Solitude in context: On the role of culture,immigration, and acculturation in the experience of time to oneself

Older adults spend much time in solitude (without social interaction), putting them at risk of loneliness, especially if aging outside their country of origin (e.g., Chinese immigrants to Canada). Yet, cultural contextual factors that may reduce loneliness in moments of solitude are poorly understood. This study sought to disentangle the roles of culture, immigration, and acculturation in solitude-loneliness associations across two countries. Community-dwelling adults aged 51–85 in Vancouver (N = 58 East Asian, N = 37 European/North American) and in Hong Kong (N = 56 East/Southeast Asian) completed approximately 30 ecological momentary assessments over 10 days on their current affect and social situations. Participants in Vancouver spent more time in solitude, desired solitude more, and felt less lonely overall than those in Hong Kong. Multilevel models revealed that moments of solitude felt lonelier than moments spent in social interaction, but only for individuals less acculturated to their host culture or not concurrently desiring solitude. Associations held regardless of host culture, cultural heritage, or immigration status. Findings suggest that solitude need not feel lonely if it happens by choice and if individuals feel connected with their host culture, for both immigrant older adults and those aging in their birth country.     

Change in the event-related skin conductivity: an indicator of the immediate importance of elaborate information processing?]

In recent psychophysiological conceptualizations of the orienting response (OR) within the framework of information processing, the OR is increasingly considered a "call for processing resources", something which is especially inferred from variations in the event-related skin conductance response (SCR). The present study, therefore, was concerned with certain implications arising from this framework or perspective, particularly in regard to the question of whether stimuli eliciting skin conductance responses obligatorily receive/evoke processing priority or not. In order to examine whether these electrodermal responses denote a capturing of attention or merely a call for processing resources, short (1 s) pure sine tones of 65 dB with sudden onset (commonly used as orienting stimuli) were inserted in a reaction time paradigm with an additional memory load. This demand was primarily given because memory processes play a key role in theories of orienting and habituation. The task was run under two different conditions of complexity, factorially combined with a novelty variation of the added auditory stimuli. The results revealed a substantial deterioration of task performance subsequent to the occurrence of the tones, which, however, was dependent on task complexity and on novelty of the tones. The task impairment is particularly remarkable as subjects were asked to avoid distractions by paying attention to the task and as the tones were introduced as subsidiary and task-irrelevant. Together with the missing effects of task complexity on phasic and tonic electrodermal activity, results suggest that information-processing conceptualizations of the OR can only be a meaningful heuristic contribution to theoretical developments about human orienting and its habituation if the setting of processing priority, its conditions, as well as its implications are adequately taken into account. In addition, it seems to be promising to consider the strength of the SCR as an index of urgency of elaborate, attention-demanding processing and not as a peripheral physiological manifestation of the OR, or, respectively, of a call for unspecific processing resources. Such a view would also do justice to the aspect of prioritization. The sufficient conditions for an OR's occurrence could, in this context, be equated with, among others, some of those which activate a mechanism subserving selective attention and, as a possible result, which lead to further and more elaborate processing of potentially important information.     

Does motor encoding enhance relational information?

Summary Three experiments investigated whether learning action phrases by enacting the denoted action enhances organization or not. In the first experiment it was shown that, compared to a standard learning instruction, enacting did not enhance the clustering of episodic and taxonomic lists, but it did enhance memory performance. Furthermore, the enacting effect was strongest with an unrelated list; in all lists, organization and recall correlated only under a verbal instruction and not under an enacting instruction. In the second experiment, subjects were also informed about the categories of the lists and instructed to use them to learn the items. The organization was enhanced in all cases by this procedure, but the recall performance was enhanced only with a standard learning instruction. Under enacting, information about the categories had no influence. In the third experiment this effect was replicated for a taxonomic list and could be generalized for a motor list, in which categories were in accordance with the similarities of the movement pattern. Here too the explicit category information had an effect only under a standard learning instruction, but not with enacting. We interpret these effects as support for the assumption that enacting does not enhance memory performance by better relational information. Relational information is, on the contrary, less important for recall under enacting than under a standard learning instruction.     

Motor programme information as a separable memory unit

Summary Two experiments produced further evidence for the claim that motor programme information may be considered as a separate memory unit, partially independent of other memory representations. In Experiment 1, it was shown that for the comparison of shared movement components in two actions such as turning the handle and stirring the ingredients, the activation of their motor programmes is required. This is demonstrated by the finding that the execution of the first action, which preactivates its motor programmes, leads to shorter reaction times than under control conditions in which the verbally described action is only spoken. In Experiment 2, it was further shown that the execution of the action does not in every case expedite the assessment of a connection between a prime item and a target item vis à vis verbal repetition, but only where the task requires the activation of motor programmes.     

There is more than one level in color naming — A reply to Zollinger (1984)

Summary It is argued that the structure of the Munsell solid is not sufficient to explain the evolution of color terms as Zollinger (1984) has argued. A manifold model of color perception is described with a local metric structure of discriminability and a global categorical structure. This model elucidates the interdependency of the different levels of constraints on color naming and permits the integration of experimental results which cannot be explained in the model underlying Zollinger's (1984) color-metric argument for the emergence of turquoise.     

Size and orientation of objects in explicit and implicit memory: A reversal of the dissociation between perceptual similarity and type of test

Memory of size and orientation of objects was tested in explicit and implicit memory tests. Explicit memory was tested by object recognition and by recognition of the congruency of the changed sensory features. Implicit memory was tested by size assessment (Exps. 1 and 2), orientation judgement (Exps. 4 and 5), picture-fragment naming (Exp. 6), and classification (Exps. 3 and 7). Memory of sensory features was investigated by the comparison of performances of test-congruent with test-incongruent stimuli (i.e., same size or orientation vs. different size or orientation). The main result was a dissociation between these two tasks pertaining to the influence of sensory congruency on performance. However, it was in opposition to the usual relationship between the type of test and the perceptual similarity from study to test. In this study explicit, but not implicit, memory depended on sensory congruency. In the explicit tests performances were better when the stimuli were congruent than when they were incongruent. In the implicit test this variation had no influence. To get a repetition effect, it was important only that the object was repeated, and the size of this effect did not depend on sensory congruency. However, a change in another sensory feature — distortions of shape — strongly influenced the size of the repetition effect in the implicit test. Neither transfer-appropriate processing nor a system approach can easily explain this pattern of results. A multi-level, multi-token model is proposed to account for the different effects of sensory features in explicit and implicit memory.     

Effects of training students to identify the semantic base of prose materials

Feedback and feedback plus points toward a course grade were applied to the attentional behaviors (defined as the ability to identify the semantic base of text passages) of 30 undergraduate students participating in a reading comprehension development program. Correct underlining was increased, extraneous underlining was decreased, and postreading comprehension test scores improved as a result of the procedures. Scores on a standardized test of reading comprehension also increased significantly.