'Goslob is a Boy's Name'

This class-based case study explores how firmly established are primary school children's gender expectations and how far a primary school environment serves to reinforce or challenge their expectations. Children of differing ages responded to a specially written story framework. Their responses indicated a gender stereotyping which influenced interpretation. Implications for teaching are discussed.     

Book reviews

Sport Psychology: Concepts and Applications F.C. Bakker, H.T.A. Whiting and H. van der Brug, John Wiley, Chichester, 1990 ix + 225 pp., £29.95 (hb), ISBN 0 471 92368 0

Advanced Materials for Sports Equipment K.E. Easterling, Chapman and Hall, London, 1993 xii + 127 pp., £17.50 (pb), ISBN 0 412 40120 7

Sport Psychology: A Self‐help Guide S.J. Bull (ed.), Crowood Press, Marlborough, Wilts, 1991 vi + 208 pp., £14.95 (pb), ISBN 1 85223 568 3

The Human Machine R. McNeil Alexander, Natural History Museum Publications, London, 1992 176 pp., £15.95 (pb), ISBN 0 565 01169 3     

Eccentric subject,impossible object: A 1 poststructural reading of Hannah Cullwick

The paper explores poststructural figures of identity via a reading of a collection of texts by and about a Victorian maidservant, Hannah Cullwick. Drawing on Donna Haraway's figure of the trickster or shape changer and on the theorizing of the ''subaltern'' subject in postcolonial writing, the paper challenges readings of Hannah and her life that offer her up as an exemplary figure of suffering or heroic womanhood. Instead, it is proposed that Hannah can be seen as an ambivalent and transgressive figure of difference and in - between - ness . The paper gestures towards some implications for the handling of first-person narratives in qualitative research. The ''Hannah Cullwick'' texts include her diaries and those of her secret lover and, later, husband, an eminent barrister, together with the commentaries of their respective editors. Reference is also made to a photographic essay and to contemporary scholarly works about Hannah and her life.     

Children and objects: affection and infection

This paper considers young children’s (aged 3–5 years) relations with objects, and in particular objects that are brought from home to school. We begin by considering the place of objects within early years classrooms and their relationship to children’s education before considering why some objects are often separated from their owners on entry to the classroom. We suggest that the ‘arrest’ of objects is as a consequence of them being understood as ‘infecting’ specific perceptions or constructs of young children. We further suggest that a focus on the dichotomy between affection/infection for and of certain objects may offer new possibilities for seeing and engaging with children, thus expanding the narrow imaginaries of children that are coded in developmental psychology, UK early years education policy and classroom practice.     

Trauma-related impairment in children—A survey in Sri Lankan provinces affected by armed conflict

ObjectivesThe present study examined traumatic experiences, PTSD, and co-morbid symptoms in relation to neuropsychological and school performance in school children affected by two decades of civil war and unrest.MethodThe epidemiological survey of children's mental health included a representative sample of 420 school children. Local teachers were trained to administer a translation of the UCLA-PTSD Index Form. The instrument and the epidemiological findings were validated by assessment through clinical expert interview, school grades, and neuropsychological testing in a subsample (N = 67).ResultsNinety-two percent of the children surveyed had experienced severely traumatizing events such as combat, bombing, shelling, or witnessing the death of a loved one. Twenty-five percent met the criteria for a diagnosis of PTSD. Traumatized children reported lasting interference of experiences with their daily life, which was corroborated by memory testing, scores in school performance and ratings of social withdrawal. Depressive symptoms and poor physical health were frequent in these children. The majority of trained teachers achieved valid results in the structured interviews.ConclusionPerformance and functioning in children are related to the total load of traumatic events experienced. An important component of psychosocial programs in post-conflict areas should include increasing community-based awareness of the consequences of traumatic stress, both as a preventative measure and as a way of decreasing stigmatization of affected individuals.     

Two- to eight-month-old infants' perception of dynamic auditory-visual spatial colocation

From birth, infants detect associations between the locations of static visual objects and sounds they emit, but there is limited evidence regarding their sensitivity to the dynamic equivalent when a sound-emitting object moves. In 4 experiments involving thirty-six 2-month-olds, forty-eight 5-month-olds, and forty-eight 8-month-olds, we investigated infants' ability to process this form of spatial colocation. Whereas there was no evidence of spontaneous sensitivity, all age groups detected a dynamic colocation during habituation and looked longer at test trials in which sound and sight were dislocated. Only 2-month-olds showed clear sensitivity to the dislocation relation, although 8-month-olds did so following additional habituation. These results are discussed relative to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis and work suggesting increasing specificity in processing with age.     

The Development of Size Sequencing Skills: An Empirical and Computational Analysis

We explore a long-observed phenomenon in children's cognitive development known as size seriation. It is not until children are around 7 years of age that they spontaneously use a strict ascending or descending order of magnitude to organize sets of objects differing in size. Incomplete and inaccurate ordering shown by younger children has been thought to be related to their incomplete grasp of the mathematical concept of a unit. Piaget first brought attention to children's difficulties in solving ordering and size-matching tests, but his tasks and explanations have been progressively neglected due to major theoretical shifts in scholarship on developmental cognition. A cogent alternative to his account has never emerged, leaving size seriation and related abilities as an unexplained case of discontinuity in mental growth. In this monograph, we use a new training methodology, together with computational modeling of the data to offer a new explanation of size seriation development and the emergence of related skills. We describe a connected set of touchscreen tasks that measure the abilities of 5- and 7-year-old children to (a) learn a linear size sequence of five or seven items and (b) identify unique (unit) values within those same sets, such as second biggest and middle-sized. Older children required little or no training to succeed in the sequencing tasks, whereas younger children evinced trial-and-error performance. Marked age differences were found on ordinal identification tasks using matching-to-sample and other methods. Confirming Piaget's findings, these tasks generated learning data with which to develop a computational model of the change. Using variables to represent working and long-term memory (WM and LTM), the computational model represents the information processing of the younger child in terms of a perception-action feedback loop, resulting in a heuristic for achieving a correct sequence. To explain why older children do not require training on the size task, it was hypothesized that an increase in WM to a certain threshold level provides the information-processing capacity to allow the participant to start to detect a minimum interval between each item in the selection. The probabilistic heuristic is thus thought to be replaced during a transitional stage by a serial algorithm that guarantees success. The minimum interval discovery has the effect of controlling search for the next item in a principled monotonic direction. Through a minor additional processing step, this algorithm permits relatively easy identification of ordinal values. The model was tested by simulating the perceptual learning and action selection processes thought to be taking place during trial-and-error sequencing. Error distributions were generated across each item in the sequence and these were found to correspond to the error patterns shown by 5-year-olds. The algorithm that is thought to emerge from successful learning was also tested. It simulated high levels of success on seriation and also on ordinal identification tasks, as shown by 7-year-olds. An unexpected finding from the empirical studies was that, unlike adults, the 7-year-old children showed marked difficulty when they had to compute ordinal size values in tasks that did not permit the use of the serial algorithm. For example, when required to learn a non-monotonic sequence where the ordinal values were in a fixed random order such as “second biggest, middle-sized, smallest, second smallest, biggest,” each item has to be found without reference to the “smallest difference” rule used by the algorithm. The difficulty evinced by 7-year-olds was consistent with the idea that the information in LTM is integrally tied to the search procedure itself as a search-and-stop based on a cumulative tally, as distinct from being accessed from a more permanent and atemporal store of stand-alone ordinal values in LTM. The implications of this possible constraint in understanding are discussed in terms of further developmental changes. We conclude that the seriation behavior shown by children at around 7 years represents a qualitative shift in their understanding but not in the sense that Piaget first proposed. We see the emergent algorithm as an information-reducing device, representing a default strategy for how humans come to deal with potentially complex sets of relations. We argue this with regard to counting behaviors in children and also with regard to how linear monotonic devices for resolving certain logical tasks endure into adulthood. Insofar as the monograph reprises any aspect of the Piagetian account, it is in his highlighting of an important cognitive discontinuity in logicomathematical understanding at around the age of 7, and his quest for understanding the transactions with the physical world that lead to it.