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Does anyone need help? Age and gender effects on children's ability to recognize need-of-help.

ABSTRACT: The exploratory study presented here examines children's ability to recognize another person's need-of-help. This social perception process necessarily precedes the decision to actively help others. Fifty-eight children aged between 5 and 13 completed three experimental paradigms. They were asked to look at black-and-white drawings and to indicate which ones showed somebody in need of help. A control task requiring children to differentiate between pictures of humans and birds measured general categorization abilities. This experimental design enabled us to consider confounding effects of children's developmental status and motivation and to distinguish them from specific need-of-help recognition abilities. As gender and age have been shown to influence social perception as well as helping behavior, we explored whether these factors also have an impact on need-of-help recognition. Children's response accuracies and response times (RTs) were analyzed. We observed clearly higher accuracy rates for younger girls compared to younger boys specifically in the need-of-help recognition tasks. For boys, an age-related performance improvement was found. Younger girls performed at a similarly high level as older girls and boys. No gender differences were observed for children aged over nine. This report provides first evidence that the developmental trajectory of children's ability to recognize another person's need-of-help differs for girls and boys.

SUBMITTER: Stolarova M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3936112 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Does anyone need help? Age and gender effects on children's ability to recognize need-of-help.

Stolarova Margarita M Brielmann Aenne A AA

Frontiers in psychology 20140227

The exploratory study presented here examines children's ability to recognize another person's need-of-help. This social perception process necessarily precedes the decision to actively help others. Fifty-eight children aged between 5 and 13 completed three experimental paradigms. They were asked to look at black-and-white drawings and to indicate which ones showed somebody in need of help. A control task requiring children to differentiate between pictures of humans and birds measured general c ...[more]

PMID: 24578698

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Project description:There has been an enduring fascination with the possibility of gender differences in the brain basis of language, yet the evidence has been largely equivocal. Evidence does exist, however, for women being at greater risk than men for developing psychomotor slowing and even Alzheimer disease with advancing age, although this may in part at least be due to women living longer. We examined whether gender, age, or their interaction influenced language-related or more general processes in reading. Reading consists of elements related to language, such as the processing of word sound patterns (phonology) and meanings (semantics), along with the lead-in processes of visual perception and orthographic (visual word form) processing that are specific to reading. To test for any influence of gender and age on either semantic processing or orthography-phonology mapping, we tested for an interaction of these factors on differences between meaningful words and meaningless but pronounceable non-words. We also tested for effects of gender and age on how the number of letters in a word modulates neural activity for reading. This lead-in process presumably relates most to orthography. Behaviorally, reading accuracy declined with age for both men and women, but the decline was steeper for men. Neurally, interactions between gender and age were found exclusively in medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC). These factors influenced the word-non-word contrast, but not the parametric effect of number of letters. Men showed increasing activation with age for non-words compared to words. Women showed only slightly decreasing activation with age for novel letter strings. Overall, we found interactive effects of gender and age in the mOFC on the left primarily for novel letter strings, but no such interaction for a contrast that emphasized visual form processing. Thus the interaction of gender with age in the mOFC may relate most to orthography-phonology conversion for unfamiliar letter strings. More generally, this suggests that efforts to investigate effects of gender on language-related tasks may benefit from taking into account age and the type of cognitive process being highlighted.

Project description:TheoryArgumentation is crucial for all academic disciplines. Nevertheless, a lack of argumentation skills among students is evident. Two core aspects of argumentation are the recognition of argument structures (e.g., backing up claims with premises, according to the Toulmin model) and the recognition of fallacies. As both aspects may be related to content knowledge, students studying different subjects might exhibit different argumentation skills depending on whether the content is drawn from their own or from a foreign subject. Therefore, we developed an instrument to measure the recognition of both argument structures and fallacies among the groups of preservice teachers and business economics students in both their respective domains (pedagogy and economics), and a neutral domain (sustainability). For the recognition of fallacies, we distinguished between congruent and incongruent fallacies. In congruent fallacies, the two aspects of argument quality, i.e., deductive validity and inductive strength, provide converging evidence against high argument quality. In incongruent fallacies, these two aspects diverge. Based on dual process theories, we expected to observe differences in the recognition of congruent and incongruent fallacies.AimsWe investigated whether these two abilities are domain-specific and whether the recognition of fallacies depends on the congruence of two aspects of argument quality.Methods267 preservice teachers and 56 business economics students participated in the study. For the recognition of argument structures, participants assigned the five statements constituting one argument to the corresponding component according to the Toulmin model. For the recognition of fallacies, we created arguments and incorporated a common fallacy into some of them: formal fallacy, overgeneralization, irrelevance, or circularity. Participants rated whether the argument was cogent or not, which was followed by a brief justification.ResultsDomain specificity could not be found for either of both abilities. For the recognition of fallacies, two dimensions were found: a congruent dimension (formal fallacies and overgeneralizations) and an incongruent dimension (irrelevance and circularity).DiscussionThe instrument measures the recognition of both argument structures and fallacies in these two groups across domains. The recognition of fallacies differs depending on whether the deductive validity and the inductive strength of the argument are equally indicative of argument quality or not.

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Does anyone need help? Age and gender effects on children's ability to recognize need-of-help.

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Does anyone need help? Age and gender effects on children's ability to recognize need-of-help.

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