanced by semantic elaboration, compared to passive viewing, and the memory enhancement was more remarkable when negative or positive stories were imagined. fMRI results demonstrated that activations in the left inferior frontal gyrus and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) were greater during the encoding of target pictures with semantic elaboration than those with passive viewing, and that these activations further increased during encoding with semantic elaboration of emotional stories than of neutral stories. Functional connectivity between the left inferior frontal gyrus and dmPFC/hippocampus during encoding significantly predicted retrieval accuracies of memories encoded with self-generated emotional stories. These findings suggest that networks including the left inferior frontal region, dmPFC, and hippocampus could contribute to the modulation of memories encoded with the emotion generation.
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LeBron, Alana M. W.; Schulz, Amy J.; Bernal, Cristina; Gamboa, Cindy; Wright, Conja; Sand, Sharon; Valerio, Melissa; Caver, Deanna
2015-01-01
Background Contextually and culturally congruent interventions are urgently needed to reduce racial, ethnic, and socio economic inequities in physical activity and cardiovascular disease. Objectives To examine a community-based participatory research (CBPR) process that incorporated storytelling into a physical activity intervention, and consider implications for reducing health inequities. Methods We used a CBPR process to incorporate storytelling in an existing walking group intervention. Stories conveyed social support and problem-solving intervention themes designed to maintain increases in physical activity over time, and were adapted to the walking group context, group dynamics, challenges, and traditions. Lessons Learned After describing of the CBPR process used to adapt stories to walking group sites, we discuss challenges and lessons learned regarding the adaptation and implementation of stories to convey key intervention themes. Conclusions A CBPR approach to incorporating storytelling to convey intervention themes offers an innovative and flexible strategy to promote health toward the elimination of health inequities. PMID:25727980
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An event-related potential study of maternal love in mothers.
Lu, Jiamei; Li, Da; Xu, Jingwei
2012-10-01
Feeling is stable and implicit and can be explicated in concrete situations in the form of emotion. To map the time course of feeling processing, the present study explored electrophysiological responses relevant to inner feeling by creating situations to evoke the explicit response of feeling. Fourteen mothers were asked to listen to TS and NS. Although the early event-related potential components (P1, N1 and P2) elicited by story pictures were not affected by the emotional valence of stories, the pictures relevant to TS elicited larger P3 and late positive potential (LPP) components than did neutral story pictures, indicating that feeling processing occurred at the post-perceptual stage. Feeling-related positive potential was separated using the difference wave analysis technique, which consisted of two sub-components: FRBB1 and FRBB2 based on P3 and LPP modulations, respectively. These data provide new electrophysiological evidence for the time course of feeling processing related to maternal love.