Neural Correlates of Belief- and Desire-Reasoning

Theory of mind requires an understanding of both desires and beliefs. Moreover, children understand desires before beliefs. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying this developmental lag. Additionally, previous neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies have neglected the direct comparison of these developmentally critical mental-state concepts. Event-related brain potentials were recorded as participants ( N  =   24; mean age   =   22 years) reasoned about diverse-desires, diverse-beliefs, and parallel physical situations. A mid-frontal late slow wave (LSW) was associated with desire and belief judgments. A right-posterior LSW was only associated with belief judgments. These findings demonstrate neural overlap and critical differences in reasoning explicitly about desires and beliefs, and they suggest children recruit additional neural processes for belief judgments beyond a common, more general, mentalizing neural system.     

Children's Early Awareness of Comprehension as Evident in Their Spontaneous Corrections of Speech Errors

A crucial human cognitive goal is to understand and to be understood. But understanding often takes active management. Two studies investigated early developmental processes of understanding management by focusing on young children's comprehension monitoring. We ask: When and how do young children actively monitor their comprehension of social-communicative interchanges and so seek to clarify and correct their own potential miscomprehension? Study 1 examined the parent–child conversations of 13 children studied longitudinally in everyday situations from the time the children were approximately 2 years through 3 years. Study 2 used a seminaturalistic situation in the laboratory to address these questions with more precision and control with 36 children aged 2–3 years.     

FROM NEAR‐RUBBLE TO REBIRTH: A FORMER CHURCH BUILDING AS A CENTERPIECE OF COLLABORATION FOR CHILDREN

This article describes the collaborative efforts of multiple organizations and individuals in transforming a doomed church in a large urban community into an exemplary public Pre‐k through Grade 2 laboratory school. Central to this emerging facility was the commitment of all cooperating parties to focus upon meeting the educational, health, and social needs of each child through school, home and community involvement. Unique to this collaboration has been the continual involvement of higher education institutions in Western New York in the planning, organization and implementation of this project. Further, infusion of the latest in computer and video technology with distance learning capability supported cross‐fertilization and friendships among higher education professionals and their students from a variety of related disciplines.     

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST: MEDIEVALIST AND MODERNIST IDEAS IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

Sitting on a fence is a dangerous course:

You might even get a bullet from a peace‐keeping force.

How're you going to know best,

Once upon a time in the West?

Dire Straits

     

Incivility and Dysfunction in the Library Workplace: Perceptions and Feedback from the Field

Issues associated with lack of civility, less than ideal functionality, and employees that may not self-reflect as much they should are all challenges in the modern workplace and libraries are no exception. The purpose of this study was to determine which issues associated with a lack of civility such as mobbing, bullying, workplace dysfunction, and lack of abilities regarding self-reflection were found in the library workplace and to what extent. The data represents the feedback of 4,168 library employees through a self-reporting survey instrument designed by the authors with the help of the American Library Association. Data is both quantitative and qualitative and seeks to examine the issues addressed across all types of libraries. While useful for all library employees, this study and report are especially relevant to the modern library administrator.     

Children and adolescents' internal models of food-sharing behavior include complex evaluations of contextual factors

This study examined internal representations of food sharing in 589 children and adolescents (8-19 years of age). Questionnaires, depicting a variety of contexts in which one person was asked to share a resource with another, were used to examine participants' expectations of food-sharing behavior. Factors that were varied included the value of the resource, the relation between the two depicted actors, the quality of this relation, and gender. Results indicate that internal models of food-sharing behavior showed systematic patterns of variation, demonstrating that individuals have complex contextually based internal models at all ages, including the youngest. Examination of developmental changes in use of individual patterns is consistent with the idea that internal models reflect age-specific patterns of interactions while undergoing a process of progressive consolidation.