Search results for ""Author Patricia J. Bauer""

This monograph presents the pediatric portion of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Toolbox Cognition Battery (CB) of the NIH Toolbox for the Assessment of Neurological and Behavioral Function. The NIH Toolbox is an initiative of the Neuroscience Blueprint, a collaborative framework through which 16 NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offi ces jointly support neuroscience-related research, to accelerate discoveries and reduce the burden of nervous system disorders. The CB is one of four modules that measure cognitive, emotional, sensory, and motor health across the lifespan. The CB is unique in its continuity across childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and old age, and in order to help create a common currency among disparate studies, it is also available at low cost to researchers for use in large-scale longitudinal and epidemiologic studies. Chapter 1 describes the evolution of the CB; methods for selecting cognitive subdomains and instruments; the rationale for test design; and a validation study in children and adolescents, ages 3 to 15 years. Subsequent chapters feature detailed discussions of each test measure and its psychometric properties (Chapters 2–6), the factor structure of the test battery (Chapter 7), the effects of age and education on composite test scores (Chapter 8), and a final summary and discussion (Chapter 9). As the chapters in this monograph demonstrate, the CB has excellent psychometric properties, and the validation study provided evidence for the increasing differentiation of cognitive abilities with age.

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This all-embracing Handbook on the Development of Children’s Memory represents the first place in which critical topics in memory development are covered from multiple perspectives, from infancy through adolescence. Forty-four chapters are written by experienced researchers who have influenced the field. Edited by two of the world’s leading experts on the development of memory Discusses the importance of a developmental perspective on the study of memory The first ever handbook to bring together the world’s leading academics in one reference guide Each section has an introduction written by one of the Editors, who have also written an overall introduction that places the work in historical and contemporary contexts in cognitive and developmental psychology 2 Volumes

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An exploration of memory formation in young children Parameters of Remembering and Forgetting in the Transition from Infancy to Early Childhood details research findings related to long-term memory formation in young children. While it has long been assumed that adults do not retain memories of their infancy, this study explores the possibility that long-term memories do form, and may manifest in different ways as a child matures. This book explores the study's methods, events, and analysis of results, with extensive appendices that provide additional information regarding the testing system, analysis parameters and control, and the specifics of research design that allayed effects on the participants' performance.

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This monograph is an edited collection of chapters within the domain of developmental methodology that collectively share the following goals. First, this monograph provides updated and comprehensive, yet also accessible and brief, summaries of our current understanding of key methodologies used in developmental science. Second, this monograph describes how our current understanding can be further leveraged to advance understanding of human development. Third, this monograph identifies shortcomings in our understanding of developmental methodology in order to provide a roadmap for future methodological advances. Fourth, this monograph aims to organize developmental methodology as a subdiscipline within developmental science. The chapters of this monograph were selected to identify major themes of developmental methodology, broadly defined to encompass issues of design, analysis, and research progression. Besides covering a wide range of topics, chapters were selected that (a) represent active areas of research or debate, (b) are important in advancing the quality of developmental science, and (c) seem likely to remain active and important areas of developmental methodology in the foreseeable future. Early chapters focus on design issues, including the merits of different sampling strategies and the use of large-scale data sets in developmental science. In the middle chapters, attention shifts to issues in longitudinal design and analysis. These chapters include an overview of longitudinal analyses in developmental science, considerations in measurement within longitudinal studies, and person-specific longitudinal approaches. Later chapters consider broader issues of replication and research accumulation, as well as the history and future of developmental methodology.

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Higher cognitive functions are reliably predicted by working memory measures from two domains: children's performance on complex span tasks, and infants' looking behavior. Despite the similar predictive power across these research areas, theories of working memory development have not connected these different task types and developmental periods. The current project works to bridge this gap with a processoriented theory, focusing on two tasks assessing visual working memory capacity in infants (the change-preference task) versus children and adults (the change detection task). Previous results seem inconsistent, with capacity estimates increasing from one to four items during infancy, but only two to three items during early childhood. A probable source of this discrepancy is the different task structures used with each age group, but prior theories were not suffi ciently specific to relate performance across tasks. The current theory focuses on cognitive dynamics, that is, the formation, maintenance, and use of memory representations within task contexts over development. This theory was formalized in a computational model to generate three predictions: 1) increasing capacity estimates in the change-preference task beyond infancy; 2) higher capacity estimates in change-preference versus change detection when tested within individuals; and 3) correlated performance across tasks because both rely on the same underlying memory system. Lastly, model simulations tested a fourth prediction: development across tasks could be explained through increasing real-time stability, realized computationally as strengthening connectivity. Results confi rmed these predictions, supporting the cognitive dynamics account of performance and development changes in real-time stability.

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Children with incarcerated parents are at risk for a variety of problematic outcomes, yet research has rarely examined protective factors or resilience processes that might mitigate such risk in this population. In this volume, we present findings from fi ve new studies that focus on child- or family-level resilience processes in children with parents currently or recently incarcerated in jail or prison. In the fi rst study, empathic responding is examined as a protective factor against aggressive peer relations for 210 elementary school age children of incarcerated parents. The second study further examines socially aggressive behaviors with peers, with a focus on teasing and bullying, in a sample of 61 children of incarcerated mothers. Emotion regulation is examined as a possible protective factor. The third study contrasts children’s placement with maternal grandmothers versus other caregivers in a sample of 138 mothers incarcerated in a medium security state prison. The relation between a history of positive attachments between mothers and grandmothers and the current cocaregiving alliance are of particular interest. The fourth study examines coparenting communication in depth on the basis of observations of 13 families with young children whose mothers were recently released from jail. Finally, in the fi fth study, the proximal impacts of a parent management training intervention on individual functioning and family relationships are investigated in a diverse sample of 359 imprisoned mothers and fathers. Taken together, these studies further our understanding of resilience processes in children of incarcerated parents and their families and set the groundwork for further research on child development and family resilience within the context of parental involvement in the criminal justice system.

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There is a growing public health burden of inactivity in industrialized nations. In recent years, children have become increasingly inactive, leading to concomitant increases in the prevalence of being overweight and unfit. Inactivity during childhood has implications for the prevalence of several chronic diseases (e.g., obesity, type 2 diabetes) observed in adulthood. These 'adult-onset' diseases have also become more prevalent during childhood and adolescence, exacerbating the need to develop novel treatments that provide enduring benefit by altering the chronic and oftentimes debilitating course of these lifestyle diseases. Of further interest is the absence of public health concern for the effect of inactivity on brain health and cognition. It is curious that this has not emerged as a larger societal issue, given its obvious relation to childhood obesity and other inactivity-related disorders that have captured the United States and other industrialized nations. Many schools have minimized physical activity opportunities despite a growing literature indicating their benefits to cognition and learning. Such educational practices are increasing in popularity due to budgetary constraints and an increased emphasis placed upon student performance on standardized tests. It is counterintuitive that spending less time in the classroom and more time engaged in physical activities might improve learning, yet research is consonant in suggesting that physical activity benefits brain health and cognition. Accordingly, this monograph describes a body of research, which examines the complex relationship of physical activity to cognitive and brain health from a translational perspective, with the goal of maximizing effective function across the lifespan.

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