Basic Symbolic Number Skills, but Not Formal Mathematics Performance, Longitudinally Predict Mathematics Anxiety in the First Years of Primary School.

Mathematical anxiety (MA) and mathematics performance typically correlate negatively in studies of adolescents and adults, but not always amongst young children, with some theorists questioning the relevance of MA to mathematics performance in this age group. Evidence is also limited in relation to the developmental origins of MA and whether MA in young children can be linked to their earlier mathematics performance. To address these questions, the current study investigated whether basic and formal mathematics skills around 4 and 5 years of age were predictive of MA around the age of 7-8. Additionally, we also examined the cross-sectional relationships between MA and mathematics performance in 7-8-year-old children. Specifically, children in our study were assessed in their first (T1; aged 4-5), second (T2; aged 5-6), and fourth years of school (T3; aged 7-8). At T1 and T2, children completed measures of basic numerical skills, IQ, and working memory, as well as curriculum-based mathematics tests. At T3, children completed two self-reported MA questionnaires, together with a curriculum-based mathematics test. The results showed that MA could be reliably measured in a sample of 7-8-year-olds and demonstrated the typical negative correlation between MA and mathematical performance (although the strength of this relationship was dependent on the specific content domain). Importantly, although early formal mathematical skills were unrelated to later MA, there was evidence of a longitudinal relationship between basic early symbolic number skills and later MA, supporting the idea that poorer basic numerical skills relate to the development of MA.

Toward an Account of Intuitive Time.

People hold intuitive theories of the physical world, such as theories of matter, energy, and motion, in the sense that they have a coherent conceptual structure supporting a network of beliefs about the domain. It is not yet clear whether people can also be said to hold a shared intuitive theory of time. Yet, philosophical debates about the metaphysical nature of time often revolve around the idea that people hold one or more "common sense" assumptions about time: that there is an objective "now"; that the past, present, and future are fundamentally different in nature; and that time passes or flows. We empirically explored the question of whether people indeed share some or all of these assumptions by asking adults to what extent they agreed with a set of brief statements about time. Across two analyses, subsets of people's beliefs about time were found consistently to covary in ways that suggested stable underlying conceptual dimensions related to aspects of the "common sense" assumptions described by philosophers. However, distinct subsets of participants showed three mutually incompatible profiles of response, the most frequent of which did not closely match all of philosophers' claims about common sense time. These exploratory studies provide a useful starting point in attempts to characterize intuitive theories of time.

Medicaid-Insured Client Characteristics and Quit Outcomes at the Arizona Smokers' Helpline.

Medicaid-insured individuals who smoke experience disparities in quitting and are a priority population for assistance. This retrospective cohort study of Arizona Smokers' Helpline clients (Jan 2014-Mar 2019) examined the association between insurance status, treatment, and smoking cessation. When compared to clients with non-Medicaid insurance or no insurance, clients with Medicaid (26%) were more likely to be female, referred directly to the ASHLine by a healthcare or community partner, smoke in the home, and report having a mental health condition. They also were less likely to utilize cessation medication and reported receiving less social support to quit. Controlling for these and other theoretically relevant variables, insurance status was stratified (Medicaid, non-Medicaid, and uninsured), and quit outcomes were compared by level of treatment (4 treatment groups: more and less than 3 coaching sessions and cessation medication use yes/no). Compared to clients who received 3+ coaching sessions, those who had less than 3 coaching sessions had significantly lower adjusted odds of quitting. Results were similar regardless of cessation medication use or insurance status. There is no indication that treatment effects differ by insurance status. While insurance status appears to proxy for other important factors like low social and economic status and higher comorbidity prevalence, in a quitline setting, quitting is associated with additional, high-quality coaching. Where coaching sessions may offset social and economic barriers to quitting, quitlines may consider focusing on assisting Medicaid-insured clients to connect and engage with treatment.

The effect of episodic future thinking on young children's future-oriented decision making.

We investigated whether the developmental emergence of episodic future thinking (EFT) is associated with performance on a type of delay of gratification task: a delay choice task that involved choosing between a small reward now or a larger reward the next day. In Study 1, 4- to 5-year-olds' (N = 99) EFT as measured by a tool saving task was significantly associated with performance on the delay choice task, but this was not the case for other EFT measures. Study 2 compared the performance of 4- to 5-year-olds (N = 130) on the delay choice task when cued to think about either a future, past, or habitual event versus a no-cue baseline. Overall, cuing impaired performance on the delay choice task. Although EFT does show a relation to performance in a delay choice task in preschoolers, deliberately engaging in thought about future events may be too taxing in young children to reliably enhance the ability to make future-oriented decisions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

More Later: Delay of Gratification and Thought About the Future in Children.

We investigated whether individual differences in future time perception and the detail with which future events are imagined are related to children's delay of gratification. We administered a delay choice task (real rewards), a delay discounting task (hypothetical rewards), a novel future time perception measure, an episodic future thinking (EFT) interview and IQ measures to a sample of 7- to 11-year-olds (N = 132) drawn from a urban predominately white population in N. Ireland. We found a strong correlation between delay choice and delay discounting. Future time perception and EFT were related to delay discounting, however only the relation with future time perception survived controlling for age and IQ. Children who showed greater compression of future time periods were the steepest discounters.

Pain in the Past and Pleasure in the Future: The Development of Past-Future Preferences for Hedonic Goods.

It seems self-evident that people prefer painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future. Indeed, it has been claimed that, for hedonic goods, this preference is absolute (Sullivan, 2018). Yet very little is known about the extent to which people demonstrate explicit preferences regarding the temporal location of hedonic experiences, about the developmental trajectory of such preferences, and about whether such preferences are impervious to differences in the quantity of envisaged past and future pain or pleasure. We find consistent evidence that, all else being equal, adults and children aged 7 and over prefer pleasure to lie in the future and pain in the past and believe that other people will, too. They also predict that other people will be happier when pleasure is in the future rather than the past but sadder when pain is in the future rather than the past. Younger children have the same temporal preferences as adults for their own painful experiences, but they prefer their pleasure to lie in the past and do not predict that others' levels of happiness or sadness vary dependent on whether experiences lie in the past or the future. However, from the age of 7, temporal preferences were typically abandoned at the earliest opportunity when the quantity of past pain or pleasure was greater than the quantity located in the future. Past-future preferences for hedonic goods emerge early developmentally but are surprisingly flexible.

The Early Elementary School Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (the EES-AMAS): A New Adapted Version of the AMAS to Measure Math Anxiety in Young Children.

In the past decade, there has been increasing interest in understanding how and when math anxiety (MA) develops. The incidence and effects of MA in primary school children, and its relations with math achievement, have been investigated. Nevertheless, only a few studies have focused on the first years of primary school, highlighting that initial signs of MA may emerge as early as 6 years of age. Nevertheless, there are some issues with measuring MA in young children. One of these is that, although several scales have been recently developed for this age group, the psychometric properties of most of these instruments have not been adequately tested. There is also no agreement in the number and identity of the factors that underlie MA at this young age. Some scales also consist of several items, which make them impractical to use in multivariate studies, which aim at the simultaneous measurement of several constructs. Finally, most scales have been developed and validated in US populations, and it is unclear if they are appropriate to be used in other countries. In order to address these issues, the current studies aimed at developing a short, new instrument to assess MA in early elementary school students, the Early Elementary School Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (the EES-AMAS). This scale is an adapted version of the Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (AMAS; Hopko et al., 2003), which is one of the most commonly used scales to measure MA and has been shown to be a valid and reliable measure across a number of countries and age groups. The psychometric properties of the new scale have been investigated by taking into account its dimensionality, reliability, and validity. Moreover, the gender invariance of the scale has been verified by showing the measurement equivalence of the scale when administered to male and female pupils. We have also demonstrated the equivalence of the scale across languages (Italian and English). Overall, the findings confirmed the validity and reliability of the new scale in assessing the early signs of math anxiety and in measuring differences between genders and educational contexts. We have also shown that MA was already related to math performance, and teacher's ratings of children's math ability at this young age. Additionally, we have found no gender differences in MA in our samples of 6- and 7-year-old children, an important finding, given the strong evidence for gender differences in MA in older age groups.

Time Points: A Gestural Study of the Development of Space-Time Mappings.

Human languages typically employ a variety of spatial metaphors for time (e.g., "I'm looking forward to the weekend"). The metaphorical grounding of time in space is also evident in gesture. The gestures that are performed when talking about time bolster the view that people sometimes think about regions of time as if they were locations in space. However, almost nothing is known about the development of metaphorical gestures for time, despite keen interest in the origins of space-time metaphors. In this study, we examined the gestures that English-speaking 6-to-7-year-olds, 9-to-11-year-olds, 13-to-15-year-olds, and adults produced when talking about time. Participants were asked to explain the difference between pairs of temporal adverbs (e.g., "tomorrow" versus "yesterday") and to use their hands while doing so. There was a gradual increase across age groups in the propensity to produce spatial metaphorical gestures when talking about time. However, even a substantial majority of 6-to-7-year-old children produced a spatial gesture on at least one occasion. Overall, participants produced fewer gestures in the sagittal (front-back) axis than in the lateral (left-right) axis, and this was particularly true for the youngest children and adolescents. Gestures that were incongruent with the prevailing norms of space-time mappings among English speakers (leftward and backward for past; rightward and forward for future) gradually decreased with increasing age. This was true for both the lateral and sagittal axis. This study highlights the importance of metaphoricity in children's understanding of time. It also suggests that, by 6 to 7 years of age, culturally determined representations of time have a strong influence on children's spatial metaphorical gestures.

Factors Predicting Client Re-Enrollment in Tobacco Cessation Services in a State Quitline.

INTRODUCTION: Quitlines are an integral part of tobacco treatment programs and reach groups of smokers who have a wide range of barriers to cessation. Although tobacco dependence is chronic and relapsing, little research exists on factors that predict the likelihood of clients re-engaging and reconnecting with quitlines for treatment. The objective of this study was to describe factors that predict the re-enrollment of clients in Arizona's state quitline. METHODS: This was a retrospective analysis of data collected from clients (N = 49,284) enrolled in the Arizona Smokers' Helpline from January 2011 through June 2016. We used logistic regression to analyze predictors of re-enrollment in services after controlling for theoretically relevant baseline variables (eg, nicotine dependence, smokers in the home) and follow-up variables (eg, program use, quit outcome). RESULTS: Compared with clients who reported being quit after their first enrollment, clients who reported not being quit were almost 3 times as likely to re-enroll (odds ratio = 2.89; 95% confidence interval, 2.54-3.30). Other predictors were having a chronic condition or a mental health condition, greater nicotine dependence, and lower levels of social support. Women and clients not having other smokers in the home were more likely to re-enroll than were men and clients not living with other smokers. CONCLUSION: Understanding baseline and in-program factors that predict client-initiated re-enrollment can help quitlines tailor strategies to proactively re-engage clients who may have difficulty maintaining long-term abstinence.

Quit outcomes among clients ineligible for cessation medication through the state quitline: a retrospective, observational study.

BACKGROUND: Distribution of tobacco cessation medications through state quitlines increases service utilization and quit outcomes. However, some state quitlines have moved to models in which callers are instructed to obtain quit medications through their health insurance pharmaceutical benefit. We aimed to investigate the impact of this policy on medication access and quit outcomes in the state quitline setting for clients who must obtain covered medications through the state Medicaid program. We hypothesized that clients with Medicaid who were referred by their healthcare provider would be more likely to report using quit medication and have higher quit rates compared to clients with Medicaid who engaged the quitline on their own. METHODS: An observational, retrospective study was conducted using state quitline clients with Medicaid health insurance who were ineligible for quitline provided cessation medications. Clients were stratified by referral type: self-referred, passively referred, and proactively referred. Unadjusted and adjusted logistic regression was used to estimate the effect of referral type on both quit status and cessation medication use. RESULTS: Proactively referred clients were less likely to use quit medication (53.6%) compared to self (56.9%) and passively referred clients (61.1%). Proactively referred clients had lower quit rates (31.4%), as compared to passively referred (36.0%) and self-referred (35.1%). In adjusted models, proactively referred clients were significantly less likely to be quit than passively referred clients (OR = 0.75, 95% CI: 0.56, 0.99). There were no statistically significant differences in medication use or number of coaching sessions among proactive, passive, and self-referred clients in adjusted models. CONCLUSIONS: In adjusted models, medication use did not significantly differ by mode of entry in this population of Medicaid beneficiaries. Psychosocial factors such as intention to quit in the next 30 days, social support for quitting, education level, race, and ethnicity impacted quit status and differed by mode of entry. Quitlines should use tailored strategies to increase engagement and reduce barriers among proactively referred clients.

Developmental Dyscalculia is Characterized by Order Processing Deficits: Evidence from Numerical and Non-Numerical Ordering Tasks.

This study tested the hypothesis that individuals with dyscalculia have an order processing deficit. The ordering measures included both numerical and non-numerical ordering tasks, and ordering of both familiar and novel sequences was assessed. Magnitude processing/estimation tasks and measures of inhibition skills were also administered. The participants were 20 children with developmental dyscalculia, and 20 children without maths difficulties. The two groups were closely matched on age, gender, socio-economic status, educational experiences, IQ and reading ability. The findings revealed differences between the groups in both ordering and magnitude processing skills. Nevertheless, diagnostic status was best predicted by order processing abilities.

Young children's non-numerical ordering ability at the start of formal education longitudinally predicts their symbolic number skills and academic achievement in maths.

Ordinality is a fundamental feature of numbers and recent studies have highlighted the role that number ordering abilities play in mathematical development (e.g., Lyons et al., ), as well as mature mathematical performance (e.g., Lyons & Beilock, ). The current study tested the novel hypothesis that non-numerical ordering ability, as measured by the ordering of familiar sequences of events, also plays an important role in maths development. Ninety children were tested in their first school year and 87 were followed up at the end of their second school year, to test the hypothesis that ordinal processing, including the ordering of non-numerical materials, would be related to their maths skills both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. The results confirmed this hypothesis. Ordinal processing measures were significantly related to maths both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, and children's non-numerical ordering ability in their first year of school (as measured by order judgements for everyday events and the parents' report of their child's everyday ordering ability) was the strongest longitudinal predictor of maths one year later, when compared to several measures that are traditionally considered to be important predictors of early maths development. Children's everyday ordering ability, as reported by parents, also significantly predicted growth in formal maths ability between Year 1 and Year 2, although this was not the case for the event ordering task. The present study provides strong evidence that domain-general ordering abilities play an important role in the development of children's maths skills at the beginning of formal education.

Impact of Healthy Vending Machine Options in a Large Community Health Organization.

PURPOSE: To determine whether increasing the proportion of healthier options in vending machines decreases the amount of calories, fat, sugar, and sodium vended, while maintaining total sales revenue. DESIGN: This study evaluated the impact of altering nutritious options to vending machines throughout the Banner Health organization by comparing vended items' sales and nutrition information over 6 months compared to the same 6 months of the previous year. SETTING: Twenty-three locations including corporate and patient-care centers. INTERVENTION: Changing vending machine composition toward more nutritious options. MEASURES: Comparisons of monthly aggregates of sales, units vended, calories, fat, sodium, and sugar vended by site. ANALYSIS: A pre-post analysis using paired t tests comparing 6 months before implementation to the equivalent 6 months postimplementation. RESULTS: Significant average monthly decreases were seen for calories (16.7%, P = .002), fat (27.4%, P ≤ .0001), sodium (25.9%, P ≤ .0001), and sugar (11.8%, P = .045) vended from 2014 to 2015. Changes in revenue and units vended did not change from 2014 to 2015 ( P = .58 and P = .45, respectively). CONCLUSION: Increasing the proportion of healthier options in vending machines from 20% to 80% significantly lowered the amount of calories, sodium, fat, and sugar vended, while not reducing units vended or having a negative financial impact.

Can I Count on Getting Better? Association between Math Anxiety and Poorer Understanding of Medical Risk Reductions.

BACKGROUND: Lower numerical ability is associated with poorer understanding of health statistics, such as risk reductions of medical treatment. For many people, despite good numeracy skills, math provokes anxiety that impedes an ability to evaluate numerical information. Math-anxious individuals also report less confidence in their ability to perform math tasks. We hypothesized that, independent of objective numeracy, math anxiety would be associated with poorer responding and lower confidence when calculating risk reductions of medical treatments. METHODS: Objective numeracy was assessed using an 11-item objective numeracy scale. A 13-item self-report scale was used to assess math anxiety. In experiment 1, participants were asked to interpret the baseline risk of disease and risk reductions associated with treatment options. Participants in experiment 2 were additionally provided a graphical display designed to facilitate the processing of math information and alleviate effects of math anxiety. Confidence ratings were provided on a 7-point scale. RESULTS: Individuals of higher objective numeracy were more likely to respond correctly to baseline risks and risk reductions associated with treatment options and were more confident in their interpretations. Individuals who scored high in math anxiety were instead less likely to correctly interpret the baseline risks and risk reductions and were less confident in their risk calculations as well as in their assessments of the effectiveness of treatment options. Math anxiety predicted confidence levels but not correct responding when controlling for objective numeracy. The graphical display was most effective in increasing confidence among math-anxious individuals. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that math anxiety is associated with poorer medical risk interpretation but is more strongly related to confidence in interpretations.

Must analysis of meaning follow analysis of form? A time course analysis.

Many models of word recognition assume that processing proceeds sequentially from analysis of form to analysis of meaning. In the context of morphological processing, this implies that morphemes are processed as units of form prior to any influence of their meanings. Some interpret the apparent absence of differences in recognition latencies to targets (SNEAK) in form and semantically similar (sneaky-SNEAK) and in form similar and semantically dissimilar (sneaker-SNEAK) prime contexts at a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 48 ms as consistent with this claim. To determine the time course over which degree of semantic similarity between morphologically structured primes and their targets influences recognition in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared facilitation for the same targets after semantically similar and dissimilar primes across a range of SOAs (34-100 ms). The effect of shared semantics on recognition latency increased linearly with SOA when long SOAs were intermixed (Experiments 1A and 1B) and latencies were significantly faster after semantically similar than dissimilar primes at homogeneous SOAs of 48 ms (Experiment 2) and 34 ms (Experiment 3). Results limit the scope of form-then-semantics models of recognition and demonstrate that semantics influences even the very early stages of recognition. Finally, once general performance across trials has been accounted for, we fail to provide evidence for individual differences in morphological processing that can be linked to measures of reading proficiency.

Semantic similarity influences early morphological priming in Serbian: a challenge to form-then-meaning accounts of word recognition.

Semantically similar (e.g., coolant-COOL) primes have produced greater facilitation than have form-similar but semantically dissimilar (e.g., rampant-RAMP) primes when English words have appeared in the forward-masked primed lexical decision task (Feldman, O'Connor, & Moscoso del Prado Martín, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16: 684-691, 2009). These results challenge claims that form-based, semantically blind activation underlies early morphological facilitation. Some have argued that the English materials in previous studies were not ideally constructed, insofar as the types of spelling changes to affixed stems differed in the semantically similar and dissimilar pairs. The present study exploited Serbian's bialphabetism, rich morphology, and homographic (form-identical) stems to replicate early effects of semantic similarity. Furthermore, it incorporated within-target manipulations of prime type and of alphabet, such that the alphabets of the prime-target pairs matched in Experiment 1a and alternated in Experiment 1b. Importantly, no letter or phoneme changes occurred between the stems of the primes and targets. These results revealed significant effects of semantic similarity that are comparable with and without alphabet alternation. The semantic effects in Serbian replicated almost exactly those in English (Feldman et al., Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16: 684-691, 2009), which suggests that even early in the course of processing, morphemes are units of meaning as well as of form. The results failed to support models of lexical processing that postulate sequential access, first to the morphological form, and then to the semantic aspects of words.

Does subliminal priming of free response choices depend on task set or automatic response activation?

In a task requiring speeded bidirectional responses to arrow symbols (≪,≫), "free choice" responses to interspersed bidirectional stimuli (<>) are influenced by masked directional primes (e.g., Schlaghecken & Eimer, 2004). By varying stimulus-response (S-R) compatibility, we tested whether this priming effect is mediated by the conscious instructional set, or instead by pre-existing directional associations to the symbols. In two experiments, one group of participants was instructed to respond with the hand consistent with the implied direction of the arrow symbols, while another group was instructed to make the spatially opposite responses. Both groups showed priming of "free choice" responses. However, such priming was always biased according to the instructional set rather than pre-existing associations. Subliminal priming of "free choice" responses therefore depends on conscious task goals.

Fast trial pacing in a lexical decision task reveals a decay of automatic semantic activation.

We report an experiment showing that reducing attentional resources by presenting trials with a short, 400 ms intertrial interval (ITI) (a) did not affect semantic priming at a 160 ms prime-to-target stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA), relative to a 2500 ms ITI, and (b) eliminated the priming that occurred at a 1200 ms SOA when the ITI was 2500 ms. However, the elimination of priming at the 1200 ms SOA occurred only when the relatedness proportion (RP, proportion of related primes and targets) was .25 and not when it was .75. We interpret these results as showing that attentional/strategic priming occurs with an RP as low as .25, but only when sufficient attentional resources are available. Equally important, this is the first direct evidence that automatic semantic activation decays within 1200 ms in the standard semantic-priming/lexical-decision paradigm when attentional resources are not being used to maintain the goal of sustaining prime activation. We further argue that the frequent occurrences of related primes and targets with a high RP serve as reminders to maintain that goal such that cognitive load does not reduce long-SOA priming when the RP is high.

Early morphological processing is morphosemantic and not simply morpho-orthographic: a violation of form-then-meaning accounts of word recognition.

Many studies have suggested that a word's orthographic form must be processed before its meaning becomes available. Some interpret the (null) finding of equal facilitation after semantically transparent and opaque morphologically related primes in early stages of morphological processing as consistent with this view. Recent literature suggests that morphological facilitation tends to be greater after transparent than after opaque primes, however. To determine whether the degree of semantic transparency influences parsing into a stem and a suffix (morphological decomposition) in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared patterns of facilitation between semantically transparent (e.g., coolant-cool) and opaque (e.g., rampant-ramp) prime-target pairs. Form properties of the stem (frequency, neighborhood size, and prime-target letter overlap), as well as related-unrelated and transparent-opaque affixes, were matched. Morphological facilitation was significantly greater for semantically transparent pairs than for opaque pairs. Ratings of prime-target relatedness predicted the magnitude of facilitation. The results limit the scope of form-then-meaning models of word recognition and demonstrate that semantic similarity can influence even early stages of morphological processing.

Priming effects on temporal order judgments about words: perceived temporal priority or response bias?

In a temporal order judgment task, in which observers select which of two words appeared first, Stolz (1999) found that observers were more likely to select the word that had been semantically primed. Using repetition priming, we replicated Stolz's finding and extended her results by demonstrating that the effect was due to both (1) repetition priming causing the primed item to be perceived as having occurred earlier and (2) a response bias to guess the repetition primed item as the correct response. We discuss our new finding that priming induces an attentional precedence effect in the context of previous research suggesting that exogenous spatial cuing induces an attentional precedence effect but identity or semantic priming may not.