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Biomedical subjects

B P Ackerman

Publications and source records attributed to B P Ackerman.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Emotion knowledge in economically disadvantaged children: self-regulatory antecedents and relations to social difficulties and withdrawal.

We examined the relations of verbal ability and self-regulation in preschool to emotion knowledge in first grade, and concurrent relations between emotion knowledge and indexes of social functioning in 143 children from low-income families. After controlling for children's verbal ability in preschool, teacher reports of attentional control and caregiver reports of behavioral control in preschool predicted children's emotion expression knowledge and emotion situation knowledge 2 years later. After controlling for verbal ability and attentional and behavioral control, children's emotion knowledge predicted concurrent teacher-reported social problems and social withdrawal. Results suggest that low levels of emotion knowledge co-occur with many important aspects of children's early social adaptation.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2001

Family structure and the externalizing behavior of children from economically disadvantaged families.

This study examined the relations among family structure, caregiver relationship history, aspects of environmental adversity, and teacher reports about the externalizing behaviors of 6- and 7-year-old children from economically disadvantaged families. Family structure contrasted intact families, stepfamilies, single-parent families, and cohabiting families. Problem behaviors were more frequent for children from unmarried families than from married families and were more frequent for boys than for girls from cohabiting families. Relationship history reduced the effects for family structure. Children's adjustment varied with both the current status and past stability of caregiver intimate relationships for disadvantaged families.

Child↗
PubMed1999

Family instability and the problem behaviors of children from economically disadvantaged families.

This longitudinal study examined the relation between family instability and the problem behaviors of children from economically disadvantaged families. Family instability was assessed when the children were ages 5 and 7 and included number of residence changes, changes of intimate caregiver relationships, and recent negative life events. The results showed direct concurrent relations between family instability and preschool children's externalizing behavior in the context of other family process variables, relations between subsequent family instability and 1st-grade children's internalizing behavior (i.e., with preschool behavior ratings controlled), and an effect for persistent instability across grade. Moderator effects were also found for child variables, including gender, temperamental adaptability, and prior externalizing scores.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1999

The relations between cluster indexes of risk and promotion and the problem behaviors of 6- and 7-year-old children from economically disadvantaged families.

This study examined the relations between alternative representations of poverty cofactors and promotion processes and teacher reports of the problem behaviors of 6- and 7-year-old children from economically disadvantaged families (N = 159). The results showed that single-index representations of risk and promotion variables predicted child aggressive behaviors but not child anxious/depressed behaviors. An additive model of individual risk indicators performed similarly. Smaller indexes representing clusters of parent adjustment variables and family instability variables, however, differentially predicted aggressive and anxious/depressed behaviors, respectively. The results suggest the importance of promotion processes and of representing environmental adversity at varying levels of specificity for children from economically disadvantaged families.

Caregivers↗
PubMed1996

Induction of a memory retrieval strategy by young children.

This study examines children's modification of their own retrieval processes in a cued recall task. Each experiment had multiple study-test trails with triplets of categorically related words (Horse-Pig-Cow). Category-orienting questions were asked at acquisition, and each trial had different triplet stimuli. The last triplet word was the target, and the retrieval cues were the whole-context cue (Horse-Pig), a part context cue (Horse), or a noncontext associate (Goat). The measure of retrieval induction was recall increases across trials. Experiments 1 and 3 examined retrieval support for induction by 7- to 12-year olds by manipulating cue type. Experiments 2 and 4 manipulated acquisition variables that might effect retrieval induction. The results showed induction of an effective retrieval strategy in the situations of maximum retrieval support even by the 7-year olds, and developmental differences occurred in the situations where the retrieval cues provided few hints about the acquisition encoding operation. The results suggest that monitoring and modification of retrieval processes should be distinguished and that monitoring is necessary but not sufficient for induction of an effective retrieval strategy. The results have implications for understanding children's strategy-utilization deficiencies in memory tasks.

Attention↗
PubMed1993

Children's understanding of the relation between referential knowledge and referential behavior.

Young children often confuse what is said and meant in referential communication. This study determines exactly what is confused by kindergarten children, second graders, and fourth graders. In each of four experiments, a story listener's referential knowledge variously came from object details in the context and in an utterance, and children were asked independently to judge knowledge sufficiency for identifying one referent in a display, and whether the knowledge came from the utterance alone. In Experiments 1 and 2, experimenter identification of the correct referent was manipulated to determine if children confuse internal representations of information knowledge and referential behavior, or behavior and the real world referent, in determining the listerner's knowledge. In other experiments, the consistency of referential behavior with the correct referent was manipulated to determine the basis of children's knowledge assessments. Overall the results show that children's say-mean confusion varies depending on situational factors and variably reflects children's use of internal representations and external referential behavior in assessing knowledge.

Child↗
PubMed1990

Children's understanding of private keys in referential communication.

A private key is a referential utterance used to inform selectively. The ambiguity of the utterance conceals meaning from nonselected audience members. The purpose of this study was to examine three aspects of children's understanding of the use of private keys. Experiment 1 concerned children's sensitivity to information in the context of utterance (i.e., the common ground). Experiment 2 examined appreciation of audience design and the speaker's intent. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 explored some reasons for children's problems in understanding private keys. The results show that even first graders are sensitive to common ground information and the speaker's intent. However, audience design is troublesome even for second graders in some situations, probably because they fail to assess the knowledge of the audience members. Private keys are important theoretically because they represent an aspect of referential communication involving the uses of ambiguous utterances that have been ignored by developmental researchers.

Attention↗
PubMed1990

The relation between item identification difficulty and elaborative conceptual processing for children and adults.

The four experiments concerned the relation between the difficulty of item identification processes, elaborative conceptual processing, and developmental differences in cued recall. Elaborative conceptual processing was manipulated by asking related ("How many are related?"), category ("How many are vehicles?"), and analytic ("How many usually carry freight?") orienting questions about four-word stimuli in which the words were categorically related (Bus-Airplane-Car-Train). The measures of elaborative processing were the speed and accuracy of question answers. Cued recall for the targets (Train) was assessed for one-word (Bus) or two-word (Bus-Airplane) cues, which were varied to determine if elaborative processing affected cue discriminability or constructability, or both. The difficulty of item identification was varied in several ways. In Experiment 1, the graphemic information was degraded in the acquisition stimuli, or the retrieval cues, or the stimulus words were intact. In Experiments 2 and 3, acquisition presentation time was varied and the stimuli were read by the experimenter or the subject. Experiment 4 featured pictures to determine generalizability. The results showed that elaborative conceptual processing facilitates recall. Most important, item identification processes limit elaborative conceptual processing for both words and pictures, and more for children than for college students.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1990

Concept availability in the causal inferences of children and adults.

What supplies the concepts in causal inferences in story comprehension? This question was examined in 5 experiments. Elementary school children and college students listened to stories containing a "premise" sentence describing a character's intent in initiating a series of actions, followed by an unexpected "outcome." After each story, the subjects were asked inference questions about the reason for the outcome (Experiments 1-4) or asked to explain the outcome (Experiment 5). In the various experiments, the availability of object concepts for an inference was manipulated by providing 0 or 2 clues preceding the outcome, additional filler information that diluted the clue information, a mention of an object in the premise or no mention, and an object title for each story or no title. The results suggested that the availability of an object concept in sentences prior to the outcome was a critical determinant of whether an object inference occurred, especially for children. Given availability, the thematic prominence of the object influences whether the object will be used in an inference.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Place and action in children's representations of stories.

The purpose of the four experiments was to examine the prominence of place and action information in the story representations of second (7-year-old), fifth (10-year-old), and sixth (11-year-old) grade children and college students. The subjects were read short stories in which the information in a premise and an outcome sentence were consistent or inconsistent in describing place or action information. Judgments about story adequacy and the conditional probability of an inadequacy judgment given inconsistency detection were measures of prominence in the story representation, and prominence was manipulated by providing place titles, action titles, or no titles. The results showed that place inconsistency is more important than action inconsistency in children's judgments of story adequacy, except when the action involves the story theme. Developmental differences in story judgments generally were larger for inconsistent actions than for inconsistent places, perhaps due to children's problems in abstracting an action theme early in story processing.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

The relation between resource limitations and optional conceptual processing by children and adults.

In some situations children fail to perform optional conceptual processing that they are able to perform. The purpose of the 4 experiments was to determine if the difficulty of word identification affects optional conceptual processing by second/third graders, fifth graders, and college students in a cued recall task. Conceptual processing was manipulated by presenting Hard (e.g., hawk eagle canary) or Easy (river lake canary) word triplets that varied in the contrastive processing necessary to identify the "odd" target word (canary). The orienting activity also varied: for the Oddity Choice activity, contrastive processing was obligatory because the subject had to identify the target; for the Read activity, contrastive processing was optional because the experimenter identified the target. A recall advantage for the Hard over the Easy triplets was the measure of contrastive processing. Finally, the difficulty of word identification varied in that the subjects read the stimuli or the experimenter read the stimuli, and all the words were degraded, only the nontarget words were degraded, or all the words were intact. The results established that contrastive processing facilitates recall, and that word identification difficulty may limit the extent of optional contrastive processing.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1984

Storage and processing constraints on integrating story information in children and adults.

In two experiments, this study examined the effects of integration complexity on the ability of child and adult listeners to integrate information from different sentences in a story. First and third graders and college adults were read stories containing incongruent event information and succeeding resolution information that explained the incongruency, and asked questions that probed incongruency recognition and resolution. Information storage complexity was manipulated by separating the event and resolution information and foregrounding or backgrounding the focal story characters. Processing complexity was manipulated by varying the inferential complexity of relating the resolution to the incongruent information, and the coreferential cues linking the event and resolution information. The results showed that increases in complexity adversely affected resolution integration, and more for the children than for the adults. The children's integration performance, in particular, was affected by theme discontinuity and coreferential complexity.

Adult↗
PubMed1982

Aging and metamemory: the roles of relatedness and imagery.

The hypothesis that age deficits in long-term episodic memory tasks are due to imparied metamemorial skills was investigated in a paired-associate task that required participants to predict the likelihood of recalling individual items. Both young and old adults were able to predict their ability to recall, and both age groups were equally sensitive to the effects of differences in the degree of relatedness between word-pair members on subsequent recall. However, both old and young adults were insensitive to the beneficial effects of using interactive imagery at encoding. It was concluded that differences in metamemorial skills are not responsible for age differences in memory.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1981

Performative bias in children's interpretations of ambiguous referential communications.

The hypothesis of this study was that young children respond incorrectly in interpreting ambiguous communications in referential tasks because they respond to the illocutionary performative force rather than the locutionary content of the communications. However, these children can evaluate locutionary adequacy when the performative force is deemphasized. In 2 experiments, young children were induced to discriminate between informative and ambiguous communications according to either the performative or locutionary adequacy of the communications. In experiment 1, kindergarten and second-grade children were asked to assign adequate communications to an informative speaker and ambiguous communications to an ambiguous speaker. In experiment 2, kindergarten children were required to choose an object or signal that an object choice was impossible in response to adequate or inadequate communications uttered by a speaker. The results of both experiments showed that correct responses of the kindergarten children to the ambiguous communications improved when they responded to the locutionary rather than the performative force of the communications.

Child↗