Myopia prevalence, refractive status and uncorrected myopia among primary and secondary school students in Germany.

Introduction: The increasing prevalence of myopia worldwide is problematic because myopia can result in severe secondary pathologies, and is associated with considerable financial burden. With plenty of prevalence data available for some regions, current data for Europe remain sparse. Yet, information on myopia prevalence and associations is essential for monitoring, preventive and interventive purposes.

Associative learning via eyeblink conditioning differs by age from infancy to adulthood.

Associative learning is a key feature of adaptive behaviour and mental health, enabling individuals to adjust their actions in anticipation of future events. Comprehensive documentation of this essential component of human cognitive development throughout different developmental periods is needed. Here, we investigated age-related changes in associative learning in key developmental stages, including infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

Facial emotion recognition in children of parents with a mental illness.

Objective: Facial emotion recognition (FER) is a fundamental social skill essential for adaptive social behaviors, emotional development, and overall well-being. FER impairments have been linked to various mental disorders, making it a critical transdiagnostic mechanism influencing the development and trajectory of mental disorders. FER has also been found to play a role in the transgenerational transmission of mental disorders, with the majority of research suggesting FER impairments in children of parents with a mental illness (COPMI).

Parent-child interactive behavior in a German sample of parents with and without a mental illness: model replication and adaption of the Coding Interactive Behavior system.

Studies using observational measures often fail to meet statistical standards for both reliability and validity. The present study examined the psychometric properties of the Coding Interactive Behavior (CIB) System within a German sample of parent-child dyads. The sample consisted of 149 parents with and without a mental illness and their children [n experimental group (EG) = 75, n control group (CG) = 74] who participated in the larger Children of Mentally Ill Parents at Risk Evaluation (COMPARE) study.

Empathy and psychopathology in children and adolescents: the role of parental mental illness and emotion regulation.

Objective: Although empathy is known to be a strength, recent studies suggest that empathy can be a risk factor for psychopathology under certain conditions in children. This study examines parental mental illness as such a condition. Further, it aims to investigate whether maladaptive emotion regulation (ER) mediates the relationship between empathy and psychopathological symptoms of children.

Parenting stress in parents with and without a mental illness and its relationship to psychopathology in children: a multimodal examination.

Objective: Children of parents with a mental illness are at heightened risk to develop a mental illness themselves due to genetics and environmental factors. Although parenting stress (PS) is known to be associated with increased psychopathology in parents and children, there is no study investigating PS multimodally in a sample of parents with a mental illness. This study aims to compare PS of parents with and without a mental illness and further to examine the relationship between PS and psychopathology of children.

Using Light Meters to Investigate the Light-Myopia Association - A Literature Review of Devices and Research Methods.

With the increasing prevalence of myopia, evaluating its relationship with objective light exposure as a potential adjustable environmental factor in myopia development has been an emerging research field in recent years. From a thorough literature search, we identify ten wearable light meters from human studies on light exposure and myopia and present an overview of their parameters, thereby demonstrating the wide between-device variability and discussing its implications. We further identify 20 publications, including two reanalyses, reporting investigations of light-myopia associations with data from human subjects wearing light meters.

Spectral pattern similarity analysis: Tutorial and application in developmental cognitive neuroscience.

The human brain encodes information in neural activation patterns. While standard approaches to analyzing neural data focus on brain (de-)activation (e.g.

Myelin development in visual scene-network tracts beyond late childhood: A multimethod neuroimaging study.

The visual scene-network-comprising the parahippocampal place area (PPA), retrosplenial cortex (RSC), and occipital place area (OPA)-shows a prolonged functional development. Structural development of white matter that underlies the scene-network has not been investigated despite its potential influence on scene-network function. The key factor for white matter maturation is myelination.

Memory specificity is linked to repetition effects in event-related potentials across the lifespan.

The specificity with which past experiences can be remembered varies across the lifespan, possibly due to differences in how precisely information is encoded. Memory formation can be investigated through repetition effects, the common finding that neural activity is altered when stimuli are repeated. However, whether differences in this indirect measure of memory formation relate to lifespan differences in memory specificity has not yet been established.

A New 3-Day Standardized Eyeblink Conditioning Protocol to Assess Extinction Learning From Infancy to Adulthood.

Associative learning can be observed from the neonatal period onward, providing opportunities to examine changes in basic learning and memory abilities. One method that is suitable to study associative learning is classical eyeblink conditioning (EBC) which is dependent on the cerebellum. Extinction learning can be systematically investigated in this paradigm by varying the context during learning and extinction.

Head motion during fMRI tasks is reduced in children and adults if participants take breaks.

Head motion remains a challenging confound in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of both children and adults. Most pediatric neuroimaging labs have developed experience-based, child-friendly standards concerning e.g.

Representational similarity precedes category selectivity in the developing ventral visual pathway.

Many studies have investigated the development of face-, scene-, and body-selective regions in the ventral visual pathway. This work has primarily focused on comparing the size and univariate selectivity of these neural regions in children versus adults. In contrast, very few studies have investigated the developmental trajectory of more distributed activation patterns within and across neural regions.

Prolonged functional development of the parahippocampal place area and occipital place area.

Successful navigation of our surroundings is of high environmental relevance and involves processing of the visual scenery. Scene-processing undergoes a major behavioral improvement during childhood. However, possible neural changes that underlie this cognitive development in scene perception are understudied in comparison to other stimulus categories.

Looking Tasks Online: Utilizing Webcams to Collect Video Data from Home.

Online experimentation is emerging as a new methodology within classical data acquisition in psychology. It allows for easy, fast, broad, and cheap data conduction from the comfort of people's homes. To add another method to the array of available tools, here we used recent developments in web technology to investigate the technical feasibility of online HyperText Markup Language-5/JavaScript-based video data recording.

Online webcam-based eye tracking in cognitive science: A first look.

Online experimentation is emerging in many areas of cognitive psychology as a viable alternative or supplement to classical in-lab experimentation. While performance- and reaction-time-based paradigms are covered in recent studies, one instrument of cognitive psychology has not received much attention up to now: eye tracking. In this study, we used JavaScript-based eye tracking algorithms recently made available by Papoutsaki et al.

Face recognition is similarly affected by viewpoint in school-aged children and adults.

There is an ongoing debate on the question when face processing abilities mature. One aspect that has been part of this debate is the ability to recognize faces in and across different viewpoints. Here, we tested 128 participants consisting of school-age children (ages, 5-10 years) and adults (ages, 19-37 years) in two experiments to investigate the effects of different viewpoints (including front, three-quarter, profile view) on face recognition during development.

Tracking the Functional Development of the Corpus Callosum in Children Using Behavioral and Evoked Potential Interhemispheric Transfer Times.

Visual functions requiring interhemispheric transfer exhibit a long developmental trajectory up to age 12, which might be constrained by corpus callosum maturation. Here, we use electrophysiological and behavioral crossed-uncrossed differences (CUDs) in a visual Poffenberger paradigm to estimate the interhemispheric transfer time (IHTT)-a measure of corpus callosum maturation-in 7-year-old children and adults. Adults' electrophysiological CUDs were faster than 7-year-olds'.

Online psychophysics: reaction time effects in cognitive experiments.

Using the Internet to acquire behavioral data is currently on the rise. However, very basic questions regarding the feasibility of online psychophysics are still open. Here, we aimed to replicate five well-known paradigms in experimental psychology (Stroop, Flanker, visual search, masked priming, attentional blink) in three settings (classical "lab", "web-in-lab", "web") to account for possible changes in technology and environment.

U Can Touch This: How Tablets Can Be Used to Study Cognitive Development.

New technological devices, particularly those with touch screens, have become virtually omnipresent over the last decade. Practically from birth, children are now surrounded by smart phones and tablets. Despite being our constant companions, little is known about whether these tools can be used not only for entertainment, but also to collect reliable scientific data.

The use of repetition suppression paradigms in developmental cognitive neuroscience.

Repetition suppression paradigms allow a more detailed look at brain functioning than classical paradigms and have been applied vigorously in adult cognitive neuroscience. These paradigms are well suited for studies in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience as they can be applied without collecting a behavioral response and across all age groups. Furthermore, repetition suppression paradigms can be employed in various neuroscience techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG).

Mid-adolescent neurocognitive development of ignoring and attending emotional stimuli.

Appropriate reactions toward emotional stimuli depend on the distribution of prefrontal attentional resources. In mid-adolescence, prefrontal top-down control systems are less engaged, while subcortical bottom-up emotional systems are more engaged. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to follow the neural development of attentional distribution, i.

Differences in the right inferior longitudinal fasciculus but no general disruption of white matter tracts in children with autism spectrum disorder.

One of the most widely cited features of the neural phenotype of autism is reduced "integrity" of long-range white matter tracts, a claim based primarily on diffusion imaging studies. However, many prior studies have small sample sizes and/or fail to address differences in data quality between those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typical participants, and there is little consensus on which tracts are affected. To overcome these problems, we scanned a large sample of children with autism (n = 52) and typically developing children (n = 73).