Drawing, Play-Dough, and Koosh Balls: The Use of Comfort Tools with Children in Forensic and Clinical Interviews

<p>During forensic and clinical interviews, children are often required to discuss difficult topics that may elicit feelings of shame, embarrassment, or reluctance. It is the clinician’s or forensic interviewer’s task to obtain detailed and accurate reports from these children, with many employing the use of comfort tools (e.g. drawing, play-dough, koosh balls) to put children at ease (Hill & Brown, 2017; Poole & Dickinson, 2014). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether three commonly used comfort tools influence children’s reports of a self-selected, emotionally laden event. Ninety-two children aged between 5 and 7 years old were asked to discuss a time when they got into trouble, and a time when they were happy. Some children were questioned without any comfort tools; the remainder were given one of the following: drawing materials, play-dough, or a koosh ball to interact with during the interview. Comfort tools had no impact on the amount of information reported by children. They also had no influence on whether children provided more episodic information (which may be especially relevant in forensic interviews), or evaluative information (which may be more relevant in clinical contexts). Providing comfort tools did not influence children’s ratings of either their interview experience, or the emotional intensity of the events they described. The interviewer asked more questions of children interviewed with drawing materials than those interviewed without comfort tools. The findings raise questions about the efficacy of comfort tools in interviews with children about past events, although more research is needed to establish an evidence-base to guide practitioners in different settings.</p>

Drawing, Play-Dough, and Koosh Balls: The Use of Comfort Tools with Children in Forensic and Clinical Interviews

<p>During forensic and clinical interviews, children are often required to discuss difficult topics that may elicit feelings of shame, embarrassment, or reluctance. It is the clinician’s or forensic interviewer’s task to obtain detailed and accurate reports from these children, with many employing the use of comfort tools (e.g. drawing, play-dough, koosh balls) to put children at ease (Hill & Brown, 2017; Poole & Dickinson, 2014). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether three commonly used comfort tools influence children’s reports of a self-selected, emotionally laden event. Ninety-two children aged between 5 and 7 years old were asked to discuss a time when they got into trouble, and a time when they were happy. Some children were questioned without any comfort tools; the remainder were given one of the following: drawing materials, play-dough, or a koosh ball to interact with during the interview. Comfort tools had no impact on the amount of information reported by children. They also had no influence on whether children provided more episodic information (which may be especially relevant in forensic interviews), or evaluative information (which may be more relevant in clinical contexts). Providing comfort tools did not influence children’s ratings of either their interview experience, or the emotional intensity of the events they described. The interviewer asked more questions of children interviewed with drawing materials than those interviewed without comfort tools. The findings raise questions about the efficacy of comfort tools in interviews with children about past events, although more research is needed to establish an evidence-base to guide practitioners in different settings.</p>

The computational benefits of episodic memory in spatial learning

Episodic memory has been studied extensively in the past few decades, but so far little is understood about how it is used to affect behavior. Here we postulate three learning paradigms: one-shot learning, replay learning, and online learning, where in the first two paradigms episodic memory is retrieved for decision-making or replayed to the neocortex for extracting semantic knowledge, respectively. In the third paradigm, the neocortex directly extracts information from online experiences as they occur, but does not have access to these experiences afterwards. By using visually-driven reinforcement learning in simulations, we found that whether an agent is able to solve a task by relying on the three learning paradigms depends differently on the number of learning trials and the complexity of the task. Episodic memory can, but does not always, have a major benefit for spatial learning, and its effect differs for the two modes of accessing episodic information. One-shot learning is initially faster than replay learning, but the latter reaches a better asymptotic performance. We believe that understanding how episodic memory drives behavior will be an important step towards elucidating the nature of episodic memory.

Importance-related fillers improve the classification accuracy of the Response Time Concealed Information Test in a crime scenario

Purpose. The Response Time Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) can reveal when a person recognizes a relevant item among other irrelevant items, based on comparatively slower responding. Therefore, if a person is concealing knowledge about the relevance of this item (e.g., recognizing it as a murder weapon), this deception can be revealed. A recent study introduced additional “familiarity-related fillers”, and these items substantially enhanced diagnostic efficiency in detecting autobiographical data. However, the generalizability of the efficiency of fillers to other scenarios remains an open question. We empirically investigated whether new importance-related fillers enhanced diagnostic efficiency in an imaginary crime scenario. Methods. Two hundred and thirty-nine volunteers participated in an independent samples experiment. Participants were asked to imagine either committing a crime (“guilty” group) or to imagine visiting a museum (“innocent” group). Then, all participants underwent RT-CIT testing using either a standard single probe or an enhanced single probe (with importance-related fillers) protocol.Results. The enhanced RT-CIT (with importance-related fillers) showed high diagnostic efficiency (AUC = .810), and significantly outperformed the standard version (AUC = .562). Neither dropout rates nor exclusion criteria influenced this enhancement.Conclusions. Importance-related fillers improve diagnostic efficiency when detecting episodic information using the RT-CIT, and seem to be useful in detecting knowledge in a wide range of scenarios.

Production and sociocultural activities of the Belarusian society of the Deaf (2011–2015)

The article reflects the socio-cultural and industrial activities of the public association “Belarusian Society of the Deaf” (“BelOG”) in 2011–2015. This article, the material of which is based on the sources of the current archive of the Central Board of the Belarusian Society of the Deaf and others, introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, will fill the gap in historical science, given that this period of the association’s activity is not reflected in historiography, there is only episodic information about the Belarusian Society of the Deaf at the specified time. Despite the difficult economic situation in the manufacturing sector of “BelOG”, caused by the consequences of the financial crisis in the Republic of Belarus (2009), partial financing of socio-cultural events and facilities continued. However, at the same time, this period was full of significant achievements in solving the problems of the linguistic rights of the hearing impaired, the development of studies of the Belarusian Sign Language, culture, sports and the historical heritage of the Belarusian Society of the Deaf.

Competitive interactions between motor and episodic memory systems during interleaved learning

Distinct motor and episodic memory systems are widely thought to compete during memory consolidation and retrieval, yet the nature of their interactions during learning is less clear. Motor learning is thought to depend on contributions from both systems, with the episodic system supporting rapid updating and the motor system supporting gradual tuning of responses by feedback. However, this competition has been identified when both systems are engaged in learning the same material (motor information), and so competition might be emphasized. We tested whether such competition also occurs when learning involved separate episodic-memory and motor information presented distinctly but yet in close temporal proximity. We measured behavioral and brain-activity correlates of motor-episodic competition during learning using a novel task with interleaved motor-adaptation and episodic-learning demands. Despite unrelated motor versus episodic information and temporal segregation, motor learning interfered with episodic learning and episodic learning interfered with motor learning. This reciprocal competition was tightly coupled to corresponding reductions of fMRI activity in motor versus episodic learning systems. These findings suggest that distinct motor and episodic learning systems compete even when they are engaged by system-specific demands in close temporal proximity during memory formation.

Prestimulus Activity in the Cingulo-Opercular Network Predicts Memory for Naturalistic Episodic Experience

Human memory is strongly influenced by brain states occurring before an event, yet we know little about the underlying mechanisms. We found that activity in the cingulo-opercular network (including bilateral anterior insula [aI] and anterior prefrontal cortex [aPFC]) seconds before an event begins can predict whether this event will subsequently be remembered. We then tested how activity in the cingulo-opercular network shapes memory performance. Our findings indicate that prestimulus cingulo-opercular activity affects memory performance by opposingly modulating subsequent activity in two sets of regions previously linked to encoding and retrieval of episodic information. Specifically, higher prestimulus cingulo-opercular activity was associated with a subsequent increase in activity in temporal regions previously linked to encoding and with a subsequent reduction in activity within a set of regions thought to play a role in retrieval and self-referential processing. Together, these findings suggest that prestimulus attentional states modulate memory for real-life events by enhancing encoding and possibly by dampening interference from competing memory substrates.

Reinstatement of Event Details during Episodic Simulation in the Hippocampus

According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, episodic simulation (i.e., imagining specific novel future episodes) draws on some of the same neurocognitive processes that support episodic memory (i.e., recalling specific past episodes). Episodic retrieval supports the ability to simulate future experiences by providing access to episodic details (e.g., the people and locations that comprise memories) that can be recombined in new ways. In the current functional neuroimaging study, we test this hypothesis by examining whether the hippocampus, a region implicated in the reinstatement of episodic information during memory, supports reinstatement of episodic information during simulation. Employing a multivoxel pattern similarity analysis, we interrogated the similarity between hippocampal neural patterns during memory and simulation at the level of individual event details. Our findings indicate that the hippocampus supports the reinstatement of detail-specific information from episodic memory during simulation, with the level of reinstatement contributing to the subjective experience of simulated details.

Impaired coherence for semantic but not episodic autobiographical memory in semantic variant primary progressive aphasia

Language deficits, including word-finding difficulties and impaired single-word comprehension, have been found in patients with semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA). These deficits characterize the linguistic abilities of patients with svPPA on a micro-linguistic level (word and sentence level). On a macro-linguistic level (discourse level), svPPA patients’ discourse has been described as “empty”. Few studies have considered the contribution of a linguistic impairment to the difficulty of producing autobiographical narratives. In the present study, we assessed svPPA patients’ discourse coherence during autobiographical narratives in order to characterize the nature of their speech on a macro-linguistic level and to investigate the relationship between discourse production and memory in a naturalistic context. We collected samples of discourse in which svPPA patients and healthy controls (matched in age, education, sex and handedness) reported autobiographical events. Their narratives were assessed with a rating scale to evaluate global coherence of discourse. The protocols were also analysed using the Autobiographical Interview method (Levine, Svoboda, Hay, Winocur, &amp; Moscovitch, 2002) and categorized as episodic (information about events at a specific time and place), semantic (general knowledge), or supplementary details (metacognitive statements, repeated information, editorializing). Where possible, patients were assessed longitudinally at three time points over two years. Patients with svPPA produced a reduced number of episodic details, while the number of semantic details produced was comparable to controls. However, the episodic information produced by patients was coherent with the topic of discourse, while semantic information was not. These results suggest that svPPA patients produce semantic information comparable to controls in quantity but not quality, whereas the opposite is the case for episodic information.