Studies have shown that human infants can integrate the multisensory attributes of their world and, thus, have coherent perceptual experiences. Multisensory attributes can either specify non-arbitrary (e.g., amodal stimulus/event properties and typical relations) or arbitrary properties (e.g., visuospatial height and pitch). The goal of the current study was to expand on Walker et al.'s (2010) finding that 4-month-old infants looked longer at rising/falling objects when accompanied by rising/falling pitch than when accompanied by falling/rising pitch. We did so by conducting two experiments. In Experiment 1, our procedure matched Walker et al.'s (2010) single screen presentation while in Experiment 2 we used a multisensory paired-preference procedure. Additionally, we examined infants' responsiveness to these synesthetic-like events at multiple ages throughout development (four, six, and 12 months of age). ... In sum, our findings indicate that the ability to match changing visuospatial height with rising/falling pitch does not emerge until the end of the first year of life and throw into doubt Walker et al.'s (2010) claim that 4-month-old infants perceive audiovisual synesthetic relations in a manner similar to adults. / by Nicholas Minar. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

Our everyday world consists of people and objects that are usually specified by dynamic and concurrent auditory and visual attributes, which is known to increase perceptual salience and, therefore, facilitate learning and discrimination in infancy. Interestingly, early experience with faces and vocalizations has two seemingly opposite effects during the first year of life, 1) it enables infants to gradually acquire perceptual expertise for the faces and vocalizations of their own race and, 2) it narrows their ability to discriminate the faces of other-race faces (Kelly et al., 2007). It is not known whether multisensory redundancy might help older infants overcome the other-race effect reported in previous studies. The current project investigated infant discrimination of dynamic and vocalizing other-race faces in younger and older infants using habituation and eye-tracking methodologies. Experiment 1 examined 4-6 and 10-12-month-old infants' ability to discriminate either a native or non-native face articulating the syllable /a/. Results showed that both the 4-6- and the 10-12-month-olds successfully discriminated the faces,regardless of whether they were same- or other-race faces. Experiment 2 investigated the contribution of auditory speech cues by repeating Experiment 1 but in silence. Results showed that only the 10-12-month-olds tested with native-race faces successfully discriminated them. Experiment 3 investigated whether it was speech per se or sound in general that facilitated discrimination of the other-race faces in Experiment 1 by presenting a synchronous, computer-generated "boing" sound instead of audible speech cues. Results indicated that the 4-6-month olds discriminated both types of faces but that 10-12-month-olds only discriminated own-race faces. These results indicate that auditory cues, along with dynamic visual cues, can help infants overcome the effects of previously reported narrowing and facilitate discrimination of other-race static, silent faces. Critically, our results show that older infants can overcome the other race-effect when dynamic faces are accompanied by speech but not when they are accompanied by non- speech cues. Overall, a generalized auditory facilitation effect was found as a result of multisensory speech. Moreover, our findings suggest that infants' ability to process other- race faces following perceptual narrowing is more plastic than previously thought. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

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Children learn words astonishingly skilfully. Even infants can reliably “fast map” novel category labels to their referents without feedback or supervision (Carey & Bartlett, 1978; Houston-Price, Plunkett, & Harris, 2005). Using both empirical and neural network modelling methods this thesis presents an examination of both the fast and slow mapping phases of children's early word learning in the context of object and action categorisation. A series of empirical experiments investigates the relationship between within-category perceptual variability on two-year-old children's ability to learn labels for novel categories of objects and actions. Results demonstrate that variability profoundly affects both noun and verb learning. A review paper situates empirical word learning research in the context of recent advances in the application of computational models to developmental research. Data from the noun experiments are then simulated using a Dynamic Neural Field (DNF) model (see Spencer & Schöner, 2009), suggesting that children's early object categories can emerge dynamically from simple label-referent associations strengthened over time. Novel predictions generated by the model are replicated empirically, providing proofof- concept for the use of DNF models in simulations of word learning, as well emphasising the strong featural basis of early categorisation. The noun data are further explored using a connectionist architecture (Morse, de Greef, Belpaeme & Cangelosi, 2010) in a robotic system, providing the groundwork for future research in cognitive robotics. The implications of these different approaches to cognitive modelling are discussed, situating the current work firmly in the dynamic systems tradition whilst emphasising the value of interdisciplinary research in motivating novel research paradigms.

Posttraumatic growth describes positive changes following challenging events. Although such changes are well documented there remain a number of important areas for further research, some of which are addressed in this thesis. In particular, this thesis aimed to clarify the relationship between growth and adjustment following health events, explore growth in different cultures (UK and Africa), and examine growth following childbirth using a prospective design. First, two systematic reviews were carried out to examine (i) growth following health events and (ii) maternal wellbeing in African women. The first meta-analytic review found that growth following cancer and HIV/AIDS was associated with higher levels of positive mental health, higher subjective physical health, and lower levels of negative mental health. Moderating variables were time since the event, age, ethnicity, and type of negative mental health outcome. The second review found that maternal psychological problems in African women have a similar or slightly higher prevalence than reported in developed countries. Risk factors were broadly comparable although some culture-specific factors were also found. Three research studies were conducted. The first study qualitatively explored 55 Gambian women's experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and the postnatal period. Thematic analysis identified five themes: (1) transition to adulthood, (2) physical difficulties, (3) value of children in relation to others, (4) children as a strain, and (5) going through it alone. Prospective studies of growth following childbirth were then carried out in the UK (N=125) and The Gambia (N=101). Women completed questionnaires during their third trimester of pregnancy and up to 12 weeks after birth. A proportion of women in both countries reported growth following childbirth. In the UK, higher levels of growth were associated with caesarean sections and prenatal posttraumatic stress symptoms. In The Gambia, higher growth was associated with lower income, lower education, and higher postnatal social support.

A child's early academic learning experiences take place at home as well as at school. These two ‘overlapping spheres' have unique roles to play for the child, and affect them in different ways. In this thesis, I focus on the child's home life, and mother-child interactions nested within the home, and investigate how individual and dyadic characteristics of child and of mother may have a bearing on the quality of children's academic and non-academic learning experiences at home, and on their experience of school. The first three papers used data from eighty-five families of Year 1 children in South-East England. This data was collected using questionnaire and interview measures and videotaped observations of mother-child interactions during home visits. Paper 1 explores personal and social factors in Year 1 children relating to their self-reported school adjustment. Results from interviews showed that family and home life were important for academic self-concept, but not for school engagement, further reinforcing existing research showing that each distinct environment within the child's microsystem affects their experience of the other. Paper 2 focused on homework: an area of children's formal education outside school. Most homework interaction research uses researcher-set activities; my study tested the validity of this by comparing genuine homework and a researcher-set task. In observations of 85 families of year 1 children, mother's and child's affect during genuine homework did not correlate with their affect during the non-homework tutored task, and were related to different personal and social factors. Taking this further, Paper 3 investigated whether maternal beliefs about education predicted how she scaffolded her child during Year 2 homework. This paper used data from eighty of the families, visited a year after the original visit. Results showed that instruction quality during homework was predicted by mothers' earlier learning attribution beliefs, but not by their attitudes or expectations. Homework is believed to help children refine their self-regulation skills. Paper 4 examined maternal scaffolding interactions through the conceptual lens of ‘transfer of regulation'. Using a different dataset of home visits with seventy-eight families of children aged 8-11, the fine-grained coding method sheds light on aspects of tutored interactions typically missed by traditional scaffolding coding schemes, identifying various aspects of self-regulation and other-regulation, and mapping increases and decreases over the course of the task, thus providing rich information about the interaction quality within each mother-child dyad. In conclusion, both social (transfer of regulation: Paper 4; parenting styles, mother-child relationship: Paper 1) and individual (maternal beliefs and personality: Papers 2 and 3) factors within the home context play a role in the child's learning and school experience – as assessed by academic self-concept, self-regulation, and the positivity and cognitive support received during homework. This thesis further reveals the interlaced nature of home and school, highlighting the value of unpacking the role of the home environment on children's education.

Beck and Rector (2005) proposed a model of functional outcome in schizophrenia, suggesting the path between neurocognition and functioning is mediated by functional capacity and cognitive processes. These cognitive processes include defeatist performance beliefs, self-stigma and, most recently, metacognition, considered 'thinking about thinking'. Metacognition has been proposed to work in a hierarchy between the object- and meta-level, outlined within Nelson and Narens (1990) model, including several metacognitive components: metacognitive ability, experience and efficiency, connected by metacognitive processes. Firstly, this thesis investigated how different metacognitive components may interact dynamically and predict both what people do in their everyday lives (functional outcome) and how people feel about their everyday lives (subjective recovery outcome) in First Episode Psychosis (N=62), compared to healthy controls (N=73). Following this, this thesis examined the role of metacognition in predicting functional outcome across a three-year period, in FEP (N=26). Finally, it was suggested that metacognition may be expanded to include the way one thinks about oneself through important memories, e.g. self-defining memories (SDMs). The role of SDMs as an additional mediator between neurocognition and functioning in psychosis (N=71) was investigated. Next, using only one of the metacognitive components: metacognitive efficiency, this thesis explored whether this component could be used to explain the presence of anomalous experiences. Anomalous experiences refer to a rich number of various psychic phenomena, including anomalous self-experiences and anomalous perceptual experiences, leading to anomalous delusional beliefs. Initially, this thesis developed and piloted two metacognitive tasks in healthy student sample (N=125). Next, these tasks were used to examine the relationship between anomalous experiences and metacognitive efficiency within the first two samples (N=135): FEP group (N=62) and healthy control (N=73). Current findings demonstrated a role for metacognitive ability in predicting both functional outcome and subjective outcome in FEP, cross-sectionally, and in predicting functional outcome across three years. Alongside this, holding specific self-defining memories was shown to predict functional outcome, independent of neurocognition and metacognition, in FEP. However, no significant association was demonstrated between anomalous experiences and metacognitive efficiency, instead anomalous self-experiences were associated with auditory perceptual biases. This thesis highlights the importance of enhancing metacognitive ability, alongside neurocognitive ability and SDMs, in order to improve functioning.

Research has found that threat related attentional biases towards novel animals can be induced in children by giving threat information about the animals. Naturally occurring (i.e. non-induced) threat related attentional biases have also been found in both children and adults in the past research. The naturally occurring threat stimuli mainly include phobia stimuli and the threat stimuli that are assumed to have evolutionary roots (e.g., threatening facial expressions, and poisonous animals). In the present research, induced and naturally occurring threat related attentional biases were investigated and contrasted in children and adults. The participants' manual RTs and eye movements were measured in five experiments using the visual search paradigm to examine the attentional biases. The participating children, regardless of their trait anxiety scores, showed attentional bias toward angry faces as indexed by RT and eye movement measures. In the second and third experiments, children acquired fear of novel animals by listening to threat information about them. They later showed attentional bias to the newly feared stimuli: the presence of the animal's images interfered with detecting an irrelevant target, and the animal's images were detected faster than the control stimuli when presented as hidden targets in naturalistic scenes. In the fourth and fifth experiments, no enhancement of attentional bias towards fear-relevant stimuli due to receiving threat information was evident, as no difference was found between the threat information and the no information snake stimuli in terms of attention deployment measures. Strong evidence of naturally occurring attentional bias toward snake stimuli, however, was found in both RTs and overt attention indices. Overall, the RT data provided more robust evidence than the eye movement data in support of the predicted threat related attentional biases. It was argued that attentional biases to fear stimuli might have different levels which develop over time, with fast threat processing (indexed by faster RTs) appearing soon after the fear is acquired.

Peer interactions are recognised as playing a key role in the development of children, but we lack detailed analysis of individual differences in the early peer play of preschoolers. Five data sets are used to explore aspects of children's developing social competence between the ages of 2 and 5 years. Four of the five research investigations were carried out in day nurseries, and the remaining study was conducted in a reception class (children aged 5 years), all in a London Local Authority. The first paper explores core elements of peer play which can be identified through direct observation. It serves the dual purpose of highlighting children's real life experience of making social connections through peer interactions and exploring the key dimensions of verbal and nonverbal behaviour that support such connections. Papers 2 and 3 are mainly focused on exploring the different perspectives of parents and practitioners in their views of children's current social adjustment, with additional reports on child temperament from parents and reports on peer play from practitioners. Finally, Papers 4 and 5 explore in greater depth a range of potential predictors of young children's social competence, including temperament and socioemotional understanding. Being able to recognise individual differences in patterns of play specifically in terms of levels of interaction and disconnection led to the use of the Penn Interactive Peer Play Scale throughout the remaining studies. The notable differences in levels of successful interactivity underlined the need to measure children's effectiveness in using a range of abilities to establish and maintain engagement with play partners. The further studies involved a total of 516 practitioner reports and 179 parent reports on children's behaviour, social competencies and temperament, as well as 123 direct assessments of children's socio-emotional understanding. Matched parent and practitioner questionnaires were used to examine similarities and differences in adult perceptions and interpretations of children's peer play. Levels of convergence between parent and practitioner views of children's socio-behavioural functioning were found to change as children get older, from an early convergence on prosocial behaviours to a later convergence on problem behaviours. The results also highlighted the particular roles of temperament and socioemotional understanding in peer play. Effortful control was found to be a significant predictor of positive, interactive play. Furthermore, socio-emotional understanding – as assessed through the use of simple structured tasks and hypothetical scenarios – was found to predict patterns of interactive play, thereby evidencing the sociocognitive factors involved in effective peer interactions. Gender differences were also evident, suggesting that girls and boys may rely on different attributes and skills to forge social connections. The key findings are discussed with attention to their implications for effective practice in early years provision, developing our understanding of early social competence from different perspectives. Directions for further research are presented.

Sleep in children is important for the functioning of a range of cognitive processes, including memory, attention, arousal, executive functioning, and the processing of emotional experiences. This, in addition to the high comorbidity between sleep problems and anxiety, may suggest that sleep plays a role in the cognitive and behavioural processes associated with childhood anxiety. Although a body of research exists which considers the associations between sleep problems and anxiety, there is currently little research evidence available for the effect of children's sleepiness on anxiety, or for the effect of childhood sleep problems or sleepiness on anxiety related processes. To address this, this thesis begins with a meta-analysis exploring the efficacy of transdiagnostic cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) for the treatment of childhood anxiety (Paper 1). CBT is generally the treatment of choice for childhood anxiety, and targets the processes that the subsequent papers in this thesis consider in relation to children's sleepiness and sleep problems. Papers two to five consider the effect of sleepiness on a range of cognitive and behavioural processes, including vicariously learning and unlearning fear (Paper 2), ambiguity resolution (Paper 3), emotion recognition (Paper 4), and habituation and avoidance (Paper 5). The final paper considers sleep problems in relation to a CBT intervention for childhood anxiety (Paper 6). Overall, while sleep problems and usual sleepiness were found to be associated with childhood anxiety, current sleepiness was not. On the other hand, sleepiness (usual and current), and reduced sleep, affected children's behavioural processes when exposed to anxiety provoking stimuli, but were not found to affect children's anxietyrelated cognitive processes. Sleep problems interacted with vicarious learning processes, but not with ambiguity resolution or emotion recognition processes, or with change in anxiety symptoms following a CBT intervention for childhood anxiety. Implications for treatment and future research directions are discussed.