Electrophysiological Signals of Familiarity and Recency in the Infant Brain

Electrophysiological work in nonhuman primates has established the existence of multiple types of signals in the temporal lobe that contribute to recognition memory, including information regarding a stimulus’s relative novelty, familiarity, and recency of occurrence. We used high‐density event‐related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether young infants represent these distinct types of information about previously experienced items. Twenty‐four different highly familiar and initially novel items were each repeated exactly once either immediately ( Experiment 1 ), or following one intervening item ( Experiment 2 ). A late slow wave (LSW) component of the ERP exhibited neural responses consistent with recency signals over right‐central leads, but only when there were no intervening stimuli between repetitions. The LSW also exhibited responses consistent with familiarity signals over anterior‐temporal leads, but only when there were intervening stimuli between repetitions. A mid‐latency negative component (i.e., the Nc) also distinguished familiar from novel items, but did not exhibit a pattern of responding consistent with familiarity signals. These findings suggest that infants encode information about a variety of objects from their natural environments into long‐term memory, and can discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar items, and between recently seen and new items, very quickly (within 1 sec). They also suggest that infants represent information about not only whether a stimulus is familiar or unfamiliar but also whether it has been seen recently.     

THE DYNAMIC EFFECTS OF U.S. FOOD AID

Although food aid may have important medium- to long-term effects, there is a glaring absence of empirical research on food aid dynamics. This paper applies vector autoregression methods to data from 18 countries over the period 1961–95. We find evidence that food aid has a pronounced J-curve effect on recipient country per capita commercial food imports but only negligible negative effects on recipient country per capita food production. The commercial export gains are primarily enjoyed, however, by the donors' competitors, revealing heretofore unrecognized positive pecuniary trade externalities associated with foreign assistance. ( JEL F14, O13, Q17, Q18)     

Sources of Volunteer Motivation: Transformational Leadership and Personal Motives Influence Volunteer Outcomes

We examined the separate influences of volunteers' personal motives and their team leaders' behaviors on volunteer satisfaction and contributions, along with mediating processes suggested by self‐determination theory. Participants were 302 volunteers who worked in teams at various sites through a central agency. As predicted, both personal motives for volunteering and transformational leadership influenced volunteer satisfaction through enhanced work meaningfulness and higher‐quality team relationships. However, motives that predicted volunteer contribution were different from those that predicted satisfaction. Whereas satisfaction was positively associated with motives concerning esteem enhancement and value expression, contribution was positively associated with motives to gain understanding and negatively related to motives pertaining to esteem enhancement and social concerns. Transformational leadership was positively associated with volunteer satisfaction, but not with volunteer contributions. The theoretical ramifications of these findings are discussed, along with practical implications for the recruitment and retention of volunteers.     

‘Meeting them where they are at’: A practice note on implementation of the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention in an emergency family homeless shelter

Families experiencing homelessness report higher rates of traumatic exposure than the general population, and traumatic experiences can often be precipitating factors for entrance into a homeless shelter. Emergency shelter is meant to be a brief, temporary housing intervention to support families toward more stable and permanent living arrangements. Beyond this ecological intervention, there is a frequently unmet need for trauma-specific mental health services. Further still, psychosocial interventions to support sheltered families should be sensitive to both the trauma-specific needs of this population and the constraints of the shelter setting. The Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention (CFTSI) is a brief, secondary prevention protocol that aims to prevent PTSD after exposure to a traumatic event, with research demonstrating its effectiveness in acute care settings such as child advocacy centres and emergency departments. This case study illustrates the implementation of CFTSI in an emergency family shelter in a large urban area, highlighting the appropriateness of the intervention for the setting, its adaptability to client needs and its generalizability to other non-traditional intervention settings.     

Treating distressed couples with coexisting mental and physical disorders: directions for clinical training and practice

Relationship difficulties frequently coexist with significant emotional, behavioral, and physical health problems in one or both partners. Moreover, couple therapists report individual emotional and behavioral disorders as among the most difficult problems that they encounter in clinical practice. In this article, we summarize empirical evidence regarding the association between relationship distress and the onset, course, and treatment of mental and physical health problems. Based on these findings, we propose five critical implications for clinical training and the practice of couple therapy.     

Effects of Exogenous and Endogenous Distracters on Immediate and Long‐Term Recall in Toddlers

We explored the role that exogenous and endogenous competitors for attention play in infants’ abilities to encode and retain information over a 6‐month period. Sixty‐six children visited the laboratory at 15 months, and 32 returned for a second visit at 21 months. Children observed models of conventional‐ relation and enabling‐relation action sequences. Half the children were distracted by a “Mister Monkey” mechanical toy during the conventional‐relation sequence, while the other half was distracted during the enabling‐relation sequence. The Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire indexed endogenous factors at both ages. Immediate postmodel production of target actions indexed encoding efficiency, and 6‐month production of target actions indexed long‐term recall. The exogenous distracter impacted encoding efficiency (i.e., immediate recall), but not long‐term recall. Endogenous factors (i.e., temperament) were primarily associated with long‐term recall. Of special interest was our finding that endogenous factors, especially surgency, moderated the effect of the exogenous distracter. It appears that when learning conventional‐relation sequences in the presence of exogenous distracters, surgency mobilizes attentional resources toward the learning objective; however, when learning enabling‐relation sequences under the same conditions, surgency either boosts the saliency of the distracters or boosts children’s susceptibility to them.