Disability,family and technical aids: a study of how disabling/enabling experiences come about in hybrid family relations

Research regarding disabling situations generally focuses on disabling situations within a public society ‘out there’. In our research, however, the intimate family setting itself appears central to the emergence of dis/enabling experiences. Moreover, the relationships that shaped these experiences not only involve human family members but also the technical aids associated with people’s specific impairments. Biographical narratives with users of three different technical aids including hearing aids, arm prostheses and incontinence products demonstrate that studying the making of (dis)ability in hybrid family settings is essential for understanding the emergence of (dis)ability in general.     

Blocking Probabilities in Erlang Loss Queues with Advance Reservation

We study the blocking probability in a continuous time loss queue, in which resources can be claimed a random time in advance. We identify classes of loss queues where the advance reservation results in increased or decreased blocking probabilities. The lower blocking probabilities are achieved because the system tends to favor short jobs. We provide analytical and numerical results to establish the connection between the system’s parameters and either an increase or decrease of blocking probabilities, compared to the system without reservation.     

Learning Stimulus‐Location Associations in 8‐ and 11‐Month‐Old Infants: Multimodal Versus Unimodal Information

Research on the influence of multimodal information on infants' learning is inconclusive. While one line of research finds that multimodal input has a negative effect on learning, another finds positive effects. The present study aims to shed some new light on this discussion by studying the influence of multimodal information and accompanying stimulus complexity on the learning process. We assessed the influence of multimodal input on the trial‐by‐trial learning of 8‐ and 11‐month‐old infants. Using an anticipatory eye movement paradigm, we measured how infants learn to anticipate the correct stimulus–location associations when exposed to visual‐only, auditory‐only (unimodal), or auditory and visual (multimodal) information. Our results show that infants in both the multimodal and visual‐only conditions learned the stimulus–location associations. Although infants in the visual‐only condition appeared to learn in fewer trials, infants in the multimodal condition showed better anticipating behavior: as a group, they had a higher chance of anticipating correctly on more consecutive trials than infants in the visual‐only condition. These findings suggest that effects of multimodal information on infant learning operate chiefly through effects on infants' attention.     

Real‐world scene perception in infants: What factors guide attention allocation?

The foci of visual attention were modeled as a function of perceptual salience, adult fixation locations, and attentional control mechanisms (measured in separate tasks) in infants (N = 45, 3‐ to 15‐month‐olds) as they viewed static real‐world scenes. After controlling for the center bias, the results showed that low‐level perceptual salience predicts where infants look. In addition, high‐level factors also played a role: Infants fixated parts of the scenes frequently fixated by adults and this effect was stronger for older than younger infants. In line with this finding, infant fixation durations were longer on regions more frequently fixated by adults, implying longer time taken to process the available information. Fixation durations decreased with age, and this decline interacted with orienting skills such that fixation durations decreased faster with age for infants with high orienting skills, relative to infants with low orienting skills. There was a further interaction between fixation durations and selective attention abilities: Infants with low selective attention skills showed a decrease in fixation durations with age, whereas infants with higher selective attention skills showed a slight increase in fixation durations with age. These findings imply that infants' visual processing of static real‐world stimuli develops in accord with attentional control.     

The longitudinal link between popularity,likeability, fear of negative evaluation and social avoidance across adolescence

This study investigated the longitudinal bidirectional associations between likeability, popularity, fear of negative evaluation, and social avoidance, to aid in preventing the negative consequences and persistent trajectories of low social status and heightened social anxiety. In total, 1741 adolescents in grades 7–9 participated at 3 yearly waves. A self-report questionnaire measured fear of negative evaluation. Peer nominations assessed likeability, popularity, and social avoidance. Lower popularity predicted more avoidance, and vice versa. More avoidance was related to lower likeability over time. Being less popular and/or more liked by peers, increased fear of negative evaluation. Support for a transactional model between social anxiety and social status was found, but distinguishing different social status and social anxiety components is necessary.