Psychophysiological responses of shame in young children: A thermal imaging study.

Shame can be defined as the emotional response to one's violations of rules being exposed to others. However, it is difficult to objectively measure this concept. This study examined the psychophysiological indicators of shame in young children using behavioral methods and thermography, which measures facial temperatures that reflect blood flow changes related to emotions. Four- to six-year-old children participated in an "animal guessing game," in which they lied about having violated a rule. They were assigned to either the exposure or the non-exposure group. In the exposure group, participants' lies were exposed by the experimenter, whereas in the non-exposure group, their lies were not. Results showed that at the behavioral level, participants in the exposure group expressed characteristic behaviors of shame (e.g., embarrassed smiles) more often than those in the non-exposure group. Moreover, the nasal temperatures of participants in the exposure group were higher than those of participants in the other group after the lie was exposed. These results suggest that participants' lies being exposed induced psychophysiological responses and consequently raised their nasal temperature. This finding indicates that psychophysiological responses can enable us to objectively measure higher-order emotions in young children.

Sequential processing facilitates Hebb repetition learning in visuospatial domains.

Exposure to the same information improves auditory/verbal short-term memory performance, but such improvement is not always observed in visual short-term memory. In this study, we demonstrate that sequential processing makes visuospatial repetition learning efficient in a paradigm that employs a similar design previously used for an auditory/verbal domain. When we presented sets of color patches simultaneously in Experiments 1-4, recall accuracy did not increase with repetition; however, once color patches were presented sequentially in Experiment 5, accuracy did increase rapidly with repetition, even when participants engaged in articulatory suppression. Moreover, these learning dynamics matched those in Experiment 6, which used verbal materials. These findings suggest that (a) sequential focus on each item facilitates a repetition learning effect, indicating a temporal bottleneck is involved early in this process and (b) repetition learning is mechanistically similar across sensory modalities even though these modalities differently specialize in processing spatial or temporal information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Visual memory of a co-actor's target during joint search.

Studies on joint action show that when two actors turn-takingly attend to each other's target that appears one at a time, a partner's target is accumulated in memory. However, in the real world, actors may not be certain that they attend to the same object because multiple objects often appear simultaneously. In this study, we asked participant pairs to search for different targets in parallel from multiple objects and investigated the memory of a partner's target. We employed the contextual cueing paradigm, in which repetitive search forms associative memory between a target and a configuration of distractors that facilitates search. During the learning phase, exemplars of three target categories (i.e., bird, shoe, and tricycle) were presented among unique objects, and participant pairs searched for them. In Experiment 1, it was followed by a memory test about target exemplars. Consequently, the partner's target was better recognized than the target that nobody searched for. In Experiments 2a and 2b, the memory test was replaced with the transfer phase, where one individual from the pair searched for the category that nobody had searched for while the other individual searched for the category the partner had searched for in the learning phase. The transfer phase did not show search facilitation underpinned by associative memory between the partner's target and distractors. These results suggest that when participant pairs search for different targets in parallel, they accumulate the partner's target in memory but may not form its associative memory with the distractors that facilitates its search.

The contextual cueing effect disappears during joint search in preschool children.

During preschool years, children's interacting with others increases. One of the involved developmental skills is task co-representation, through which children aged 5 years and older represent a partner's task in a similar way to their own task. In adults, task co-representation makes participants attend to and form memories of objects relevant to both their own task and their partner's task; however, it is unclear whether children can also form such memories. In Experiment 1, we examined the memory facilitation of joint search using a contextual cueing effect paradigm. Children were presented with search displays repeatedly with the same or random layouts and searched and responded to the target either alone (the single group; n = 32; Mage = 73.6 months, range = 61-80) or with their parent (the joint group; n = 32; Mage = 74.3 months, range = 64-81). Results showed that the search with the same layouts was faster than that with the random layouts for the single group, indicating that children form associative memories of target and distractors relevant to their own task. For the joint group, this effect was not statistically different from that of the single group, with exploratory analysis suggesting that it was disrupted. In Experiment 2, children performed the search with a peer (n = 32; Mage = 72.7 months, range = 67-79) and the effect was also not found. Our findings suggest that the self's and partner's tasks are represented but might not be incorporated into associative memory in 5- and 6-year-old children.

COVID-19 school and kindergarten closure relates to children's social relationships: a longitudinal study in Japan.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led children to experience school closures. Although increasing evidence suggests that such intense social quarantine influences children's social relationships with others, longitudinal studies are limited. Using longitudinal data collected during (T1) and after (T2) intensive school closure and home confinement, this study investigated the impacts of social quarantine on children's social relationships. Japanese parents of children aged 0-9 years (n = 425) completed an online questionnaire that examined children's socio-emotional behavior and perceived proximity to parents or others. The results demonstrated that social quarantine was not significantly related to children's socio-emotional behavior across all age groups. However, changes in children's perceived proximity varied depending on certain age-related factors: elementary schoolers' perceived closeness to parents significantly decreased after the reopening of schools, whereas that to others, such as peers, increased. Such effects were not observed in infants and preschoolers. The follow-up survey 9-month after the reopening of schools (T3; n = 130) did not detect significant differences in both children's socio-emotional behavior and perceived proximity from that after the intense quarantine. These findings suggest that school closure and home confinement may have influenced children's social development differently across their age, and its effects were larger in perceived closeness rather than social behavior.

The neurobehavioral relationship between executive function and creativity during early childhood.

Increasing evidence from behavior and neuroimaging research indicates that executive function (EF) is related to creativity. However, most of these studies focused on adult and adolescent populations. The relationship between EF and creativity is unknown when EF undergoes rapid development during early childhood, due to the preschoolers' marginal skills of expressing their ideas, orally or in writing. Using a nonverbal, open-ended test, the present study examined whether creative thinking was related to cognitive flexibility in young children. Preschool children (N = 26) performed the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) and the Unusual Box Test (UBT), while their brain activation was recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We did not find any significant correlation between children's cognitive flexibility and creative thinking. However, fNIRS analyses showed that children's brain activation in the lateral prefrontal regions was significantly greater during the test phases of the UBT. Additionally, children who strongly recruited their ventrolateral prefrontal regions during the post-switch phases of the DCCS recruited the same regions while performing the UBT. Taken together, these findings suggest that children recruit their lateral prefrontal regions when expressing creative thinking, and that such creative thinking could be partially supported by cognitive flexibility in early childhood.

Learning of spatial configurations of a co-actor's attended objects in joint visual search.

Regarding the effects of joint action on visual memory, previous research has focused on the memory of a single object that a participant and their co-actor attended together (i.e., a shared situation), while the literature on memory has demonstrated that spatial regularity composed of multiple objects can also be learned. We aimed to examine whether the visuospatial regularity of the co-actor's attended objects could be strongly encoded. We repeatedly presented the same configuration of two targets and two sets of distractors in different colors (i.e., blue and red) to participants. In Experiment 1, pairs of participants simultaneously searched for the same target in the joint group while individual participants searched for the target alone in the single group. As a result, greater facilitation in reaction time was observed in earlier epochs in the joint group, reinforced by the learning of visuospatial regularity, compared to the single group. Experiment 2 examined whether the co-actor's attended context could be strongly encoded although two persons simultaneously searched for different targets (i.e., parallel situation) such that one searched for the blue target and the other for the red target. The results showed no evidence regarding participants' learning visuospatial regularity of the co-actor's attended objects, indicating that co-actor's learning information cannot be shared in this situation. This study revealed that facilitation of visuospatial learning in joint action would require two individuals to attend to the same objects when they perform the task.

Development of Cognitive Shifting from Others' Behavior in Young Children: A Near-infrared Spectroscopy Study.

This study examined the neural correlates of cognitive shifting when 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 45) engage in a social Dimensional Change Card Sort, where they sorted cards according to one dimension (execution phase) after observing another person sorting cards according to another dimension (observation phase) using near-infrared spectroscopy. Analyses using ANOVA revealed that older children who successfully performed the task exhibited significant lateral prefrontal activation during both phases, whereas younger children who failed the task exhibited the prefrontal activation only during the execution phases. The lateral prefrontal regions may play a role in cognitive shifting from others' behaviors.