Multitasking across the lifespan in different task contexts.

We assessed lifespan development of multitasking in a sample of 187 individuals aged 8-82 years. Participants performed a visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM) task together with either postural control or reaction time (RT) tasks. Using criterion-referenced testing we individually adjusted difficulty levels for the VSWM task to control for single-task differences.

Association between time of assessment within a school year and physical fitness of primary school children.

The dissociation of effects of age, time of assessment and cohort is a well-known challenge in developmental science. We examined effects of time of assessment in the school year on children's physical fitness using data from 75,362 German third-graders from seven cohorts. Children were tested once either in the first or second school term of third grade.

Direction-specific reading experience shapes perceptual span.

Perceptual span in reading, the spatial extent for effective information extraction during a single fixation, provides a critical foundation to all studies for sentence reading. However, it is not understood fully how the perceptual span is influenced by direction-specific reading experience. Traditional Chinese sentences can be written horizontally from left to right or vertically downward, offering the best opportunity to explore readers' perceptual span in different text directions, free of possible confounding with language proficiency and cross-participant differences.

Chinese offers a test for universal cognitive processes.

The Chinese writing system is unique in its implementation of graphemic, phonological, morphological, and semantic features. We add nuances to its portrait in the target article and highlight research on radically different timelines of phonological and semantic activation during reading of Chinese and alphabetic script, paving the way for the identification of universal and culture-specific cognitive processing.

Covid Pandemic Effects on the Physical Fitness of Primary School Children: Results of the German EMOTIKON Project.

Background: In spring of 2020, the Sars-CoV-2 incidence rate increased rapidly in Germany and around the world. Throughout the next 2 years, schools were temporarily closed and social distancing measures were put in place to slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Did these social restrictions and temporary school lockdowns affect children's physical fitness? The EMOTIKON project annually tests the physical fitness of all third-graders in the Federal State of Brandenburg, Germany.

Physical fitness of primary school children differs depending on their timing of school enrollment.

Previous research has shown that children who were enrolled to school according to the legal key date (i.e., keyage children, between eight and nine years in third grade) exhibited a linear physical fitness development in the ninth year of life.

Lifespan changes in postural control.

Lifespan development of postural control shows as an inverted U-shaped function with optimal performance in young adults and similar levels of underperformance in children and older adults. However, similarities in children and older adults might conceal differences in underlying control processes. We mapped out age-related differences in postural control using center-of-pressure trajectories of 299 participants ranging from 7 to 81 years old in three tasks: stable stance, compromised vision, and narrowed base of support.

Basic psychological need satisfaction and frustration in major depressive disorder.

Basic psychological needs theory postulates that a social environment that satisfies individuals' three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness leads to optimal growth and well-being. On the other hand, the frustration of these needs is associated with ill-being and depressive symptoms foremost investigated in non-clinical samples; yet, there is a paucity of research on need frustration in clinical samples. Survey data were compared between adult individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD; = 115; 48.

Rapid adaptation of predictive models during language comprehension: Aperiodic EEG slope, individual alpha frequency and idea density modulate individual differences in real-time model updating.

Predictive coding provides a compelling, unified theory of neural information processing, including for language. However, there is insufficient understanding of how predictive models adapt to changing contextual and environmental demands and the extent to which such adaptive processes differ between individuals. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to track prediction error responses during a naturalistic language processing paradigm.

A tutorial on using the paired t test for power calculations in repeated measures ANOVA with interactions.

The a priori calculation of statistical power has become common practice in behavioral and social sciences to calculate the necessary sample size for detecting an expected effect size with a certain probability (i.e., power).

Effect of timing of school enrollment on physical fitness in third graders.

Timing of initial school enrollment may vary considerably for various reasons such as early or delayed enrollment, skipped or repeated school classes. Accordingly, the age range within school grades includes older-(OTK) and younger-than-keyage (YTK) children. Hardly any information is available on the impact of timing of school enrollment on physical fitness.

Effects of competence feedback on therapist competence and patient outcome: A randomized controlled trial.

Objective: Therapist competence is considered essential for the success of psychotherapy. Feedback is an intervention which has the potential to improve therapist competence. The present study investigated whether competence feedback leads to an improvement of therapist competence and patient outcome.

The Beijing Sentence Corpus: A Chinese sentence corpus with eye movement data and predictability norms.

This report introduces the Beijing Sentence Corpus (BSC). This is a Chinese sentence corpus of eye-tracking data with relatively clear word boundaries. In addition, we report predictability norms for each word in the corpus.

Age and sex effects in physical fitness components of 108,295 third graders including 515 primary schools and 9 cohorts.

Children's physical fitness development and related moderating effects of age and sex are well documented, especially boys' and girls' divergence during puberty. The situation might be different during prepuberty. As girls mature approximately two years earlier than boys, we tested a possible convergence of performance with five tests representing four components of physical fitness in a large sample of 108,295 eight-year old third-graders.

Middle ratings rise regardless of grammatical construction: Testing syntactic variability in a repeated exposure paradigm.

People perceive sentences more favourably after hearing or reading them many times. A prominent approach in linguistic theory argues that these types of exposure effects (satiation effects) show direct evidence of a generative approach to linguistic knowledge: only some sentences improve under repeated exposure, and which sentences do improve can be predicted by a model of linguistic competence that yields natural syntactic classes. However, replications of the original findings have been inconsistent, and it remains unclear whether satiation effects can be reliably induced in an experimental setting at all.

Parafoveal access to word stem during reading: An eye movement study.

Previous studies (Hyönä, Yan, & Vainio, 2018; Yan et al., 2014) have demonstrated that in morphologically rich languages a word's morphological status is processed parafoveally to be used in modulating saccadic programming in reading. In the present parafoveal preview study conducted in Finnish, we examined the exact nature of this effect by comparing reading of morphologically complex words (a stem + two suffixes) to that of monomorphemic words.

Sequential Data Assimilation of the Stochastic SEIR Epidemic Model for Regional COVID-19 Dynamics.

Newly emerging pandemics like COVID-19 call for predictive models to implement precisely tuned responses to limit their deep impact on society. Standard epidemic models provide a theoretically well-founded dynamical description of disease incidence. For COVID-19 with infectiousness peaking before and at symptom onset, the SEIR model explains the hidden build-up of exposed individuals which creates challenges for containment strategies.

An Update on Secular Trends in Physical Fitness of Children and Adolescents from 1972 to 2015: A Systematic Review.

Background: There is evidence that physical fitness of children and adolescents (particularly cardiorespiratory endurance) has declined globally over the past decades. Ever since the first reports on negative trends in physical fitness, efforts have been undertaken by for instance the World Health Organization (WHO) to promote physical activity and fitness in children and adolescents. Therefore, it is timely to re-analyze the literature to examine whether previous reports on secular declines in physical fitness are still detectable or whether they need to be updated.

Eye movement control in Turkish sentence reading.

Reading requires the assembly of cognitive processes across a wide spectrum from low-level visual perception to high-level discourse comprehension. One approach of unravelling the dynamics associated with these processes is to determine how eye movements are influenced by the characteristics of the text, in particular which features of the words within the perceptual span maximise the information intake due to foveal, spillover, parafoveal, and predictive processing. One way to test the generalisability of current proposals of such distributed processing is to examine them across different languages.

Eye movement control in Chinese reading: A cross-sectional study.

The present study explored the age-related changes of eye movement control in reading-that is, where to send the eyes and when to move them. Different orthographies present readers with somewhat different problems to solve, and this might, in turn, be reflected in different patterns of development of reading skill. Participants of different developmental levels (Grade 3, = 30; Grade 5, = 27 and adults, = 27) were instructed to read sentences for comprehension while their eye movements were recorded.

Parafoveal processing of phonology and semantics during the reading of Korean sentences.

The present study sets out to address two fundamental questions in the reading of continuous texts: Whether semantic and phonological information from upcoming words can be accessed during natural reading. In the present study we investigated parafoveal processing during the reading of Korean sentences, manipulating semantic and phonological information from parafoveal preview words. In addition to the first evidence for a semantic preview effect in Korean, we found that Korean readers have stronger and more long-lasting phonological than semantic activation from parafoveal words in second-pass reading.

Beam Walking to Assess Dynamic Balance in Health and Disease: A Protocol for the "BEAM" Multicenter Observational Study.

Background: Dynamic balance keeps the vertical projection of the center of mass within the base of support while walking. Dynamic balance tests are used to predict the risks of falls and eventual falls. The psychometric properties of most dynamic balance tests are unsatisfactory and do not comprise an actual loss of balance while walking.

Russian Sentence Corpus: Benchmark measures of eye movements in reading in Russian.

This article introduces a new corpus of eye movements in silent reading-the Russian Sentence Corpus (RSC). Russian uses the Cyrillic script, which has not yet been investigated in cross-linguistic eye movement research. As in every language studied so far, we confirmed the expected effects of low-level parameters, such as word length, frequency, and predictability, on the eye movements of skilled Russian readers.

Word segmentation by alternating colors facilitates eye guidance in Chinese reading.

During sentence reading, low spatial frequency information afforded by spaces between words is the primary factor for eye guidance in spaced writing systems, whereas saccade generation for unspaced writing systems is less clear and under debate. In the present study, we investigated whether word-boundary information, provided by alternating colors (consistent or inconsistent with word-boundary information) influences saccade-target selection in Chinese. In Experiment 1, as compared to a baseline (i.

On the ambiguity of interaction and nonlinear main effects in a regime of dependent covariates.

The analysis of large experimental datasets frequently reveals significant interactions that are difficult to interpret within the theoretical framework guiding the research. Some of these interactions actually arise from the presence of unspecified nonlinear main effects and statistically dependent covariates in the statistical model. Importantly, such nonlinear main effects may be compatible (or, at least, not incompatible) with the current theoretical framework.