bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The performance of congenitally blind children in cognitive developmental tasks
Authors: Ittyerah Miriam , Samarapungavan Ala 
Published: July 2011

The study compared the performance of a group of congenitally blind children and two groups of sighted children, one of which was blindfolded and the other, visually informed. All the three groups were compared on a set of tasks, most of which have been used repeatedly to differentiate between the two developmental levels found to correspond roughly to the period of post‐infancy, early childhood and middle childhood, respectively. The purpose was to test whether:

There is a developmental difference reflected in the performance of the blind group and the extent to which such a difference, if any, parallels that of the sighted groups.
There is any global or task specific cognition deficit in the blind group as compared to the sighted groups.
There is any difference in the performance of the sighted groups who undertook the tasks either visually or factually.

Results indicate that cognitive development in the blind is not identical to that in sighted groups. Moreover, the differences in performance between groups are content or task specific and do not take the form of a global deficit across all developmental tasks. Furthermore, performance deficits are a function of both long‐term absence of experience and absence of direct or immediate visual information about the stimulus at hand.
Naughty animals or naughty experimenters? Conservation accidents revisited with video‐stimulated commentary
Authors: Eames David , Shorrocks Diane , Tomlinson Peter 
Published: July 2011

Although work on ‘conservation accidents’ furthered study of the cognitive processes in Piagetian conservation tasks, there has been little attempt to use children's meta‐cognitive awareness as access to such processes. The present study sought (a) to replicate effects on number conservation of variation in transformation conditions and (b) to investigate children's processing of such tasks by means of their commentaries on silent video‐replays of their performances.Two separate groups of 64 children aged 5–7 years participated in two similar experiments, each comprising four transformation conditions involving a human experimenter or a toy fox. Neither between‐ nor within‐subject data showed any evidence of transformation condition effects upon conservation in either experiment. Children generally denied that the counters had really been moved by the fox and overwhelmingly asserted the necessity of the experimenter's presence. Theories concerning the effect of repeating the equivalence question, the role of toy animal interference and the influence of meta‐cognitive awareness in conservation were further contradicted by the failure of performance to relate to any aspect of the video‐replay commentaries gathered in Expt 2, including reported correctness of children's pre‐transformation judgement, their belief in the agency of the toy animal, and their construal of the purpose of the task. Memory lapses before and during the video commentary confirm the usefulness of this procedure as well as the need for caution in interpreting what it yields. The possible role and implications of experimenter effects in this area of research are briefly suggested.
Preschoolers' grasp of a desire for knowledge in false‐belief prediction: Practical intelligence and verbal report
Authors: Freeman N. H. , Lewis C. , Doherty M. J. 
Published: July 2011

Preschoolers often fail a false‐belief test. Competing explanations have been offered from two perspectives: the theory of mind and the theory of reasons for action. A concept which unifies the two has been overlooked—the concept of a ‘need to know’, whereby someone has a reason for directing actions to the goal of forming a mental representation. Current tests that present the actor as a passive information user rather than an active information collector might underestimate preschoolers' conception of psychology.In Expt 1, a theory of mind test presented a false belief as the outcome of an actor's plan of action involving her need to know something. Preschoolers showed 85 per cent success when the test took the form of hide‐and‐seek, whilst success in a standard false‐belief test was 48 per cent. In Expts 2 and 4 it was found that success was not due to a low level heuristic: in the former, asking children to act out the plan of action gave 94 per cent success compared with 66 per cent from a modified standard task. Success from conventional verbal questioning was reliably lower. Further probes revealed flexibility; in a true‐belief test children recognized that the actor's plan would succeed, and in an ignorance test (Expt 3) they showed understanding that the seeker would not know where to search.We suggest that traditional tests underestimate preschoolers in two ways. One is in neglecting practical intelligence in favour of verbal questioning. The other is in challenging them with tests which pose an inferential problem about the intentionality of the actor and thus disturb children's ‘intentional stance’. Traditional tests reveal an important limitation on preschoolers' use of a theory of mind but not an organizational gap in their construction of psychology.
Cognitive linguistic correlates of ‘theory of mind’ ability in autistic children
Authors: Eisenmajer Richard , Prior Margot 
Published: July 2011

A specific deficit in theory of mind has been proposed to explain the distinct pattern of social/cognitive deficits in autistic individuals (Frith, 1989). However, it is clear that a number of children are able to demonstrate knowledge of mental states in others (Prior, Dahlstrom & Squires, 1990), hence an important question is what particularly characterizes those autistic children who do show theory of mind. Baron‐Cohen (1988) has argued that pragmatic language skills and theory of mind ability ought to be intimately related since they draw on similar representational abilities. We examined the cognitive linguistic correlates of this ability in 29 high functioning autistic children. The 11 children who could reliably show this ability were compared with those who could not, on CA, verbal MA, pragmatic language skills, WISC Vocabulary, Comprehension and Similarities, and were superior on all measures except Vocab and CA. A stepwise discriminant function analysis showed an 86 per cent correct classification of the two groups with pragmatic skills and abstract thinking as the best discriminators.Procedural and instructional variables were also assessed in this study, as was reliability of theory of mind ability from one year to the next. Most children were stable in their demonstrated knowledge. The addition of the word ‘first’ to the false belief question (Where will Sally first look for the marble?) allowed 50 per cent of the originally failing group to answer the question correctly, suggesting the need for extreme care in the details of replication experiments of this kind. Our results support the likelihood of a developmental delay in theory of mind in autism rather than endorsing the notion that this is a specific deficit with pervasive explanatory power. However, the findings might also support the ‘continuum’ conceptualization of autism with more mildly autistic children able to demonstrate knowledge of mental states and to develop adequate pragmatic language competence.
Parents' and teachers' perceptions of personality traits of young children: Sex differences1, cross‐cultural comparisons and relations with observed behaviour
Authors: Gervai J. , Turner P. J. , Hinde R. A. 
Published: July 2011

This paper is concerned with the relations between observational and Q‐sort data on the behaviour of 4‐year‐olds in two societies. The subjects were 161 (82 girls and 79 boys) preschool children. Children's perceived traits were assessed independently by mother, father and teacher by a modified Block Q‐sort. Six composite variables were derived from combined scores: cooperation, friendly, aggression, self‐control, unfocused and inhibition. Focal child observations were carried out during free play in preschool (120 observation periods over eight separate 30‐minute sessions). Behavioural variables which differentiated between girls and boys were summed to give four sex‐typical interaction measures.The Q‐sort data fitted with the behavioural data in yielding two groups of variables, one female‐typical and one male‐typical. Teachers' Q‐sorts reflected behaviour in preschool more accurately than those of parents. Budapest parents appeared to be more stereotypical in their perceptions of sex differences than Cambridge parents.More specifically: (a) parents perceived their children as more friendly and less inhibited than teachers perceived them; (b) parents in Budapest viewed their children as more cooperative and less unfocused than parents in Cambridge viewed theirs, but there were no such differences between teachers. Girls were more cooperative than boys, while boys were more unfocused; (c) boys were rated as more aggressive than girls, but Cambridge girls were rated as more aggressive by parents than by teachers; (d) girls were perceived as more self‐controlled than boys, and in Cambridge more so by teachers than by parents.It is suggested that the Q‐sort data depend not only on differences in behaviour but also on differences in values and how children are perceived in each culture and in each context (e.g. school vs. home) within that culture.
The development of word‐coding skills in the born deaf: An experimental study of deaf school‐leavers
Authors: Burden Vivian , Campbell Ruth 
Published: July 2011

Single word spelling for picture names and lexical decision were examined systematically in a group of born‐deaf English school‐leavers with a reading age of between 9 and 10 years. The deaf were better at these word‐coding skills than their reading‐age matched peers. Like them they showed systematic effects of word regularity (phonological and orthographic) in their single word spellings. In lexical decision the deaf were as fast and as accurate as chronological controls and showed similar patterns of sensitivity to spelling regularity.While both the younger and older hearing control groups showed a consistent pattern of performance across the spelling and reading tasks, with regularity effects marked in the younger and less marked in the older group, the deaf by comparison showed somewhat disjoint patterns of reading and spelling processes. This is discussed in the context of variable patterns of word reading and spelling development in hearing children.Word reading and writing is better in these deaf students than is predicted by their standardized text comprehension scores. It is suggested that in the born‐deaf, word‐coding skills are isolated with respect to other language skills; they have not become contextualized. Moreover, the pattern of performance on these single word tasks suggests that the development of such lower level literacy skills is still incomplete.
Accelerated metalinguistic (phonological) awareness in bilingual children
Authors: Campbell Ruth , Sais Efisia 
Published: July 2011

Pre‐school children (mean age 4.8 years) in matched monoglot English and bilingual Italian‐English kindergarten classes were given tests of (lexical and sublexical) metalinguistic awareness in English. Bilingual schoolchildren were superior to monolingual children at a task of spoken morpheme deletion (RAINBOW → BOW). They were also superior at detecting the odd‐one‐out from sets of pictured words when detection was meaning‐based and when it was initial‐phoneme based. The advantage to the bilingual group persisted for morpheme‐deletion and phonological sorting after partialling out performance on the meaning‐based task.Exposure to the second language (Italian) at a pre‐literate stage may improve metalinguistic skills. In particular, speech‐sound awareness, which is implicated in reading mastery, benefits from this support.
Are children with autism blind to the mentalistic significance of the eyes?
Authors: Baron‐Cohen Simon , Campbell Ruth , Karmiloff‐Smith Annette , Grant Julia , Walker Jane 
Published: July 2011

Previous work shows that children with autism manifest abnormalities in the use of gaze. They also have difficulties in the comprehension of mental states. The present paper explores whether these two abnormalities might be related. We report four experiments that test whether normal children ‘read’ the eyes, particularly eye‐direction, as conveying information about a person's mental states, and whether subjects with autism are specifically ‘blind’ to such information. The mental states assessed were desire, goal, refer, and think.The results confirm that normal children do use eye‐direction as a cue for reading these mental states, as do subjects with mental handicap (including those with William's Syndrome). In contrast, subjects with autism failed to use eye‐direction to infer the mental states. In addition, whilst normal children and children with mental handicap showed a preference for eye‐direction over an unnatural cue when inferring these mental states, children with autism did not. These findings suggest that part of the explanation for the gaze abnormalities in autism may be a failure to comprehend that the eyes convey information about a person's mental states.
Tactile stimulation: Short‐ and long‐term benefits for pre‐term infants
Authors: de Rόiste A. , Bushnell I. W. R. 
Published: July 2011

The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of a programme of supplemental tactile stimulation, Touching and Caressing, Tender in Caring (TAC‐TIC), on a group of pre‐term infants in both the short and long term. A matched subjects design was used with experimental and control infants matched on sex, birth weight, gestation and Apgar scores.In the short term, the experimental groups are found to bottle feed and be discharged home significantly earlier than the control group. At 15 months the experimental group showed accelerated cognitive development in comparison to the control group. No significant difference was found between the groups in their motor development. The long‐term result on the cognitive measure should be considered with caution given the limitations of the study and the role of possible mediating mechanisms, such as heightened parental expectation and altered parent‐infant interaction, which have yet to be examined.
Changes in reaching and grasping objects of different sizes between 7 and 13 months of age
Authors: Fagard J. , Jacquet A. Y. 
Published: July 2011

Twenty‐four 7‐ to 13‐month‐old infants were videotaped when grasping or attempting to grasp objects of different sizes ranging in height from 7 to 17.5 cm. We investigated how early during the action sequence young infants use their two hands to grasp large objects, in order to determine the age at which they anticipate the need for a bimanual strategy from perception of object size. Second hand onset was also measured to examine whether the second hand could be recruited at any time during an action.The results show that most movements start unimanually and that the second hand is activated later. The younger infants were more successful when grasping large objects with two hands than with one hand, but they did not show more bimanual reaching with large as compared to small objects before 11 months of age. These findings suggest that young infants do not perceive the same action relevant information to drive an action as older infants and that infants shift from a correction to an anticipation strategy as they grow older. The results fit with the idea that, regarding features like size, relevant visuomanual experience may be important for full coordination of the constituent perceptual and motor skills.In addition, after a unimanual initiation, the younger infants tended to activate their second hand only after the first one had completed its course. In contrast, more intermanual flexibility was observed in the older infants. This reflects an increasing range of coordinated patterns during bimanual actions around the end of the first year of life.
Children drawing Europe: The effects of nationality, age and teaching
Authors: Axia G. , Bremner J. G. , Deluca P. , Andreasen G. 
Published: July 2011

The aim of this study is to investigate cross‐national differences in children's geographical knowledge of Europe. The analyses are based on 300 maps of Europe drawn by 8‐ and 10‐year‐olds from different European countries and regions: northern Italy, southern Italy, England, Scotland, Spain and Switzerland. Based upon place schema theory (Mandler, 1984), each map was scored according to number of drawn countries (inventory information), correctness of spatial location (spatial relation information) and of shape (descriptive information) of drawn countries. The main results were the following: (1) 8‐year‐olds' schematic knowledge of Europe is poorer than that of 10‐year‐olds; (2) the core of children's representation of Europe is given by the knowledge of their own country; (3) the best represented countries are those that are closest to the physical limits of their own country; (4) north Italian children have the best knowledge of Europe, followed by English, Scottish, and south Italian children, Spanish and Swiss children showing least knowledge; (5) teaching programmes do improve 10‐year‐olds' knowledge of the geography of Europe.Interuieuw: “In which European country wouldn't you like to live?”Emma (Spanish, 10‐year‐old girl): “I couldn't say… because even if better or worse places exist”, I will adapt myself.
Comparative Genomics of Klebsiella pneumoniae Strains with Different Antibiotic Resistance Profiles
Authors: Kumar Vinod , Sun Peng , Vamathevan Jessica , Li Yong , Ingraham Karen , Palmer Leslie , Huang Jianzhong , Brown James R. 
Published: July 2011

ABSTRACT

There is a global emergence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) strains of
Klebsiella pneumoniae
, a Gram-negative enteric bacterium that causes nosocomial and urinary tract infections. While the epidemiology of
K. pneumoniae
strains and occurrences of specific antibiotic resistance genes, such as plasmid-borne extended-spectrum β-lactamases (ESBLs), have been extensively studied, only four complete genomes of
K. pneumoniae
are available. To better understand the multidrug resistance factors in
K. pneumoniae
, we determined by pyrosequencing the nearly complete genome DNA sequences of two strains with disparate antibiotic resistance profiles, broadly drug-susceptible strain JH1 and strain 1162281, which is resistant to multiple clinically used antibiotics, including extended-spectrum β-lactams, fluoroquinolones, aminoglycosides, trimethoprim, and sulfamethoxazoles. Comparative genomic analysis of JH1, 1162281, and other published
K. pneumoniae
genomes revealed a core set of 3,631 conserved orthologous proteins, which were used for reconstruction of whole-genome phylogenetic trees. The close evolutionary relationship between JH1 and 1162281 relative to other
K. pneumoniae
strains suggests that a large component of the genetic and phenotypic diversity of clinical isolates is due to horizontal gene transfer. Using curated lists of over 400 antibiotic resistance genes, we identified all of the elements that differentiated the antibiotic profile of MDR strain 1162281 from that of susceptible strain JH1, such as the presence of additional efflux pumps, ESBLs, and multiple mechanisms of fluoroquinolone resistance. Our study adds new and significant DNA sequence data on
K. pneumoniae
strains and demonstrates the value of whole-genome sequencing in characterizing multidrug resistance in clinical isolates.
Novel Postentry Inhibitor of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Replication Screened by Yeast Membrane-Associated Two-Hybrid System
Authors: Urano Emiko , Kuramochi Noriko , Ichikawa Reiko , Murayama Somay Yamagata , Miyauchi Kosuke , Tomoda Hiroshi , Takebe Yutaka , Nermut Milan , Komano Jun , Morikawa Yuko 
Published: July 2011

ABSTRACT

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) Gag protein targets to the plasma membrane and assembles into viral particles. In the next round of infection, the mature Gag capsids disassemble during viral entry. Thus, Gag plays a central role in the HIV life cycle. Using a yeast membrane-associated two-hybrid assay based on the SOS-RAS signaling system, we developed a system to measure the Gag-Gag interaction and isolated 6 candidates for Gag assembly inhibitors from a chemical library composed of 20,000 small molecules. When tested in the human MT-4 cell line and primary peripheral blood mononuclear cells, one of the candidates, 2-(benzothiazol-2-ylmethylthio)-4-methylpyrimidine (BMMP), displayed an inhibitory effect on HIV replication, although a considerably high dose was required. Unexpectedly, neither particle production nor maturation was inhibited by BMMP. Confocal microscopy confirmed that BMMP did not block Gag plasma membrane targeting. Single-round infection assays with envelope-pseudotyped and luciferase-expressing viruses revealed that BMMP inhibited HIV replication postentry but not simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) or murine leukemia virus infection. Studies with HIV/SIV Gag chimeras indicated that the Gag capsid (CA) domain was responsible for the BMMP-mediated HIV postentry block.
In vitro
studies indicated that BMMP accelerated disassembly of HIV cores and, conversely, inhibited assembly of purified CA protein in a dose-dependent manner. Collectively, our data suggest that BMMP primarily targets the HIV CA domain and disrupts viral infection postentry, possibly through inducing premature disassembly of HIV cores. We suggest that BMMP is a potential lead compound to develop antiretroviral drugs bearing novel mechanisms of action.
Mechanistic Characterization of GS-9190 (Tegobuvir), a Novel Nonnucleoside Inhibitor of Hepatitis C Virus NS5B Polymerase
Authors: Shih I-hung , Vliegen Inge , Peng Betty , Yang Huiling , Hebner Christy , Paeshuyse Jan , Pürstinger Gerhard , Fenaux Martijn , Tian Yang , Mabery Eric , Qi Xiaoping , Bahador Gina , Paulson Matthew , Lehman Laura S. , Bondy Steven , Tse Winston , Reiser Hans , Lee William A. , Schmitz Uli , Neyts Johan , Zhong Weidong 
Published: July 2011

ABSTRACT

GS-9190 (Tegobuvir) is a novel imidazopyridine inhibitor of hepatitis C virus (HCV) RNA replication
in vitro
and has demonstrated potent antiviral activity in patients chronically infected with genotype 1 (GT1) HCV. GS-9190 exhibits reduced activity against GT2a (JFH1) subgenomic replicons and GT2a (J6/JFH1) infectious virus, suggesting that the compound's mechanism of action involves a genotype-specific viral component. To further investigate the GS-9190 mechanism of action, we utilized the susceptibility differences between GT1b and GT2a by constructing a series of replicon chimeras where combinations of 1b and 2a nonstructural proteins were encoded within the same replicon. The antiviral activities of GS-9190 against the chimeric replicons were reduced to levels comparable to that of the wild-type GT2a replicon in chimeras expressing GT2a NS5B. GT1b replicons in which the β-hairpin region (amino acids 435 to 455) was replaced by the corresponding sequence of GT2a were markedly less susceptible to GS-9190, indicating the importance of the thumb subdomain of the polymerase in this effect. Resistance selection in GT1b replicon cells identified several mutations in NS5B (C316Y, Y448H, Y452H, and C445F) that contributed to the drug resistance phenotype. Reintroduction of these mutations into wild-type replicons conferred resistance to GS-9190, with the number of NS5B mutations correlating with the degree of resistance. Analysis of GS-9190 cross-resistance against previously reported NS5B drug-selected mutations showed that the resistance pattern of GS-9190 is different from other nonnucleoside inhibitors. Collectively, these data demonstrate that GS-9190 represents a novel class of nonnucleoside polymerase inhibitors that interact with NS5B likely through involvement of the β-hairpin in the thumb subdomain.