Cognitive modularity and genetic disorders

Science

Volumn 286, Issue 5448, 1999, Pages 2355-2358

  Paterson, S J ^a,b   Brown, J H ^a,b   Gsodl M K ^a   Johnson, M H ^c   Karmiloff Smith, A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

^c UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CALCULATION; COGNITION; CONTROLLED STUDY; DECISION MAKING; GENETIC DISORDER; HUMAN; HUMAN EXPERIMENT; INFANT; LANGUAGE ABILITY; MODEL; NEUROPSYCHOLOGY; PRIORITY JOURNAL; WILLIAMS BEUREN SYNDROME;

ADULT; BRAIN; CASE-CONTROL STUDIES; CHILD, PRESCHOOL; COGNITION; DOWN SYNDROME; FEMALE; HUMANS; INFANT; LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT; MALE; MATCHED-PAIR ANALYSIS; MATHEMATICS; NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL TESTS; PHENOTYPE; VOCABULARY; WILLIAMS SYNDROME;

EID: 0033579383     PISSN: 00368075     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1126/science.286.5448.2355     Document Type: Article

References (23)

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9. J. F. Fagan, J. Exp. Child Psychol. 9, 217 (1970). The Fagan Box had a hinged display stage (85 cm long and 29 cm high), with two compartments to hold the stimulus cards. The center-to-center distance between the compartments was 30.5 cm, and on all trials the display stage was situated about 30.5 cm above the infant's head. In the center of the stage was a peephole 0.625 cm in diameter, through which an observer could see the visual fixations of the infant. The stage was illuminated using a fluorescent lamp out of the infant's view. It was centered directly over the infant, such that the infant could no longer see the parent. The stimuli were then placed in two compartments simultaneously by experimenter A and, once the infant's attention was attained by talking or by shaking a rattle, the familiarization or test trials began. Looking times were measured by experimenter B. Experimenter B held a stopwatch in each hand and timed the infant's looking to the left versus the right stimulus item by observing the corneal reflection of each stimulus in the infant's pupil A beeper was set to a fixed length for the familiarization and test trials and signaled when each trial was to end. Between each familiarization or test trial, experimenter A pulled back the display stage from the infant's view, recorded the data called out by experimenter B, changed the stimuli, obtained the infant's attention again, centered the infant's gaze, and finally closed the stage, exposing the next stimuli to the infant The roles of experimenters A and B were randomly changed between subjects. Reliability using this procedure has been shown to be high (R. A. Haaf, M. Brewster, C. M. de Saint Victor, P. H. Smith, Infant Behav. Dev. 12, 211 (1989); L. M. O'Neill, S. W. Jacobson, J. L. Jacobson, Infant. Behav. Dev. 17, 465 (1994)].
10. J. F. Fagan, J. Exp. Child Psychol. 9, 217 (1970). The Fagan Box had a hinged display stage (85 cm long and 29 cm high), with two compartments to hold the stimulus cards. The center-to-center distance between the compartments was 30.5 cm, and on all trials the display stage was situated about 30.5 cm above the infant's head. In the center of the stage was a peephole 0.625 cm in diameter, through which an observer could see the visual fixations of the infant. The stage was illuminated using a fluorescent lamp out of the infant's view. It was centered directly over the infant, such that the infant could no longer see the parent. The stimuli were then placed in two compartments simultaneously by experimenter A and, once the infant's attention was attained by talking or by shaking a rattle, the familiarization or test trials began. Looking times were measured by experimenter B. Experimenter B held a stopwatch in each hand and timed the infant's looking to the left versus the right stimulus item by observing the corneal reflection of each stimulus in the infant's pupil A beeper was set to a fixed length for the familiarization and test trials and signaled when each trial was to end. Between each familiarization or test trial, experimenter A pulled back the display stage from the infant's view, recorded the data called out by experimenter B, changed the stimuli, obtained the infant's attention again, centered the infant's gaze, and finally closed the stage, exposing the next stimuli to the infant The roles of experimenters A and B were randomly changed between subjects. Reliability using this procedure has been shown to be high (R. A. Haaf, M. Brewster, C. M. de Saint Victor, P. H. Smith, Infant Behav. Dev. 12, 211 (1989); L. M. O'Neill, S. W. Jacobson, J. L. Jacobson, Infant. Behav. Dev. 17, 465 (1994)].
11. J. F. Fagan, J. Exp. Child Psychol. 9, 217 (1970). The Fagan Box had a hinged display stage (85 cm long and 29 cm high), with two compartments to hold the stimulus cards. The center-to-center distance between the compartments was 30.5 cm, and on all trials the display stage was situated about 30.5 cm above the infant's head. In the center of the stage was a peephole 0.625 cm in diameter, through which an observer could see the visual fixations of the infant. The stage was illuminated using a fluorescent lamp out of the infant's view. It was centered directly over the infant, such that the infant could no longer see the parent. The stimuli were then placed in two compartments simultaneously by experimenter A and, once the infant's attention was attained by talking or by shaking a rattle, the familiarization or test trials began. Looking times were measured by experimenter B. Experimenter B held a stopwatch in each hand and timed the infant's looking to the left versus the right stimulus item by observing the corneal reflection of each stimulus in the infant's pupil A beeper was set to a fixed length for the familiarization and test trials and signaled when each trial was to end. Between each familiarization or test trial, experimenter A pulled back the display stage from the infant's view, recorded the data called out by experimenter B, changed the stimuli, obtained the infant's attention again, centered the infant's gaze, and finally closed the stage, exposing the next stimuli to the infant The roles of experimenters A and B were randomly changed between subjects. Reliability using this procedure has been shown to be high (R. A. Haaf, M. Brewster, C. M. de Saint Victor, P. H. Smith, Infant Behav. Dev. 12, 211 (1989); L. M. O'Neill, S. W. Jacobson, J. L. Jacobson, Infant. Behav. Dev. 17, 465 (1994)].
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13. The stimuli for experiment 1 were six colored pictures of pairs of objects mounted onto white cards (17.7 cm by 17.7 cm). Different objects were used for each pair (airplanes, cats, dogs, cars, and so forth) in different positions on the card. To ensure that infants were not simply reacting to differences in mass and density [see analysis in M. W. Clearfield and K. S. Mix, Psychol. Sci. 10, 408 (1999)], we were particularly careful to design stimuli pairs of different sizes taking up different spatial extents in various locations on the cards, and to ensure that the display of three stimulus items covered no more space than that of two stimulus items. This ensured that infants focused on the numerosity of the discrete displays rather than on their spatial extent.
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16. Outliers were found with a box-and-whisker plot. The main body of the plot represented values between the 25th and 75th percentile. Participants whose looking time was more than 1.5 standard deviations above or below these values were excluded from further analyses, in accordance with the conventional procedure [P. R. Kinnear and C. D. Gray, SPSS for Windows Made Simple (Psychology Press, Hove, UK, ed. 3, 1999), p. 98]. The WS group and the MA controls involved one outlier each, the DS group two outliers, and the CA group none.
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19. Outliers were treated as in experiment 1 [see (14)]. The WS, DS, and MA control groups all involved one outlier, and the CA control group none.
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21. A. Karmiloff-Smith, Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992).
22. J. Elman et al., Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996).
23. Supported by the Down's Syndrome Association (S.J.P.) and the UK Medical Research Council (A.K.-S.). We thank the Williams Syndrome Foundation and the Down's Syndrome Association for help in recruiting participants, P. Quinn and J. Spencer for providing training in the use of the Fagan Box, and S. Hesketh for assistance with initial pilot testing.