Else-Marie Augusti

Look Who's Talking: Pre-Verbal Infants' Perception of Face-to-Face and Back-to-Back Social Interactions.

Four-, 6-, and 11-month old infants were presented with movies in which two adult actors conversed about everyday events, either by facing each other or looking in opposite directions. Infants from 6 months of age made more gaze shifts between the actors, in accordance with the flow of conversation, when the actors were facing each other. A second experiment demonstrated that gaze following alone did not cause this difference. Instead the results are consistent with a social cognitive interpretation, suggesting that infants perceive the difference between face-to-face and back-to-back conversations and that they prefer to attend to a typical pattern of social interaction from 6 months of age.

Maltreatment Is Associated With Specific Impairments in Executive Functions: A Pilot Study

Child maltreatment is associated with a host of adverse consequences. Few studies exist that map maltreated childrens performance on neurocognitive tests particularly sensitive to brain and behavior associations. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether maltreated children differed in their executive functioning compared to their nonmaltreated peers, and if they did so in specific ways. Tasks aimed at measuring set shifting, spatial working memory, and inhibition were administered. Trauma-related symptomatology was further assessed to study the potential effect of maltreatment-related psychopathology on executive functioning. A univariate analysis of variance showed that maltreated children (n = 21) performed significantly poorer compared to their nonmaltreated peers (n = 22) on the Spatial Working Memory task. Symptoms of trauma-related psychopathology were not associated with performance on the executive functions tests. In conclusion, maltreatment was not associated with a global deficit in childrens executive functions. Thus, when considering maltreated childrens cognitive functioning, specific measures of executive functions should be applied.

Associations between executive functions and long-term stress reactions after extreme trauma: A two-year follow-up of the Utøya survivors.

Terror attacks cause variation in everyday functioning across several domains. This paper focuses on the individual long-term costs in terms of clinical symptoms and cognitive (e.g., shifting, inhibition, and spatial working memory) difficulties associated with these symptoms in 24 survivors of a terror attack in Norway. Another 24 controls were included for comparison purposes. Participants were administered a battery of clinical and neurocognitive tests. Results showed that all clinical variables differed as a function of group, ps ≤ .001, η2 ≥ .64, but no significant differences were revealed for the neurocognitive measures. In the survivor group, shifting capacity and its interaction with gender predicted intrusion symptoms, p = .045, ηp2 = .338, and symptoms of avoidance, p = .008, ηp2 = .453. We discuss the findings in relation to theoretical models and therapeutic interventions.

The effect of neutral and negative colour photographs on children's item directed forgetting

Intentional forgetting is an active process relying on cognitive mechanisms (e.g., rehearsal strategies and inhibition) developing during the elementary school years. Colour photographs might be rehearsed differently in memory than words, and therefore result in a different developmental pattern of intentional forgetting than previously acknowledged. Moreover, negative material is thought to be particularly reliant upon inhibitory mechanisms in order not to be encoded in memory. Thus, childrens item-directed forgetting (DF) might develop differently both in relation to colour photographs in general and for negative pictorial stimuli in particular. The aim of the present study was to investigate item DF for colour photographs of neutral and negative valence in sixty-five school-aged children (8–12 years of age). In the present study, a DF effect was revealed irrespective of age for neutral images as well as negative images. Results are discussed in relation to potential mechanisms underlying item DF for colour photographs and how these affect development of intentional forgetting.

The effect of emotional facial expressions on children’s working memory: Associations with age and behavior

Studies on adults have revealed a disadvantageous effect of negative emotional stimuli on executive functions (EF), and it is suggested that this effect is amplified in children. The present study’s aim was to assess how emotional facial expressions affected working memory in 9- to 12-year-olds, using a working memory task with emotional facial expressions as stimuli. Additionally, we explored how degree of internalizing and externalizing symptoms in typically developing children was related to performance on the same task. Before employing the working memory task with emotional facial expressions as stimuli, an independent sample of 9- to 12-year-olds was asked to recognize the facial expressions intended to serve as stimuli for the working memory task and to rate the facial expressions on the degree to which the emotion was expressed and for arousal to obtain a baseline for how children during this age recognize and react to facial expressions. The first study revealed that children rated the facial expressions with similar intensity and arousal across age. When employing the working memory task with facial expressions, results revealed that negatively valenced expressions impaired working memory more than neutral and positively valenced expressions. The ability to successfully complete the working memory task increased between 9 to 12 years of age. Children’s total problems were associated with poorer performance on the working memory task with facial expressions. Results on the effect of emotion on working memory are discussed in light of recent models and empirical findings on how emotional information might interact and interfere with cognitive processes such as working memory.