Changes in physiological arousal during an arithmetic task: profiles of elementary school students and their associations with mindset, task performance and math grade.

Task-related change in physiological arousal is suggested to reflect active involvement with the task. While studies often examine such task-related changes in arousal as averaged across the entire task, the present study focused on temporal changes in arousal during a task. More specifically, we investigated changes in elementary school students' physiological arousal during an arithmetic task and associations between these changes and students' mindset, performance on the task, and math grades. We used a person-oriented approach to analyze the tonic electrodermal activity of 86 fourth graders, recorded while they were working on an arithmetic task. With model-based clustering of students' on-task electrodermal activity, we identified three groups of students with differing temporal dynamics of physiological arousal during the task: Increasing Arousal, Decreasing Arousal and Decreasing and Increasing Arousal. The Decreasing Arousal profile contained more students classified as holding a Fixed Mindset Tendency than would be expected if physiological profile membership and mindset tendency were independent. The Increasing Arousal profile performed better on the task than the Decreasing Arousal profile. No association was found with math grades. These results provide a new insight into individual differences in temporal patterns of on-task physiological arousal.

Finnish and Swedish riding school pupils' motivation towards participation in non-riding education.

Many horse enthusiasts have insufficient knowledge about horse behavior and welfare (BW) and learning and human-horse communication (LC), which poses a risk for both horse welfare and human safety. The main objective of this study was to investigate why riding school pupils participate or do not participate in non-riding education in BW and LC, using Self-determination theory (SDT). SDT posits that the quality of motivation is related to the individual's basic psychological needs. A convenience sample of 568 riding school pupils from Finland and Sweden completed an online questionnaire. The results showed that forty percent of the riding schools offered education in BW, and thirty-two in LC. Twenty-seven percent of the respondents participated in education in BW, and twenty-five in LC at their riding school. The respondents were autonomously motivated to participate in education, i.e., they would participate because it is interesting and personally important. Perceived needs satisfaction at the riding school predicted autonomous motivation to participate. Education was offered to a greater extent in Swedish riding schools and Swedish respondents participated more often, as well as experienced more autonomous motivation, relatedness and competence satisfaction compared with Finnish respondents. To our knowledge, this study is the first to explore riding school pupils' motivation towards non-riding education.

Development of associations between elementary school students' mindsets and attentional neural processing of feedback in an arithmetic task.

The aim of this study was to examine the development of the associations between elementary school students' mindsets and the attentional neural processing of positive and negative feedback in math. For this, we analyzed data collected twice from 100 Finnish elementary school students. During the autumn semesters of their 3rd and 4th grade, the participants' general intelligence mindset and math ability mindset were measured with a questionnaire, and their brain responses elicited by performance-relevant feedback were recorded during an arithmetic task. We found that students' fixed mindsets about general intelligence and math ability were associated with greater attention allocated to positive feedback as indicated by a larger P300. These associations were driven by the effects of mindsets on attention allocation to positive feedback in grade 4. Additionally, 4th graders' more fixed general intelligence mindset was marginally associated with greater attention allocated to negative feedback. In addition, the effects of both mindsets on attention allocation to feedback were marginally stronger when the children were older. The present results, although marginal in the case of negative feedback and mainly driven by effects in grade 4, are possibly a reflection of the greater self-relevance of feedback stimuli for students with a more fixed mindset. It is also possible that these findings reflect the fact that, in evaluative situations, mindset could influence stimulus processing in general. The marginal increase in the effects of mindsets as children mature may reflect the development of coherent mindset meaning systems during elementary school years.

Children's inhibition skills are associated with their P3a latency-results from an exploratory study.

BACKGROUND: The P3a response is thought to reflect involuntary orienting to an unexpected stimulus and has been connected with set-shifting and inhibition in some studies. In our exploratory study, we investigated if the amplitude and the latency of the P3a response were associated with the performance in a modified flanker task measuring inhibition and set-shifting in 10-year-old children (N = 42). Children participated in electroencephalography (EEG) measurement with an auditory multifeature paradigm including standard, deviating, and novel sounds. In addition, they performed a separate flanker task requiring inhibition and set-shifting skills. RESULTS: The P3a latencies for deviant sounds were associated with the reaction time reflecting inhibition: the shorter the response latencies were, the faster the reaction time was. The P3a latencies for novel sounds were not linked to the reaction times reflecting either inhibition or set-shifting. In addition, the magnitude of the P3a response was not associated with the performance in the flanker task. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that P3a response latency and reaction speed reflecting inhibitory skills are based on shared neural mechanism. Thus, the present study brings new insight to the field investigating the associations between behavior and its neural indices.

Mindsets and Neural Mechanisms of Automatic Reactions to Negative Feedback in Mathematics in Elementary School Students.

Neuroscientific research regarding mindsets is so far scarce, especially among children. Moreover, even though research indicates the importance of domain specificity of mindsets, this has not yet been investigated in neuroscientific studies regarding implicit beliefs. The purpose of this study was to examine general intelligence and math ability mindsets and their relations to automatic reactions to negative feedback in mathematics in the Finnish elementary school context. For this, event-related potentials of 97 elementary school students were measured during the completion of an age-appropriate math task, where the participants received performance-relevant feedback throughout the task. Higher growth mindset was marginally associated with a larger P300 response and significantly associated with a smaller later peaking negative-going waveform. Moreover, with the domain-specific experimental setting, we found a higher growth mindset regarding math ability, but not general intelligence, to be associated with these brain responses elicited by negative feedback regarding errors in math. This suggests that it might be important to address domain-specific and even academic-domain-specific beliefs in addition to general mindsets in research and practice.

Cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the mnemonic effect of songs after stroke.

Sung melody provides a mnemonic cue that can enhance the acquisition of novel verbal material in healthy subjects. Recent evidence suggests that also stroke patients, especially those with mild aphasia, can learn and recall novel narrative stories better when they are presented in sung than spoken format. Extending this finding, the present study explored the cognitive mechanisms underlying this effect by determining whether learning and recall of novel sung vs. spoken stories show a differential pattern of serial position effects (SPEs) and chunking effects in non-aphasic and aphasic stroke patients (N = 31) studied 6 months post-stroke. The structural neural correlates of these effects were also explored using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and deterministic tractography (DT) analyses of structural MRI data. Non-aphasic patients showed more stable recall with reduced SPEs in the sung than spoken task, which was coupled with greater volume and integrity (indicated by fractional anisotropy, FA) of the left arcuate fasciculus. In contrast, compared to non-aphasic patients, the aphasic patients showed a larger recency effect (better recall of the last vs. middle part of the story) and enhanced chunking (larger units of correctly recalled consecutive items) in the sung than spoken task. In aphasics, the enhanced chunking and better recall on the middle verse in the sung vs. spoken task correlated also with better ability to perceive emotional prosody in speech. Neurally, the sung > spoken recency effect in aphasic patients was coupled with greater grey matter volume in a bilateral network of temporal, frontal, and parietal regions and also greater volume of the right inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF). These results provide novel cognitive and neurobiological insight on how a repetitive sung melody can function as a verbal mnemonic aid after stroke.

Maturation of Speech-Sound ERPs in 5-6-Year-Old Children: A Longitudinal Study.

The maturation of 5-6-year-old children's auditory discrimination - indicated by the development of the auditory event-related-potentials (ERPs) - has not been previously studied in longitudinal settings. For the first time, we present here the results based on extensive dataset collected from 75 children. We followed the 5- to 6-year-olds for 20 months and measured their ERPs four times with the same multifeature paradigm with phonemic stimuli. The amplitude of the mismatch negativity (MMN) response increased during this time for vowel, vowel duration and frequency changes. Furthermore, the P3a component started to mature toward adult-like positivity for the vowel, intensity and frequency deviants and the late discriminative negativity (LDN) component decreased with age for vowel and intensity deviants. All the changes in the components seemed to happen during the second follow-up year, when Finnish children are taught letter symbols and other preliminary academic skills before going to school at the age of seven. Therefore, further studies are needed to clarify if these changes in the auditory discrimination are purely age-related or due to increasing linguistic knowledge of the children.

Music playschool enhances children's linguistic skills.

Several studies have suggested that intensive musical training enhances children's linguistic skills. Such training, however, is not available to all children. We studied in a community setting whether a low-cost, weekly music playschool provided to 5-6-year-old children in kindergartens could already affect their linguistic abilities. Children (N = 66) were tested four times over two school-years with Phoneme processing and Vocabulary subtests, along with tests for Perceptual reasoning skills and Inhibitory control. We compared the development of music playschool children to their peers either attending to similarly organized dance lessons or not attending to either activity. Music playschool significantly improved the development of children's phoneme processing and vocabulary skills. No such improvements on children's scores for non-verbal reasoning and inhibition were obtained. Our data suggest that even playful group music activities - if attended to for several years - have a positive effect on pre-schoolers' linguistic skills. Therefore we promote the concept of implementing regular music playschool lessons given by professional teachers in early childhood education.

Sung melody enhances verbal learning and recall after stroke.

Coupling novel verbal material with a musical melody can potentially aid in its learning and recall in healthy subjects, but this has never been systematically studied in stroke patients with cognitive deficits. In a counterbalanced design, we presented novel verbal material (short narrative stories) in both spoken and sung formats to stroke patients at the acute poststroke stage and 6 months poststroke. The task comprised three learning trials and a delayed recall trial. Memory performance on the spoken and sung tasks did not differ at the acute stage, whereas sung stories were learned and recalled significantly better compared with spoken stories at the 6 months poststroke stage. Interestingly, this pattern of results was evident especially in patients with mild aphasia, in whom the learning of sung versus spoken stories improved more from the acute to the 6-month stages compared with nonaphasic patients. Overall, these findings suggest that singing could be used as a mnemonic aid in the learning of novel verbal material in later stages of recovery after stroke.

Phoneme processing skills are reflected in children's MMN responses.

Phonological awareness (PA), the core contributor in phoneme processing abilities, has a link to later reading skills in children. However, the associations between PA and neural auditory discrimination are not clear. We used event-related potential (ERP) methodology and neuropsychological testing to monitor the neurocognitive basis of phonological awareness in typically developing children. We measured 5-6-year-old children's (N=70) phoneme processing, word completion and perceptual reasoning skills and compared their test results to their brain responses to phonemic changes, separately for each test. We found that children performing better in Phoneme processing test showed larger mismatch negativity (MMN) responses than children scoring lower in the same test. In contrast, no correspondence between test scores and brain responses was found for Auditory closure. Thus, the results suggest that automatic auditory change detection is linked to phoneme awareness in preschool children.