When preschoolers follow their eyes and older children follow their noses: visuo-olfactory social affective matching in childhood

Recognition of emotional facial expressions is a crucial skill for adaptive behavior that most often occurs in a multi-sensory context. Affective matching tasks have been used across development to investigate how people integrate facial information with other senses. Given the relative affective strength of olfaction and its relevance in mediating social information since birth, we assessed olfactory-visual matching abilities in a group of 140 children between the ages of 3 and 11 years old. We presented one of three odor primes (rose, fish and no-odor, rated as pleasant or unpleasant by individual children) before a facial choice task (happy vs. disgusted face). Children were instructed to select one of two faces. As expected, children of all ages tended to choose happy faces. Children younger than 5 years of age were biased towards choosing the happy face, irrespective of the odor smelled. After age 5, an affective matching strategy guided children's choices. Smelling a pleasant odor predicted the choice of happy faces, whereas smelling the unpleasant or fish odor predicted the choice of disgusted faces. The present study fills a gap in the developmental literature on olfactory-visual affective strategies that affect decision-making, and represents an important step towards understanding the underlying developmental processes that shape the typical social mind.

RESPONSE INTERFERENCE AND WORKING MEMORY IN 12-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN

A group of 69 12-year-old children performed three well-known response interference tasks: the Stroop task, the Eriksen flanker task, and the Simon task. Individual differences in accuracy and speed correlated across the tasks. However, there was no correlation between the interference effects on these three tasks. Stroop interference, but not the Simon or flanker effect, was correlated with working memory capacity, as obtained from the WISC-R. These results may help clarify the nature of ADHD, which is characterized by problems with response interference.

Sex differences in reaction times, decision times, and movement times in British and Korean children

In this study we compared reaction times broken down into decision times and movement times between 9-year-old British and Korean boys and girls. Boys tended to be faster on movement times, but there was no sex difference in decision times. These results were obtained on three reaction-time tasks of different levels of complexity.

Influence of sex, presentation order, and trial blocks on young adults' simple and type-C reaction times

This research examined the influence of sex, presentation order, and trial blocks on young adults' reaction times (RTs). Right-handed men and women (n = 56) completed 20 simple and 40 type-c RT trials. Analysis of variance indicated that men reacted faster than women and that the simple task was performed more quickly than the type-c version. The significant interaction for type of task x trial blocks indicated that simple RTs became faster and type-c RTs slowed from the initial to subsequent trial blocks. The significant interaction for type of task x presentation order indicated that type-c task performance was quicker when administered first. Analysis of variance also showed that false positive errors on the type-c task were most frequent during the first trial block.