Unit quiz: Plasticity in practice: skills, training, development and ageing

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Question 1

Two experimenters train participants on a reaching task with a robot-applied sideways force. Experimenter A reports that trajectories became straight again after 300 trials and concludes that an internal model changed. Experimenter B reports that when the force is removed the hand now veers in the opposite direction. Which report supports the internal-model conclusion, and what does the other one show?Experimenter B's after-effect supports the internal-model conclusion, because a reversed error after the perturbation is removed cannot be produced by a deliberate strategy; A's straight trajectories are equally consistent with a strategy of pushing sideways to cancel the force.Experimenter A's report is the stronger evidence, because a straight trajectory requires a precise internal prediction while an after-effect is only a transient error.

Question 2

A trial reports that a six-week training programme produced a gain of 0.7 standard deviations on the trained task and 0.1 standard deviations on an untrained reasoning battery, with a waiting-list control. A commentary concludes that the programme improves cognition generally. Using the arithmetic of this unit, what is the strongest reading?The pattern supports general improvement, because a positive change on the untrained battery in the same participants shows the benefit travelled beyond the trained task.The two standardised changes describe near transfer only: 0.7 in the trained task against 0.1 in an untrained measure is the expected specificity pattern, and the waiting-list control leaves expectancy, retest and regression to the mean unaddressed.

Question 3

A study finds that children who received an accessible sign language before age three outperform those who received it later on a grammatical measure, with distributions that overlap substantially. A journalist writes that the research proves language cannot be acquired after age three. What two specific reporting errors does the sentence make?It converts an average group difference with overlapping distributions into a categorical rule for every individual, and it identifies a critical period where the data support a graded sensitive period.It fails to report the sample size and the exact age at which the group difference reached significance, which are the two omissions that would make the claim defensible.

Question 4

A developmental imaging paper reports that a reward-reactivity index correlates with a risk-taking measure at r = 0.20 in 34 adolescents, and that an imbalance score computed as reward minus control shows a significant age trend. A reviewer objects that the imbalance score is unreliable. What does that objection predict about the reported correlations, and what should the authors have done?Unreliable difference scores inflate correlations by adding variance to the predictor, so the authors should have reported a corrected coefficient that removes the unreliable component.Unreliable difference scores attenuate correlations, so the observed correlation is expected to be smaller than the true association, and the authors should have reported the reliability of each component and of the difference score alongside the correlation.

Question 5

A clinic advertises a brief memory screen with 90 per cent sensitivity and 90 per cent specificity, and states that a positive result means early impairment. In a general population where the condition being screened for has a prevalence of about 1 per cent, what does the arithmetic from this unit imply about the statement?At a 1 per cent prevalence, about 9 of 108 positive results belong to people who have the condition, roughly 8 per cent, so a positive result cannot be described as meaning impairment.At a 1 per cent prevalence the test is more accurate than in a clinic, because there are more healthy people against whom its specificity can be demonstrated.

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