Negative impact of daily screen use on inhibitory control network in preadolescence: A two-year follow-up study.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made an unprecedented shift in children's daily lives. Children are increasingly spending time with screens to learn and connect with others. As the online environment rapidly substitutes in-person experience, understanding children's neuropsychological trajectories associated with screen experiences is important. Previous findings suggest that excessive screen use can lead children to prefer more immediate rewards over delayed outcomes. We hypothesized that increased screen time delays a child's development of inhibitory control system in the brain (i.e., fronto-striatal circuitry). By analyzing neuropsychological data from 8324 children (9-11ys) from the ABCD Study, we found that children who had more screen time showed a higher reward orientation and weaker fronto-striatal connectivity. Importantly, we found that the daily screen exposure mediated the effect of reward sensitivity on the development of the inhibitory control system in the brain over a two year period. These findings suggest possible negative long-term impacts of increased daily screen time on children's neuropsychological development. The results further demonstrated that screen time influences dorsal striatum connectivity, which suggests that the effect of daily screen use is a habitual seeking behavior. The study provides neural and behavioral evidence for the negative impact of daily screen use on developing children.

No frills: Simple regularities in language can go a long way in the development of word knowledge.

Recent years have seen a flourishing of Natural Language Processing models that can mimic many aspects of human language fluency. These models harness a simple, decades-old idea: It is possible to learn a lot about word meanings just from exposure to language, because words similar in meaning are used in language in similar ways. The successes of these models raise the intriguing possibility that exposure to word use in language also shapes the word knowledge that children amass during development. However, this possibility is strongly challenged by the fact that models use language input and learning mechanisms that may be unavailable to children. Across three studies, we found that unrealistically complex input and learning mechanisms are unnecessary. Instead, simple regularities of word use in children's language input that they have the capacity to learn can foster knowledge about word meanings. Thus, exposure to language may play a simple but powerful role in children's growing word knowledge. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/dT83dmMffnM. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Natural Language Processing (NLP) models can learn that words are similar in meaning from higher-order statistical regularities of word use. Unlike NLP models, infants and children may primarily learn only simple co-occurrences between words. We show that infants' and children's language input is rich in simple co-occurrence that can support learning similarities in meaning between words. We find that simple co-occurrences can explain infants' and children's knowledge that words are similar in meaning.

Examining dependencies among different time scales in episodic memory - an experience sampling study.

We re-examined whether different time scales such as week, day of week, and hour of day are independently used during memory retrieval as has been previously argued (i.e., independence of scales). To overcome the limitations of previous studies, we used experience sampling technology to obtain test stimuli that have higher ecological validity. We also used pointwise mutual information to directly calculate the degree of dependency between time scales in a formal way. Participants were provided with a smartphone and were asked to wear it around their neck for two weeks, which was equipped with an app that automatically collected time, images, GPS, audio and accelerometry. After a one-week retention interval, participants were presented with an image that was captured during their data collection phase, and were tested on their memory of when the event happened (i.e., week, day of week, and hour). We find that, in contrast to previous arguments, memories of different time scales were not retrieved independently. Moreover, through rendering recurrence plots of the images that the participants collected, we provide evidence the dependency may have originated from the repetitive events that the participants encountered in their daily life.

Sources of Interference in Memory Across Development.

Episodic memory involves remembering not only what happened but also where and when the event happened. This multicomponent nature introduces different sources of interference that stem from previous experience. However, it is unclear how the contributions of these sources change across development and what might cause the changes. To address these questions, we tested 4- to 5-year-olds (n = 103), 7- to 8-year-olds (n = 82), and adults (n = 70) using item- and source-recognition memory tasks with various manipulations (i.e., list length, list strength, word frequency), and we decomposed sources of interference using a computational model. We found that interference stemming from other items on the study list rapidly decreased with development, whereas interference from preexperimental contexts gradually decreased but remained the major source of interference. The model further quantified these changes, indicating that the ability to discriminate items undergoes rapid development, whereas the ability to discriminate contexts undergoes protracted development. These results elucidate fundamental aspects of memory development.

Excessive Functional Coupling With Less Variability Between Salience and Default Mode Networks in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

BACKGROUND: Atypical activity in the salience network (SN) and default mode network (DMN) has been previously reported in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, no study to date has investigated the nature and dynamics of the interaction between these two networks in ASD. METHODS: Here, we aimed to characterize the functional connectivity between the SN and the DMN by using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange and comparing individuals with ASD (n = 325) to a typically developing group (n = 356). We examined static and dynamic levels of functional connectivity using the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) seed as a core region of the DMN. RESULTS: We found that individuals with ASD have higher mPFC connectivity with the insula, a core region of the SN, when compared with the typical development group. Moreover, the mPFC-insula coupling showed less variability in ASD compared with the typical development group. A novel semblance-based network dynamic analysis further confirmed that the strong mPFC-insula coupling in the ASD group reduced spontaneous attentional shift for possible external elements of the environment. Indeed, we found that excessive mPFC-insula coupling was significantly associated with a tendency for reduced social responsiveness. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that the internally oriented cognition in individuals with ASD may be due to excessive coupling between the DMN and the SN.

The Fallacy of an Airtight Alibi: Understanding Human Memory for "Where" Using Experience Sampling.

A primary challenge for alibi-generation research is establishing the ground truth of real-world events of interest. In the current study, we used a smartphone app to record data on adult participants (N = 51) for a month prior to a memory test. The app captured accelerometry data, GPS locations, and audio environments every 10 min. After a week-long retention interval, we asked participants to identify where they were at a given time from among four alternatives. Participants were incorrect 36% of the time. Furthermore, our forced-choice procedure allowed us to conduct a conditional logit analysis to assess the different aspects of the events that the participants experienced and their relative importance to the decision process. We found strong evidence that participants confuse days across weeks. In addition, people often confused weeks in general and also hours across days. Similarity of location induced more errors than similarity of audio environments or movement types.

Examining three-way binding as a constraint on statistical learning.

Models of statistical learning do not place constraints on the complexity of the memory structure that is formed during statistical learning, while empirical studies using the statistical learning task have only examined the formation of simple memory structures (e.g., two-way binding). On the contrary, the memory literature, using explicit memory tasks, has shown that people are able to form memory structures of different complexities and that more complex memory structures (e.g., three-way binding) are usually more difficult to form. We examined whether complex memory structures such as three-way bindings can be implicitly formed through statistical learning by utilizing manipulations that have been used in the paired-associate learning paradigm (e.g., AB/ABr condition). Through three experiments, we show that while simple two-way binding structures can be formed implicitly, three-way bindings can only be formed with explicit instructions. The results indicate that explicit attention may be a necessary component in forming three-way memory structures and suggest that existing models should place constraints on the representational structures that can be formed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Dual processes in memory: Evidence from memory of time-of-occurrence of events.

Bastin et al. present a framework that draws heavily on existing ideas of dual processes in memory in order to make predictions about memory deficits in clinical populations. It has been difficult to find behavioral evidence for multiple memory processes but we offer some evidence for dual processes in a related domain: memory for the time-of-occurrence of events.

A system for collecting and analyzing experience-sampling data.

Online and sensor technologies promise to transform many areas of psychological enquiry. However, collecting and analyzing such data are challenging. In this article, we introduce the unforgettable.me experience-sampling platform. Unforgettable.me includes an app that can collect image, Global Positioning System, accelerometry, and audio data in a continuous fashion and upload the data to a server. The data are then automatically augmented by using online databases to identify the address, type of location, and weather conditions, as well as provide street view imagery. In addition, machine-learning classifiers are run to identify aspects of the audio data such as voice and traffic. The augmented data are available to participants in the form of a keyword search interface, as well as via several visualization mechanisms. In addition, Unforgettable Research Services partners with If This Then That (IFTTT), and so can accumulate data from any of over 600 sources, including social media, wearables, and other devices. Through IFTTT, buttons can be added as icons to smartphones to allow participants to register mood conveniently, as well as behaviors and physiological states such as happiness, microaggressions, or illness. Furthermore, unforgettable.me incorporates a mechanism that allows researchers to run experiments and analyze data within an authenticated environment without viewing users' private data.

Privacy versus open science.

Pervasive internet and sensor technologies promise to revolutionize psychological science. However, the data collected using these technologies are often very personal-indeed, the value of the data is often directly related to how personal they are. At the same time, driven by the replication crisis, there is a sustained push to publish data to open repositories. These movements are in fundamental conflict. In this article, we propose a way to navigate this issue. We argue that there are significant advantages to be gained by ceding the ownership of data to the participants who generate the data. We then provide desiderata for a privacy-preserving platform. In particular, we suggest that researchers should use an interface to perform experiments and run analyses, rather than observing the stimuli themselves. We argue that this method not only improves privacy but will also encourage greater compliance with good research practices than is possible through open repositories.

An associative account of the development of word learning.

Word learning is a notoriously difficult induction problem because meaning is underdetermined by positive examples. How do children solve this problem? Some have argued that word learning is achieved by means of inference: young word learners rely on a number of assumptions that reduce the overall hypothesis space by favoring some meanings over others. However, these approaches have difficulty explaining how words are learned from conversations or text, without pointing or explicit instruction. In this research, we propose an associative mechanism that can account for such learning. In a series of experiments, 4-year-olds and adults were presented with sets of words that included a single nonsense word (e.g. dax). Some lists were taxonomic (i.,e., all items were members of a given category), some were associative (i.e., all items were associates of a given category, but not members), and some were mixed. Participants were asked to indicate whether the nonsense word was an animal or an artifact. Adults exhibited evidence of learning when lists consisted of either associatively or taxonomically related items. In contrast, children exhibited evidence of word learning only when lists consisted of associatively related items. These results present challenges to several extant models of word learning, and a new model based on the distinction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations is proposed.

The development of episodic memory: items, contexts, and relations.

Episodic memory involves the formation of relational structures that bind information about the stimuli people experience to the contexts in which they experience them. The ability to form and retain such structures may be at the core of the development of episodic memory. In the first experiment reported here, 4- and 7-year-olds were presented with paired-associate learning tasks requiring memory structures of different complexity. A multinomial-processing tree model was applied to estimate the use of different structures in the two age groups. The use of two-way list-context-to-target structures and three-way structures was found to increase between the ages of 4 and 7. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the ability to form increasingly complex relational memory structures develops between the ages of 4 and 7 years and that this development extends well into adulthood. These results have important implications for theories of memory development.

The cost of selective attention in category learning: developmental differences between adults and infants.

Selective attention plays an important role in category learning. However, immaturities of top-down attentional control during infancy coupled with successful category learning suggest that early category learning is achieved without attending selectively. Research presented here examines this possibility by focusing on category learning in infants (6-8months old) and adults. Participants were trained on a novel visual category. Halfway through the experiment, unbeknownst to participants, the to-be-learned category switched to another category, where previously relevant features became irrelevant and previously irrelevant features became relevant. If participants attend selectively to the relevant features of the first category, they should incur a cost of selective attention immediately after the unknown category switch. Results revealed that adults demonstrated a cost, as evidenced by a decrease in accuracy and response time on test trials as well as a decrease in visual attention to newly relevant features. In contrast, infants did not demonstrate a similar cost of selective attention as adults despite evidence of learning both to-be-learned categories. Findings are discussed as supporting multiple systems of category learning and as suggesting that learning mechanisms engaged by adults may be different from those engaged by infants.