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Zusammenfassung. Fragestellung: Psychische Belastung und traumatisierende Ereignisse bei in Deutschland lebenden unbegleiteten minderjährigen Flüchtlingen (UMF) im Jugendalter sowie bei begleiteten minderjährigen Flüchtlingen (BMF) im Kindes- und Jugendalter wurden ermittelt. Zusätzlich wurden bei den Jugendlichen Prädiktoren psychischer Belastung analysiert. Methodik: 170 Kinder und Jugendliche (Jugendliche: n = 56 UMF, n = 72 BMF; Kinder: n = 42 BMF) wurden mittels Screeningfragebögen zu emotionalen und Verhaltensauffälligkeiten sowie zu traumatisierenden Ereignissen untersucht. Zudem wurden von den Jugendlichen Angaben zur Symptomatik der Posttraumatischen Belastungsstörung (PTBS) gemacht (Jugendliche: Selbstbericht; Kinder: Fremdbericht Elternteil). Ergebnisse: 45.8 % UMF (Jugendliche), 42.4 % BMF (Jugendliche) und 56.1 % BMF (Kinder) zeigten klinisch relevante emotionale und Verhaltensprobleme. Internalisierende Symptome wurden häufiger als externalisierende Symptome angegeben. Im Mittel wurden bei UMF (Jugendliche) sieben und bei BMF (Jugendliche und Kinder) vier traumatisierende Ereignisse ermittelt. UMF (Jugendliche) berichteten mehr emotionale Probleme, mehr PTBS-Symptome und mehr traumatisierende Ereignisse als BMF (Jugendliche). 43.8 % UMF (Jugendliche) und 27.9 % BMF (Jugendliche) zeigten klinisch relevante PTBS-Symptome. Der robusteste Prädiktor zur Vorhersage emotionaler und Verhaltensauffälligkeiten sowie der PTBS-Symptomatik bei den Jugendlichen war die Anzahl traumatisierender Ereignisse. Schlussfolgerungen: Die Ergebnisse belegen den psychologischen Hilfebedarf geflüchteter Kinder und Jugendlicher in Deutschland.

Metaheuristics are optimization algorithms that efficiently solve a variety of complex combinatorial problems. In psychological research, metaheuristics have been applied in short-scale construction and model specification search. In the present study, we propose a bee swarm optimization (BSO) algorithm to explore the structure underlying a psychological measurement instrument. The algorithm assigns items to an unknown number of nested factors in a confirmatory bifactor model, while simultaneously selecting items for the final scale. To achieve this, the algorithm follows the biological template of bees’ foraging behavior: Scout bees explore new food sources, whereas onlooker bees search in the vicinity of previously explored, promising food sources. Analogously, scout bees in BSO introduce major changes to a model specification (e.g., adding or removing a specific factor), whereas onlooker bees only make minor changes (e.g., adding an item to a factor or swapping items between specific factors). Through this division of labor in an artificial bee colony, the algorithm aims to strike a balance between two opposing strategies diversification (or exploration) versus intensification (or exploitation). We demonstrate the usefulness of the algorithm to find the underlying structure in two empirical data sets (Holzinger–Swineford and short dark triad questionnaire, SDQ3). Furthermore, we illustrate the influence of relevant hyperparameters such as the number of bees in the hive, the percentage of scouts to onlookers, and the number of top solutions to be followed. Finally, useful applications of the new algorithm are discussed, as well as limitations and possible future research opportunities.

Abstract. It is challenging to apply exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to event-related potential (ERP) data because such data are characterized by substantial temporal overlap (i.e., large cross-loadings) between the factors, and, because researchers are typically interested in the results of subsequent analyses (e.g., experimental condition effects on the level of the factor scores). In this context, relatively small deviations in the estimated factor solution from the unknown ground truth may result in substantially biased estimates of condition effects (rotation bias). Thus, in order to apply EFA to ERP data researchers need rotation methods that are able to both recover perfect simple structure where it exists and to tolerate substantial cross-loadings between the factors where appropriate. We had two aims in the present paper. First, to extend previous research, we wanted to better understand the behavior of the rotation bias for typical ERP data. To this end, we compared the performance of a variety of factor rotation methods under conditions of varying amounts of temporal overlap between the factors. Second, we wanted to investigate whether the recently proposed component loss rotation is better able to decrease the bias than traditional simple structure rotation. The results showed that no single rotation method was generally superior across all conditions. Component loss rotation showed the best all-round performance across the investigated conditions. We conclude that Component loss rotation is a suitable alternative to simple structure rotation. We discuss this result in the light of recently proposed sparse factor analysis approaches.

Temporal exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is commonly applied to ERP data sets to reduce their dimensionality and the ambiguity with respect to the underlying components. However, the risk of variance misallocation (i.e., the incorrect allocation of condition effects) has raised concerns with regard to EFA usage. Here, we show that variance misallocation occurs because of biased factor covariance estimates and the temporal overlap between the underlying components. We also highlight the consequences of our findings for the analysis of ERP data with EFA. For example, a direct consequence of our expositions is that researchers should use oblique rather than orthogonal rotations, especially when the factors have a substantial topographic overlap. A Monte Carlo simulation confirms our results by showing, for instance, that characteristic biases occur only for orthogonal Varimax rotation but not for oblique rotation methods such as Geomin or Promax. We discuss the practical implications of our results and outline some questions for future research.

The Mental Health Problems of Unaccompanied and Accompanied Refugees in Childhood and Adolescence in Germany

The ability to shield against distraction while focusing on a task requires the operation of executive functions and is essential for successful learning. We investigated the short-term dynamics of distraction control in a data set of 269 children aged 4-10 years and 51 adults pooled from three studies using multilevel models. Participants performed a visual categorization task while a task-irrelevant sequence of sounds was presented which consisted of frequently repeated standard sounds and rarely interspersed novel sounds. On average, participants responded slower in the categorization task after novel sounds. This distraction effect was more pronounced in children. Throughout the experiment, the initially strong distraction effects declined to the level of adults in the groups of 6- to 10-year-olds. Such a decline was neither observed in the groups of the 4- and 5-year-olds, who consistently showed a high level of distraction, nor in adults, who showed a constantly low level of distraction throughout the experimental session. Results indicate that distraction control is a highly dynamic process that qualitatively and quantitatively differs between age groups. We conclude that the analysis of short-term dynamics provides valuable insights into the development of attention control and might explain inconsistent findings regarding distraction control in middle childhood. In addition, models of attention control need to be refined to account for age-dependent rapid learning mechanisms. Our findings have implications for the design of learning situations and provide an additional source of information for the diagnosis and treatment of children with attention deficit disorders.

Unexpected and task-irrelevant sounds can impair performance in a task. It has been shown that highly arousing emotional distractor sounds impaired performance less compared to moderately arousing neutral distractor sounds. The present study tests whether these differential emotion-related distraction effects are directly related to an enhancement of arousal evoked by processing of emotional distractor sounds. We disentangled costs of orienting of attention and benefits of increased arousal levels during the presentation of highly arousing emotional and moderately arousing neutral novel sounds that were embedded in a sequence of repeated standard sounds. We used sound-related pupil dilation responses as a marker of arousal and RTs as a marker of distraction in a visual categorization task in 57 healthy young adults. Multilevel analyses revealed increased RT and increased pupil dilation in response to novel vs. standard sounds. Emotional novel sounds reduced distraction effects on the behavioral level and increased pupil dilation responses compared to neutral novel sounds. Bayes Factors revealed strong evidence against an inverse proportional relationship between behavioral distraction effects and sound-related pupil dilation responses for emotional sounds. Given that the activity of the locus coeruleus has been linked to both changes in pupil diameter and arousal, it may embody an indirect relationship as a common antecedent by the release of norepinephrine into brain networks involved in attention control and control of the pupil. The present study provides new insights into the relation of changes in arousal and attentional distraction during the processing of emotional task-irrelevant novel sounds.

The ability to shield against distraction while focusing on a task requires the operation of executive functions and is essential for successful learning. We investigated the short-term dynamics of distraction control in a data set of 269 children aged 4–10 years and 51 adults pooled from three studies using multilevel models. Participants performed a visual categorization task while a task-irrelevant sequence of sounds was presented which consisted of frequently repeated standard sounds and rarely interspersed novel sounds. On average, participants responded slower in the categorization task after novel sounds. This distraction effect was more pronounced in children. Throughout the experiment, the initially strong distraction effects declined to the level of adults in the groups of 6- to 10-year-olds. Such a decline was neither observed in the groups of the 4- and 5-year-olds, who consistently showed a high level of distraction, nor in adults, who showed a constantly low level of distraction throughout the experimental session. Results indicate that distraction control is a highly dynamic process that qualitatively and quantitatively differs between age groups.We conclude that the analysis of short-term dynamics provides valuable insights into the development of attention control and might explain inconsistent findings regarding distraction control in middle childhood. In addition, models of attention control need to be refined to account for age-dependent rapid learning mechanisms. Our findings have implications for the design of learning situations and provide an additional source of information for the diagnosis and treatment of children with attention deficit disorders.

Developmental researchers are often interested in event-related potentials (ERPs). Data-analytic approaches based on the observed ERP suffer from major problems such as arbitrary definition of analysis time windows and regions of interest and the observed ERP being a mixture of latent underlying components. Temporal principal component analysis (PCA) can reduce these problems. However, its application in developmental research comes with the unique challenge that the component structure differs between age groups (so-called measurement non-invariance). Separate PCAs for the groups can cope with this challenge. We demonstrate how to make results from separate PCAs accessible for inferential statistics by rescaling to original units. This tutorial enables readers with a focus on developmental research to conduct a PCA-based ERP analysis of amplitude differences. We explain the benefits of a PCA-based approach, introduce the PCA model and demonstrate its application to a developmental research question using real-data from a child and an adult group (code and data openly available). Finally, we discuss how to cope with typical challenges during the analysis and name potential limitations such as suboptimal decomposition results, data-driven analysis decisions and latency shifts.

Action is an important way for children to learn about the world. Recent theories suggest that action is inherently accompanied by the sensory prediction of its effects. Such predictions can be revealed by rarely omitting the expected sensory consequence of the action, resulting in an omission response that is observable in the EEG. Although prediction errors play an important role in models of learning and development, little is known about omission-related brain responses in children. This study used a motor-auditory omission paradigm, testing a group of 6–8-year-old children and an adult group (N = 31 each). In an identity-specific condition, the sound coupled to the motor action was predictable, while in an identity unspecific condition the sound was unpredictable. Results of a temporal principal component analysis revealed that sound-related brain responses underlying the N1-complex differed considerably between age groups. Despite these developmental differences, omission responses (oN1) were similar between age groups. Two subcomponents of the oN1 were differently affected by specific and unspecific predictions. Results demonstrate that children, independent from the maturation of sound processing mechanisms, can implement specific and unspecific predictions as flexibly as adults. This supports theories that regard action and prediction error as important drivers of cognitive development., Highlights • Similar brain responses (omission N1) to unexpected omissions of sounds between 6–8-year-old children and adults. • Differential brain omission responses between conditions with predictable and unpredictable sound-identity in both groups. • Immature sound processing reflected by the N1-complex in children. • Children flexibly implement sound predictions independent from the maturity level of the sound processing system.

New task-irrelevant sounds can distract attention. This study specifies the impact of stimulus novelty and of learning on attention control in three groups of children aged 6–7, 8, and 9–10 years and an adult control group. Participants (N = 179) were instructed to ignore a sound sequence including standard sounds and novel or repeated distractor sounds, while performing a visual categorization task. Distractor sounds impaired performance in children more than in adult controls, demonstrating the long-term development of attention control. Children, but not adults, were more distracted by novel than by repeated sounds, indicating increased sensitivity to novel information. Children, in particular younger children, were highly distracted during the first presentations of novel sounds compared to adults, while no age differences were observed for the last presentations. Results highlight the age-related impact of auditory novel information on attention and characterize the rapid development of attention control mechanisms as a function of age and exposure to irrelevant novel sounds.

Developmental researchers are often interested in event-related potentials (ERPs). Data-analytic approaches based on the observed ERP suffer from major problems such as arbitrary definition of analysis time windows and regions of interest and the observed ERP being a mixture of latent underlying components. Temporal principal component analysis (PCA) can reduce these problems. However, its application in developmental research comes with the unique challenge that the component structure differs between age groups (so-called measurement non-invariance). Separate PCAs for the groups can cope with this challenge. We demonstrate how to make results from separate PCAs accessible for inferential statistics by re-scaling to original units. This tutorial enables readers with a focus on developmental research to conduct a PCA-based ERP analysis of amplitude differences. We explain the benefits of a PCA-based approach, introduce the PCA model and demonstrate its application to a developmental research question using real-data from a child and an adult group (code and data openly available). Finally, we discuss how to cope with typical challenges during the analysis and name potential limitations such as suboptimal decomposition results, data-driven analysis decisions and latency shifts.

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is an important tool when the measurement structure of psychological constructs is uncertain. Typically, factor rotation is applied to obtain interpretable results resembling a simple structure. However, an overwhelming multitude of rotation techniques is available of which none is unequivocally superior. Recently, regularization has been suggested as an alternative to factor rotation. In two simulation studies, we addressed the question if regularized EFA is a suitable alternative for rotated EFA. We compared their performance in recovering predefined factor loading patterns with varying amounts of cross-loadings. Elastic net regularized EFA yielded estimates comparable to rotated EFA. For complex loading patterns, both rotated and regularized EFA tended to underestimate cross-loadings and inflate factor correlations, but regularized EFA was able to recover loading patterns as long as a subset of items followed a simple structure. We conclude that regularization is a suitable alternative to factor rotation for psychometric applications.

Attention control abilities are relevant for learning success. Little is known about the development of audio-visual attention in early childhood. Four groups of children between the ages of 4 and 10 years and adults performed an audio-visual distraction paradigm (N = 106). Multilevel analyses revealed increased reaction times in a visual categorization task when task-irrelevant novel sounds were presented, demonstrating involuntary distraction of attention. This distraction effect decreased with age and significantly differed between age groups. In addition, the two youngest age groups responded with a delay in trials following a distractor trial, indicating delayed reallocation of attention to the task at hand. Results indicate a significant maturation of audio-visual attention control within a few years during early childhood that continues throughout middle childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Der Vakuumkompressor ist in der Kaltetechnologie seit mehr als 100 Jahren das Mas aller Dinge. Die Entdeckung neuer Materialien mit sehr grosem magnetokalorischem Effekt ermoglicht mittlerweile den Bau einer neuartigen Kaltemaschine mit deutlich hoherer Effizienz. Die momentan verfugbaren Prototypen sind in der Lage, neu entwickelte Materialien in Warmetauschern mit spezieller Geometrie in einem Gesamtsystem zu testen. Essentiell ist die Entwicklung eines zuverlassigen, computergestutzten Modells, das im Vergleich mit experimentellen Daten eine kontinuierliche Optimierung der gesamten Warmepumpe ermoglicht.

Zusammenfassung Dieser Beitrag diskutiert das Konzept der Tangicons, einem nicht-kompetitiven Lernspiel mit be-greifbaren Programmierbausteinen. Tangicons wurden in einem gemeinsamen Designprozess mit Kindern entwickelt. Ziel ist es, Kinder im Vor- und Grundschulalter in einer gemeinsamen Lernsituation mit logisch-abstrakten Problemstellungen zu konfrontieren, während sie fein- und grobmotorisch Handeln. Das Konzept, welches über drei Systemgenerationen in den letzten Jahren entwickelt worden ist, wird im Beitrag in der Forschung verortet, auf zeitgemäße pädagogische Ansätze bezogen und am Beispiel eines Spiels der dritten Systemgeneration erläutert. In Evaluationen gewonnene Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse münden in einem Fazit. Abschließend werden Fragen für weitere Untersuchungen benannt.

The ability to predict upcoming structured events based on long-term knowledge and contextual priors is a fundamental principle of human cognition. Tonal music triggers predictive processes based on structural properties of harmony, i.e., regularities defining the arrangement of chords into well-formed musical sequences. While the neural architecture of structure-based predictions during music perception is well described, little is known about the neural networks for analogous predictions in musical actions and how they relate to auditory perception. To fill this gap, expert pianists were presented with harmonically congruent or incongruent chord progressions, either as musical actions (photos of a hand playing chords) that they were required to watch and imitate without sound, or in an auditory format that they listened to without playing. By combining task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with functional connectivity at rest, we identified distinct sub-regions in right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) interconnected with parietal and temporal areas for processing action and audio sequences, respectively. We argue that the differential contribution of parietal and temporal areas is tied to motoric and auditory long-term representations of harmonic regularities that dynamically interact with computations in rIFG. Parsing of the structural dependencies in rIFG is co-determined by both stimulus- or task-demands. In line with contemporary models of prefrontal cortex organization and dual stream models of visual-spatial and auditory processing, we show that the processing of musical harmony is a network capacity with dissociated dorsal and ventral motor and auditory circuits, which both provide the infrastructure for predictive mechanisms optimising action and perception performance.

ERP data are characterized by high dimensionality and a mixture of constituting signals and are thus challenging for researchers to analyze. To address these challenges, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) has been used to provide estimates of the unobserved factors and to use these estimates for further statistical analyses (e.g., analyses of group effects). However, the EFA approach is prone to biases due to assigning individual factor scores to each observation as an intermediate step and does not properly consider participants, electrodes, and groups/conditions as differentiable sources of factor variance, with the consequence that factor correlations are inaccurately estimated. Here, we suggest exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) as a potential approach to address these limitations. ESEM may handle the complexity of ERP data more appropriately because multiple sources of variance can be formally taken into consideration. We demonstrate the application of ESEM to ERP data (in comparison with EFA) with an illustrative example and report the results of a small simulation study in which ESEM clearly outperformed EFA with respect to accurate estimation of the population factor loadings, population factor correlations, and group differences. We discuss how robust statistical inference can be conducted within the ESEM approach. We conclude that ESEM naturally extends the current EFA approach for ERP data and that it can provide a coherent and flexible analysis framework for all kinds of ERP research questions.

Complex human behavior is hierarchically organized. Whether or not syntax plays a role in this organization is currently under debate. The present ERP study uses piano performance to isolate syntactic operations in action planning and to demonstrate their priority over nonsyntactic levels of movement selection. Expert pianists were asked to execute chord progressions on a mute keyboard by copying the posture of a performing model hand shown in sequences of photos. We manipulated the final chord of each sequence in terms of Syntax (congruent/incongruent keys) and Manner (conventional/unconventional fingering), as well as the strength of its predictability by varying the length of the Context (five-chord/two-chord progressions). The production of syntactically incongruent compared to congruent chords showed a response delay that was larger in the long compared to the short context. This behavioral effect was accompanied by a centroparietal negativity in the long but not in the short context, suggesting that a syntax-based motor plan was prepared ahead. Conversely, the execution of the unconventional manner was not delayed as a function of Context and elicited an opposite electrophysiological pattern (a posterior positivity). The current data support the hypothesis that motor plans operate at the level of musical syntax and are incrementally translated to lower levels of movement selection.

ZusammenfassungDieser Beitrag diskutiert das Konzept der Tangicons, einem nicht-kompetitiven Lernspiel mit be-greifbaren Programmierbausteinen. Tangicons wurden in einem gemeinsamen Designprozess mit Kindern entwickelt. Ziel ist es, Kinder im Vor- und Grundschulalter in einer gemeinsamen Lernsituation mit logisch-abstrakten Problemstellungen zu konfrontieren, während sie fein- und grobmotorisch Handeln. Das Konzept, welches über drei Systemgenerationen in den letzten Jahren entwickelt worden ist, wird im Beitrag in der Forschung verortet, auf zeitgemäße pädagogische Ansätze bezogen und am Beispiel eines Spiels der dritten Systemgeneration erläutert. In Evaluationen gewonnene Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse münden in einem Fazit. Abschließend werden Fragen für weitere Untersuchungen benannt.

This paper describes SpelLit, an application, which fosters literacy skills at elementary schools. For the development of our educational software, traditional concepts of learning have been adapted to fit the UniTable, a multi-touch tabletop system for educational purposes, aiming at students of all ages. Multi-touch technology lets users interact in easy and direct ways with computers. Being able to combine auditory, visual and haptic senses can improve the quality of learning, especially for young children. In this paper, it is shown that aspects of learning improve when well-established learning concepts are mapped to this new kind of interface. The UniTable as well as SpelLit have been developed in a user-centered process during several iterations, tests, and discussions with children and teachers as well as a speech therapist. With their help, it was possible to design hard- and software, appropriate for the use in schools.

In this paper, we describe the use of Tangicons, nonelectronic physical programming cubes for kindergarten and first grade children. Tangicons have been developed with the help of kindergarten children during various sessions of observing, playing and talking to them. Most tangible computing environments are too complex for young children. We developed an appropriate educational environment on a pedagogical basis resulting in easy to use tangible bricks, integrated in a physical game. Tangicons are haptic programmable bricks for programming a sequence of operations. Their symbol design is related to real world objects. With Tangicons, children are able to learn first steps of programming in a playful way.