Assessment of selective mutism (SM) is hampered by the lack of diagnostic measures. The Frankfurt Scale of Selective Mutism was developed for kindergarteners, schoolchildren, and adolescents, including the diagnostic scale (DS) and the severity scale (SS). The objective of this study was to evaluate this novel, parent-rated questionnaire among individuals aged 3 to 18 years ( n = 334) with SM, social phobia, internalizing disorders, and a control group. Item analysis resulted in high item-total correlations, and internal consistency in both scales was excellent with Cronbach's α = .90-.98. Exploratory factor analysis of the SS consistently yielded a one-factor solution. Mean sum scores of the DS differed significantly between the diagnostic groups, and the receiver operating characteristic analysis resulted in optimal cutoffs for distinguishing SM from all other groups with the area under the curves of 0.94-1.00. The SS sum scores correlated significantly with SM's clinician-rated symptom severity.

Scripts are mental representations of activities in memory and are thought to be organized dimensionally in a temporal dimension. We investigated the cognitive strategies during the processing of temporal order of an event sequence to gain insight into the organization of scripts. Subjects were presented with triplets of script events (A - B - C). Fifty percent of the items included sequence violations at different positions within the triplet (late: A - C - B, or early: C - A - B). Reaction times indicate that subjects use an economical strategy by comparing the relative temporal positions of event pairs (e.g., A vs. B and if necessary B vs. C) and only attend to information that is necessary. Pupil data and error rates indicate that the temporal information of the complete sequence affects the decision process even if the first event pair indicates that temporal order has been violated. Results are seen as evidence of a dimensional structure of scripts.

No abstract

Event sequences or scripts are the conceptual representations of activities in memory. Traditional views hold that events are represented in amodal networks and are retrieved by associative strategies. The embodied cognition approach holds that knowledge is grounded in perception and retrieved by mental simulation. We used a script generation task where event sequences of activities had to be produced. Activities varied in their degree of familiarity. In a regressional design we investigated whether amodal or perceptual variables best predicted knowledge retrieval to gain insight into the underlying representation. Retrieval depended on the familiarity of the activity. While novel activities mainly relied on perception-based simulation and to a lesser extent on associative strategies, moderately familiar activities showed the opposite pattern, and events of familiar activities were retrieved by association alone. We conclude that amodal structures exist in all representations that become stronger with increasing frequency and finally prevail over perceptual structures.

AbstractAccessing the temporal position of events (early or late in the event sequence) can influence the generation of predictions about upcoming events. However, it is unclear how the temporal position is processed strategically. To investigate this, we presented event pairs to 23 healthy volunteers manipulating temporal order (chronological, inverse) and temporal position (early, late). Pupil dilation, eye movements, and behavioral data, showed that chronological and early event pairs are processed with more ease than inverse and late event pairs. Indexed by the pupillary response late events and inversely presented event pairs elicited greater cognitive processing demands than early events and chronologically presented event pairs. Regarding eye movements, fixation duration was less sensitive to temporal position than to temporal order. Looking at each item of the event sequence only once was behaviorally more effective than looking multiple times at each event regardless of whether temporal position or temporal order was processed. These results emphasize that accessing temporal position and temporal order information results in dissociable behavioral patterns. While more cognitive resources are necessary for processing late and inverse items, change of information acquisition strategies turns out to be most effective when temporal order processing is required. (JINS, 2012,18, 351–360)