Population-Level Associations between Preschool Vulnerability and Grade-Four Basic Skills

Background: This is a predictive validity study examining the extent to which developmental vulnerability at kindergarten entry (as measured by the Early Development Instrument, EDI) is associated with children’s basic skills in 4th grade (as measured by the Foundation Skills Assessment, FSA). Methodology/Principal Findings: Relative risk analysis was performed on a large database linking individual-level EDI ratings to the scores the same children obtained on a provincial assessment of academic skills (FSA – Foundation Skills Assessment) four years later. We found that early vulnerability in kindergarten is associated with the basic skills that underlie populations of children’s academic achievement in reading, writing and math, indicating that the Early Development Instrument permits to predict achievement-related skills four years in advance. Conclusions/Significance: The EDI can be used to predict children’s educational trends at the population level and can help select early prevention and intervention programs targeting pre-school populations at minimum cost

The Nature of Working Memory for Braille

Blind individuals have been shown on multiple occasions to compensate for their loss of sight by developing exceptional abilities in their remaining senses. While most research has been focused on perceptual abilities per se in the auditory and tactile modalities, recent work has also investigated higher-order processes involving memory and language functions. Here we examined tactile working memory for Braille in two groups of visually challenged individuals (completely blind subjects, CBS; blind with residual vision, BRV). In a first experimental procedure both groups were given a Braille tactile memory span task with and without articulatory suppression, while the BRV and a sighted group performed a visual version of the task. It was shown that the Braille tactile working memory (BrWM) of CBS individuals under articulatory suppression is as efficient as that of sighted individuals' visual working memory in the same condition. Moreover, the results suggest that BrWM may be more robust in the CBS than in the BRV subjects, thus pointing to the potential role of visual experience in shaping tactile working memory. A second experiment designed to assess the nature (spatial vs. verbal) of this working memory was then carried out with two new CBS and BRV groups having to perform the Braille task concurrently with a mental arithmetic task or a mental displacement of blocks task. We show that the disruption of memory was greatest when concurrently carrying out the mental displacement of blocks, indicating that the Braille tactile subsystem of working memory is likely spatial in nature in CBS. The results also point to the multimodal nature of working memory and show how experience can shape the development of its subcomponents

The Impact of Social Disparity on Prefrontal Function in Childhood

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) develops from birth through late adolescence. This extended developmental trajectory provides many opportunities for experience to shape the structure and function of the PFC. To date, a few studies have reported links between parental socioeconomic status (SES) and prefrontal function in childhood, raising the possibility that aspects of environment associated with SES impact prefrontal function. Considering that behavioral measures of prefrontal function are associated with learning across multiple domains, this is an important area of investigation. In this study, we used fMRI to replicate previous findings, demonstrating an association between parental SES and PFC function during childhood. In addition, we present two hypothetical mechanisms by which SES could come to affect PFC function of this association: language environment and stress reactivity. We measured language use in the home environment and change in salivary cortisol before and after fMRI scanning. Complexity of family language, but not the child's own language use, was associated with both parental SES and PFC activation. Change in salivary cortisol was also associated with both SES and PFC activation. These observed associations emphasize the importance of both enrichment and adversity-reduction interventions in creating good developmental environments for all children

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Community resilience, quality childcare, and preschoolers' mental health: A three-city comparison

Many studies suggest that quality childcare can positively influence children's outcomes in a wide range of domains, including mental health. While an extensive literature on the effects of childcare on individual children exists, how quality childcare programs contribute to trends at the population-level is yet to be established. In this study, we examine community differences in the quality of childcare and the mental health of children attending childcare centres in three communities in British Columbia, Canada. Previous research on Kindergarten children conducted in these communities indicated that two exhibited expected outcomes (based on socioeconomic criteria, these communities were classified as " better off" and " worse off" ), and one exhibited better than expected outcomes and was therefore labeled " resilient." We hypothesized that the better than expected child outcomes in the resilient community were due to better quality childcare