150 Psychologie
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This study examined age‐related differences in the effectiveness of two generative learning strategies (GLSs). Twenty‐five children aged 9–11 and 25 university students aged 17–29 performed a facts learning task in which they had to generate either a prediction or an example before seeing the correct result. We found a significant Age × Learning Strategy interaction, with children remembering more facts after generating predictions rather than examples, whereas both strategies were similarly effective in adults. Pupillary data indicated that predictions stimulated surprise, whereas the effectiveness of example‐based learning correlated with children’s analogical reasoning abilities. These findings suggest that there are different cognitive prerequisites for different GLSs, which results in varying degrees of strategy effectiveness by age.
Objective: Although meaning making and specifically autobiographical reasoning are expected to relate to well‐being, findings tend to be mixed. Attempts at meaning making do not always lead to meaning made. We aimed to disentangle these complex relationships and also explore the role of level of education.
Method: Ninety participants (mean age 36.73 years, SD = 7.27; 74.4% women, 25.6% men) who had experienced the loss of a parent through death, going missing, or Alzheimer's disease narrated this loss, a sad, a turning point, and a self‐defining memory, and completed questionnaires assessing depression, trauma symptoms, and protracted grief. Three aspects of autobiographical reasoning (quantity, valence, and change‐relatedness of self‐event connections) were related to meaning made (sophistication of meaning making) and symptom level.
Results: Years of education correlated both with positive implications of autobiographical reasoning and with meaning made. The quantity, positivity, and change‐relatedness of attempts at meaning making (self‐event connections) predicted accomplished meaning made, and positivity alone predicted less prolonged grief.
Conclusions: Adapting the life story after a loss such that change of the self is acknowledged and positive change can be constructed helps finding meaning and lowering protracted grief. These changes in narrative identity are supported by more years of education.
In this explorative study, we investigate how sequences of behaviour are related to success or failure in complex problem‐solving (CPS). To this end, we analysed log data from two different tasks of the problem‐solving assessment of the Programme for International Student Assessment 2012 study (n = 30,098 students). We first coded every interaction of students as (initial or repeated) exploration, (initial or repeated) goal‐directed behaviour, or resetting the task. We then split the data according to task successes and failures. We used full‐path sequence analysis to identify groups of students with similar behavioural patterns in the respective tasks. Double‐checking and minimalistic behaviour was associated with success in CPS, while guessing and exploring task‐irrelevant content was associated with failure. Our findings held for both tasks investigated, from two different CPS measurement frameworks. We thus gained detailed insight into the behavioural processes that are related to success and failure in CPS.
A question of striking the right balance : how do digital media influence how we think and act?
(2020)
What influence do digital technologies have on human perception, thinking and action? Do computer games harm the development of young brains? And is there really such a thing as »digital dementia«, an increasing forgetfulness caused by the use of modern technologies? For some of these questions, answers are available that are empirically corroborated.
Auf das richtige Maß kommt es an : wie beeinflussen digitale Medien unser Denken und Handeln?
(2020)
Welchen Einfluss haben digitale Technologien auf das menschliche Wahrnehmen, Denken und Handeln? Schaden Computerspiele der Entwicklung junger Gehirne? Und gibt es tatsächlich so etwas wie eine »digitale Demenz«, eine durch die Nutzung moderner Technologien bedingte wachsende Vergesslichkeit? Auf einige dieser Fragen gibt es bereits Antworten, die empirisch belegt sind.
Imageability and emotionality ratings for 2592 German nouns (3–10 letters, one to three phonological syllables) were obtained from younger adults (21–31 years) and older adults (70–86 years). Valid ratings were obtained on average from 20 younger and 23 older adults per word for imageability, and from 18 younger and 19 older adults per word for emotionality. The internal consistency (Cronbach’s α) and retest rank-order stability of the ratings were high for both age groups (α and r ≥ .97). Also, the validity of our ratings was found to be high, as compared to previously published ratings (r ≥ .86). The ratings showed substantial rank-order stability across younger and older adults (imageability, r = .94; emotionality, r = .85). At the same time, systematic differences between age groups were found in the mean levels of ratings (imageability, d = 0.38; emotionality, d = 0.20) and in the extent to which the rating scales were used (imageability, SD = 24 vs. 19, scale of 0 to 100; emotionality, SD = 26 vs. 31, scale of −100 to 100). At the descriptive level, our data hint at systematically different evaluations of semantic categories regarding imageability and emotionality across younger and older adults. Given that imageability and emotionality have been reported, for instance, as important determinants for the recognition and recall of words, our findings highlight the importance of considering age-specific information in age-comparative cognitive (neuroscience) experimental studies using word materials. The age-specific imageability and emotionality ratings for the 2592 German nouns can be found in the electronic supplementary material...
Ergodic subspace analysis
(2020)
Properties of psychological variables at the mean or variance level can differ between persons and within persons across multiple time points. For example, cross-sectional findings between persons of different ages do not necessarily reflect the development of a single person over time. Recently, there has been an increased interest in the difference between covariance structures, expressed by covariance matrices, that evolve between persons and within a single person over multiple time points. If these structures are identical at the population level, the structure is called ergodic. However, recent data confirms that ergodicity is not generally given, particularly not for cognitive variables. For example, the <i>g</i> factor that is dominant for cognitive abilities between persons seems to explain far less variance when concentrating on a single person’s data. However, other subdimensions of cognitive abilities seem to appear both between and within persons; that is, there seems to be a lower-dimensional subspace of cognitive abilities in which cognitive abilities are in fact ergodic. In this article, we present ergodic subspace analysis (ESA), a mathematical method to identify, for a given set of variables, which subspace is most important within persons, which is most important between person, and which is ergodic. Similar to the common spatial patterns method, the ESA method first whitens a joint distribution from both the between and the within variance structure and then performs a principle component analysis (PCA) on the between distribution, which then automatically acts as an inverse PCA on the within distribution. The difference of the eigenvalues allows a separation of the rotated dimensions into the three subspaces corresponding to within, between, and ergodic substructures. We apply the method to simulated data and to data from the COGITO study to exemplify its usage.
Early experiences of childhood sexual or physical abuse are often associated with functional impairments, reduced well-being and interpersonal problems in adulthood. Prior studies have addressed whether the traumatic experience itself or adult psychopathology is linked to these limitations. To approach this question, individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and healthy individuals with and without a history of child abuse were investigated. We used global positioning system (GPS) tracking to study temporal and spatial limitations in the participants’ real-life activity space over the course of one week. The sample consisted of 228 female participants: 150 women with PTSD and emotional instability with a history of child abuse, 35 mentally healthy women with a history of child abuse (healthy trauma controls, HTC) and 43 mentally healthy women without any traumatic experiences in their past (healthy controls, HC). Both traumatized groups—i.e. the PTSD and the HTC group—had smaller movement radii than the HC group on the weekends, but neither spent significantly less time away from home than HC. Some differences between PTSD and HC in movement radius seem to be related to correlates of PTSD psychopathology, like depression and physical health. Yet group differences between HTC and HC in movement radius remained even when contextual and individual health variables were included in the model, indicating specific effects of traumatic experiences on activity space. Experiences of child abuse could limit activity space later in life, regardless of whether PTSD develops.