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Reasoning Task (reasoning + task)
Selected AbstractsMajor and minor depression in Parkinson's disease: a neuropsychological investigationEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NEUROLOGY, Issue 9 2006A. Costa Previous studies have failed to distinguish the differential contribution of major and minor depression to cognitive impairment in patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD). This study was aimed at investigating the relationships among major depression (MD), minor depression (MiD) and neuropsychological deficits in PD. Eighty-three patients suffering from PD participated in the study. MD and MiD were diagnosed by means of a structured interview (SCID-I) based on the DSM-IV criteria, and severity of depression was evaluated by the Beck Depression Inventory. For the neuropsychological assessment, we used standardized scales that measure verbal and visual episodic memory, working memory, executive functions, abstract reasoning and visual-spatial and language abilities. MD patients performed worse than PD patients without depression on two long-term verbal episodic memory tasks, on an abstract reasoning task and on three measures of executive functioning. The MiD patients' performances on the same tests fell between those of the other two groups of PD patients but did not show significant differences. Our results indicate that MD in PD is associated with a qualitatively specific neuropsychological profile that may be related to an alteration of prefrontal and limbic cortical areas. Moreover, the same data suggest that in these patients MiD and MD may represent a gradual continuum associated with increasing cognitive deficits. [source] Adolescents' collaboration in the classroom: Do peer relationships or gender matter?,PSYCHOLOGY IN THE SCHOOLS, Issue 8 2008Lisa M. Swenson Peer collaboration can be a useful tool in a school classroom to help students perform at their best. With whom should students be paired, though? Previous research yields inconsistent findings regarding whether the benefits of peer collaboration depend on the gender or friendship of collaborators. We paired students with a same-gender friend or a nonfriend in their classroom to examine whether friendship and specific dimensions of relationship quality were important for understanding adolescent (N = 132 high-school students) boys' and girls' performance on a scientific reasoning task. Dimensions of relationship quality were related to task performance with greater perceived conflict predicting poorer performance. Girls outperformed boys, but the difference was marginal and nonsignificant after accounting for dimensions of relationship quality. Friends' and nonfriends' performance was similar. Results are informative for educators who use collaboration as an instructional technique and for other professionals who work to support the development of effective reasoning and problem-solving skills among adolescents. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] Boys Will Be Boys; Cows Will Be Cows: Children's Essentialist Reasoning About Gender Categories and Animal SpeciesCHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 2 2009Marianne G. Taylor Two studies (N = 456) compared the development of concepts of animal species and human gender, using a switched-at-birth reasoning task. Younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) treated animal species and human gender as equivalent; they made similar levels of category-based inferences and endorsed similar explanations for development in these 2 domains. In contrast, 10-year-olds and adults treated gender and species concepts as distinct from one another. They viewed gender-linked behavioral properties as open to environmental influence and endorsed environment-based mechanisms to explain gender development. At all ages, children demonstrated differentiated reasoning about physical and behavioral properties, although this differentiation became more stable with age. The role of psychological essentialism in guiding conceptual development is discussed. [source] Spatial Reasoning With External Visualizations: What Matters Is What You See, Not Whether You InteractCOGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 7 2008Madeleine Keehner Abstract Three experiments examined the effects of interactive visualizations and spatial abilities on a task requiring participants to infer and draw cross sections of a three-dimensional (3D) object. The experiments manipulated whether participants could interactively control a virtual 3D visualization of the object while performing the task, and compared participants who were allowed interactive control of the visualization to those who were not allowed control. In Experiment 1, interactivity produced better performance than passive viewing, but the advantage of interactivity disappeared in Experiment 2 when visual input for the two conditions in a yoked design was equalized. In Experiments 2 and 3, differences in how interactive participants manipulated the visualization were large and related to performance. In Experiment 3, non-interactive participants who watched optimal movements of the display performed as well as interactive participants who manipulated the visualization effectively and better than interactive participants who manipulated the visualization ineffectively. Spatial ability made an independent contribution to performance on the spatial reasoning task, but did not predict patterns of interactive behavior. These experiments indicate that providing participants with active control of a computer visualization does not necessarily enhance task performance, whereas seeing the most task-relevant information does, and this is true regardless of whether the task-relevant information is obtained actively or passively. [source] | ||||||||||