Effects Of Verbal Information Research Articles

The effect of verbal information about model’s competence on overimitation by preschool children

Overimitation is defined by a tendency to copy all actions executed by a model, even the clearly irrelevant ones. The motivational mechanisms and functionality of overimitation are still not well understood, but its possible adaptive meaning could be related to causal opacity of a great part of socially learned behaviors. This phenomenon has been widely replicated in several contexts and has been observed in the behavior of children over 2 years of age and even in adults. Despite the seeming robustness of overimitation, studies have shown that it is sensitive to some characteristics of a model observed such as age, familiarity, proficiency, and reputation. Our work intended to investigate the effect of information about the competence of an adult model on the copying of irrelevant actions by preschool children (5 years old) in a task. We tested the influence of self-declared information about the model competence and of the same kind of information given by third parties in a conversation about the model. Our results reveal no effect of both “self-declared competence” and “reputation” biases on overimitation. We discuss that this result may have occurred because other information available to participants, and not manipulated by us, was used to infer model competence such as the model’s age and success in the task directly observed by the participants. Another potential explanation is that children use a “copy all, correct later” strategy in a context where only one model is available.

Effects of verbal information on fear-related reasoning biases in children

The present study made an attempt to induce fear-related reasoning biases by providing children with negative information about a novel stimulus. For this purpose, non-clinical children aged 9–12 years ( N = 318) were shown a picture of an unknown animal for which they received either negative, ambiguous, positive, or no information. Then children completed a series of tests for measuring various types of reasoning biases (i.e., confirmation bias and covariation bias) in relation to this animal. Results indicated that children in the negative and, to a lesser extent, the ambiguous information groups displayed higher scores on tests of fear-related reasoning biases than children in the positive and no information groups. Altogether, these results support the idea that learning via negatively tinted information plays a role in the development of fear-related cognitive distortions in youths.

The effects of verbal information on children's fear beliefs about social situations

Two experiments explored the role of verbal information in changing children's fear-related beliefs about social situations. In Experiment 1, 118 6- to 8- and 12- to 13-year-olds heard positive, negative, or no information about individuals’ experiences of three social situations. Fear beliefs regarding each situation were assessed before and after this manipulation. Verbal information had no significant influence on children's fear beliefs. In Experiment 2, the same paradigm was used with 80 12- to 13-year-olds, but the information took the form of multiple attitude statements about the situations expressed by groups of peers, older children, or adults. An affective priming task of implicit attitudes was used to complement the explicit questions about fear beliefs. Negative information influenced both explicit and implicit fear beliefs. The source of information and the child's own social anxiety did not moderate these effects. Implications for our understanding of the socialisation of childhood fears are discussed.

The effect of verbal information on the experience of discomfort in mammography

Purpose : Discomfort experienced during mammography is a factor associated with non-participation of women in breast screening programmes. Women’s expectations of discomfort have been found to be related to the actual experiences of discomfort reported. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of verbal information given prior to the examination on women’s expectations of discomfort and on actual discomfort experienced.Method : The study involved 136 attendees at the Central and Eastern Sydney BreastScreen Service, Sydney, Australia for routine breast screening by mammography. Prior to the mammogram, expectations of discomfort were recorded. Half of the women (68) were verbally provided with the prior outlined information about the procedure, the importance of the compression and the associated slight discomfort (experimental group). The other half (68) completed the procedure routinely without such information (control group). After the procedure, all the participants were asked to report the levels of actual discomfort they experienced. By comparing the responses of women in the experimental and control groups, the effects of the verbal information were evaluated.Results : A significant difference was found between the two groups in the relationship between levels of discomfort experienced and levels of expectations (P value=0.007).Conclusions : The results of this study indicated that verbal information had a significant effect on reducing the levels of discomfort experienced by reducing the expectations of discomfort of the women. This effect was more pronounced in the first time attendees. Further research is suggested.

What is the impact of knowing that a rose is a rose: Effects of verbal information on young children's recall of events

What is the impact of knowing that a rose is a rose: Effects of verbal information on young children's recall of events

Integration of Visual and Verbal Information in Children's Memories

The extent to which children's visual memories were modified by subsequent verbal information was examined. In 2 experiments, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children and college students were asked questions after being shown slides. Some questions described events that appeared in the slides and other questions described events not depicted. In experiment 1 correct recall of the visual events was facilitated by congruent verbal information and impaired by incongruent verbal information. When subjects demonstrated good memory for the original visual events, the effects of the verbal information increased with age. In experiment 2, the effects of verbal information on visual recognition performance were evaluated. Correct recognition of study slides and false recognition of distractor slides increased when the questions presented information depicted in the appropriate slides. Again, the influence of verbal information increased with age only when subjects demonstrated correct recognition of control slides. These results illustrate the increasing interdependence of the verbal and visual systems with age.

Effect of Verbal Information on Recognition of Fragmented Figures

The concept of 'set' is often involved in an attempt to account for certain perceptual phenomena. Dashiell, Gibson, Allport, and, more recently, Haber have reviewed the effect of set on perception.' Although there are many experiments on how set affects perception, they can be questioned on a number of grounds. The first is that where it has been assumed that expectation influences perceptual experience, a coincidental process-a recent perceptual experience-has been shown to exert the more important role when the two have been experimentally separated.2 A second is the failure to distinguish perception from related processes of recognition, identification, interpretation, or simply guessing. For instance, if perception is defined as the experience of a present object, recognition implies a feeling of familiarity with that object. In recognition, the present object is experienced with the added reference to the past, whereas the first time the object was seen it was experienced without the element of familiarity. Similarly, perception can be differentiated from identification (certain forms distinctiveness as a consequence of repeated exposure) and interpretation (the meaning which the visual form has for a person).3 The present experiments were undertaken in an effort to show that a set given one group of Ss can affect a subsequent perceptual experience so that it is different from the experience of a group not so set. Here, set refers to the information Ss received. More specifically, one group of Ss was given prior verbal information which was intended to enable them to percep-