Metamemory and the transfer of an interrogative strategy by EMR children

EMR children were taught to produce an interrogative strategy as an aid to paired-associate learning. Interrogative training was spread over four sessions with experimenter guidance gradually faded; training was followed by tests of long-term retention for the trained items, strategy maintenance, and generalization. Metamemory was assessed prior to training and following generalization. Analysis of recall demonstrated successful maintenance and generalization of the interrogative strategy; the quality of elaborations produced by the trained children predicted recall accuracy. Importantly, metamemory pretest measures for the interrogative trained children were related to strategy use at generalization. Metamemory posttest reliably predicted recall during training, maintenance, and generalization sessions and strategy use at maintenance. Interrogative training did not noticeably improve general aspects of metamemorial knowledge.     

Maintenance of children's rehearsal strategies: Effects of amount of training and strategy form

Fifty third- and fourth-grade children, assigned to groups varying in Amount (1 or 2 sessions) and Type (cumulative-cluster or cluster) of strategy training or to a control condition, participated in three free recall sessions, two training sessions with blocked lists of common words and a maintenance session with a 50-states list blocked by geographical regions. During strategy training and maintenance, the cumulative-cluster groups recalled more than the cluster and control groups. Amount of training significantly influenced degree of strategy maintenance, but only in the cumulative-cluster strategy. Strategy form was highly correlated with recall in the cumulative-cluster condition, while total study time (effort) was related to recall only in conditions where strategy instructions were not given. The form of the strategy during training predicted transfer form and recall. 100% of the children who received extended training and demonstrated good strategy form during acquisition sessions successfully transferred the strategy to the geography task.     

Functional similarity and interpersonal attraction

A pair of related experiments examined the relationship of functional similarity (i.e., the degree of similarity between two interactants in assessing mutually known others on personal construct dimensions) to interpersonal attraction. In Experiment I, 10 previously unacquainted college students of both sexes participated in 10 hours of dyadic disclosure exercises over a 5-week period. As predicted, members of high functional similarity dyads evidenced greater attraction to one another than did members of low functional similarity dyads. Experiment II investigated the relationship of functional similarity to level of acquaintance (i.e., friends, nominals) and type of assessment (i.e., physical, interactional, psychological) in a 2 × 3 factorial design. As hypothesized, “friendship” pairs of male undergraduates displayed greater functional similarity than did “nominal” pairs from the same population, particularly at the deeper level of “psychological” assessment. Results are discussed in relation to classical conditioning (D. Byrne, In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 4. New York. Academic Press, 1969), affect-reinforcement (G. L. Clore, In S. W. Duck (Ed.), Theory and practice in interpersonal attraction. New York/London: Academic Press, 1977) and information processing ( I. Ajzen, In S. Duck (Ed.), Theory and practice in interpersonal attraction, New York/London: Academic Press, 1977) models of interpersonal attraction, and are interpreted as supporting and extending (S. Duck's Theory and practice in interpersonal attraction, New York/London: Academic Press, 1977) filtering theory of friendship formation.     

On multiple determinants of racial differences in intelligence: A reply to Jensen

A belief in the multidimensional nature of intelligence prompted Borkowski and Krause (1983) to reexamine the race-IQ controversy from a new theoretical perspective. Jensen has subsequently forced us to look more carefully at data presented in the earlier paper. After we corrected all measures in the perceptual efficiency and executive systems for unreliability and rethought the earlier data, our original conclusions remain tenable: Control processes and metacognitive states are important factors in understanding the sources of race-related differences in intelligence. In accord with the earlier conclusion, we do not deny the association of “speediness” (perceptual efficiency) with race-IQ differences but rather argue for the necessity, and utility, of a broader, multidimensional conceptualization of the nature and growth of intelligence.     

Immediate and delayed effects of victim suffering on the attacker's aggression

On the first day of a two-day experiment, male undergraduates were either angered or not, and they were given either high, low, or no metered pain feedback after each shock they supposedly delivered to their previous evaluator for his errors on a learning task. After the learning task the subjects made a number of ratings, including how much they had enjoyed this first session. On the second day, all subjects were simply required to administer shocks to a different person for his mistakes on the same learning task. The angered subjects were more punitive on both days toward both learners than the nonangered men. On the first day the angered men also increased the intensity of the shocks they delivered over trial blocks. Most interestingly, the angered men showed more enjoyment of the first session of the experiment as their victim's pain increased, and this enjoyment rating was related to the angered subjects' level of aggression on the second day of the experiment when they punished an “innocent” victim. The results were interpreted as consistent with the hypothesized reinforcement process which essentially states that signs and/or knowledge of the victim's suffering can reinforce impulsive or angry aggressive behavior.     

Racial differences in intelligence: The importance of the executive system

The race-IQ controversy arose at a time when psychometric views of intelligence dominated. Little attention was paid to more process-oriented models in spite of the fact they provide alternative perspectives on the causes of individual differences in problem-solving. We hypothesized that much of the IQ spread commonly observed between black and white children can be attributed to differences in components of their executive systems, including the knowledge base, control processes, and metacognitive states. To test this possibility, black and white children who differed significantly on fluid and crystallized intelligence were tested on multiple tasks reflecting components of the executive systems as well as on perceptual efficiency tasks. Striking group differences were observed in metamemory, stragegy use, and general knowledge, but few reliable differences were found in perceptual efficiency. Regression analyses showed that different factors predicted fluid and crystallized intelligence, with metamemory predicting the latter but not the former. An implication of these findings has potential educational significance: training directed at executive skills, introduce at an early age, might elevate learning and problem-solving skills in black children, thereby reducing racial differences in crystallized intelligence.     

Child judgments of sentences varying in grammatical complexity

This study is another contribution to the development of a satisfactory child version of the linguistic task of judging grammaticality. With a nondifferentially reinforced forced-choice procedure, it was found that responses of 24 5- and 24 7-yr-old children did vary as a function of the grammatical complexity of stimulus sentences. The children judged sentence stimuli of two types (negatives and wh-word questions) each having three levels of grammatical complexity (two primitive and one well-formed). After each stimulus presentation, the subject pointed to the adult or the child in a photograph, depending on who was judged to have produced that utterance. Performance of the two age groups did not differ for the question stimuli, for which subjects pointed to the adult more frequently as the grammatical complexity of wh-word questions increased. In response to the negative sentences, the older group attributed more well-formed stimuli to the adult than primitive ones. While the younger group pointed to the adult more frequently for well-formed negatives than for the middle level negatives, they made more adult responses than expected to the least complex negatives. It was concluded that, with this procedure, 5- and 7-yr-olds demonstrate ability to distinguish grammatically well-formed from primitive sentences. Procedural improvements for future research may allow children this age and younger to demonstrate more adult-like discrimination between a variety of primitive and well-formed sentences.     

Children's metacognition: Exploring relations among knowledge,process, and motivational variables

Following a metamemory pretest, 60 first and third grade children (6 and 8 years of age, respectively) were divided into three treatment groups which received task-specific strategy instructions appropriate for three memory problems, general metacognitive information about subordinate and superordinate processing, or both strategy and metacognitive training. Maintenance and generalization versions of the memory tasks were given, followed by an attributional assessment of children's perceptions of the causes for specific success and failure outcomes. Post-training scores on the memory tasks showed that strategy training was highly successful. Metacognitive training appeared to have no effect on the metameory or strategy scores with one exception: metamemory and strategy use on the generalization task were significantly correlated only for children who received both metacognitive and strategy training. Apparently, children who were initially high in metamemory skills profited more from the comprehensive training package, using new metacognitive insights to aid the generalization of acquired strategies to the transfer tasks. Among strategy-trained children those who attributed success to effort were both more strategic and higher in metamemory than those who attributed task outcomes to noncontrollable factors such as ability or task characteristics. Results were discussed in terms of the interactive nature of knowledge, process, and motivational variables as determinants of strategy transfer.     

The effects of semantic integration training on memory for pictograph sentences

The effectiveness of training a semantic integration strategy for recall of pictograph sequences, and the generalization of the strategy to a related oral sentence task were examined in 60 kindergarten prereaders. Semantic integration training consisted of three individual sessions in which the child was instructed to treat the sequence as a sentence and to act out the pictograph sentences using toys in order to facilitate recall. Repetition and no-practice control groups were included. Pictograph sentence memory post-tests immediately following and 2 weeks after training indicated that semantic integration training substantially improved recall for pictograph sequences, an improvement that was unrelated to the child's initial memory performance or subsequent post-training awareness of the strategy. In addition, the training resulted in better performance on a generalization test of oral sentence synthesis. These findings support a strategy-based conceptualization of individual differences in the semantic processing of written materials.     

Development of classification: The use of similarity and dimensional relations

Findings about perceptual development indicate that overall similarity is the primary perceptual relation by which young children compare complex objects. Traditional studies of classification, however, did not focus on children's organizational use of holistic relations but rather on their ability to classify by dimensions or criterial attributes. The results from such traditional studies suggest that young children are deficient classifiers. The present research investigated the possibility, contrary to the traditional view, that 4- to 6-year-old children are competent and systematic classifiers at least by overall similarity. In three experiments, preschoolers and kindergarteners classified various sets of multidimensional stimuli that could be organized into categories by overall similarity or by dimensional attributes. Consistent with the research in perceptual development, the children were highly attentive to overall similarity. However, the preschoolers in particular showed marked difficulty in using this relation to form categories of more than two objects. The children's difficulties were highly reminiscent of traditional claims about early classification. Analyses of the classification strategies used by the children, however, suggest that even the youngest children understood the purpose of a classification. The developmentla changes appear to be in the ability to execute a classification. Importantly, type of classification strategy was independent of type of category organization. Individual children used the same strategies both when classifying by overall similarity and by dimensional attributes. These results strongly suggest that it is the classification skills themselves, and not just the ability to classify by particular relations, that change with age.     

The effects upon food-reinforced pecking and treadle-pressing of auditory and visual signals for response-independent food

Seven pigeons whose key-pecking was maintained by food reinforcement on a differential-reinforcement-of-low-rates 12-sec limited-hold 4-sec schedule and 12 other pigeons whose treadle-pressing was maintained by the same schedule received appetitive Pavlovian conditioning trials superimposed upon the instrumental baseline. Half the birds in each group received a tone as the CS, and the other half received a stimulus change on the key. Each CS was 20 sec long, and was immediately followed by 10-sec access to grain. The visual CS markedly facilitated the rate of pecking on the key for the birds whose baseline response was pecking. The visual CS produced auto-shaping of the key-peck and tended to produce suppression of treadle-pressing for the birds whose baseline response was treadle-pressing. The auditory CS produced inconsistent effects across birds regardless of the baseline response. In all cases the conditioned effects extinguished when response-independent food was omitted.     

Another look at the theoretical assumptions of adolescent egocentrism

We attempt in this paper to reevaluate the theoretical assumptions of D. Elkind's theory of adolescent egocentrism Child Development, 38, 1025–1034). We argue that the construct is not well placed in the ontogenetic context of Piagetian logical development, and that the theory cannot account for stage transition or the appearance of the imaginary audience (IA) and personal fable (PF) components. We argue that the IA and PF constructions are better understood as problems in interpersonal understanding. These components are reinterpreted in terms of stage sequence that describes the ontogenesis of interpersonal understanding. The advantages of this model are highlighted.     

The effect of a low rate of regular signals upon the reaction times of introverts and extraverts

In an RT (reaction time) task involving responding to infrequent, regular signals, extraverts produced higher proportions of missed signals and lengthened RT's than introverts did. This result was only obtained after some time on task and is evidence that inhibitory states are formed more rapidly in extraverted subjects under low stimulation conditions. In a more extended version of the task, mean RT was found to be longer in extraverted than introverted subjects in the second half of the experiment though there was no significant difference between the groups in the first half. These findings are complementary to data from previous studies showing that extraverts generate stronger inhibitory potential in continuous responding tasks, or that their characteristic arousal level may be lower than that of introverted subjects. The need to distinguish between the different explanatory constructs is discussed and a simple model amalgamating the major theoretical positions is outlined.     

The recall and use of traits and events in social inference processes

Social inference research needs to more closely examine the kinds of information people actually have available for making social judgments. It is assumed here that the observation of behavioral events results in encoding and storage of both a relatively raw event record and of higher level encodings, such as trait inferences. Several specific hypotheses are advanced concerning the effects of higher level encodings on event recall, and the effects of encoding and memory processes on subsequent judgments about a stimulus person. Consistent with hypotheses, results indicate that higher level encodings do affect recall for stimulus information and do affect judgments of the stimulus person. The possibility that higher level encodings affect judgments solely by introducing bias into recall for the episodic record is considered and discarded in favor of the interpretation that higher level encodings are actually recalled and used in inference processes.     

The effects of perceived similarity upon the use of reward and punishment

Subjects were led to perceive a trainee as either similar or dissimilar to themselves. During subsequent influence trials, subjects attempted to assess the causes of the trainee's performance and to employ rewards, punishments, or manipulations of the trainee's environment to optimize her performance. It was predicted that subjects would perceive the performance of dissimilar trainees as caused more by the dispositional factor of motivation than the performance of similar trainees, and that dissimilar trainees would thus be rewarded more upon success as well as punished more upon failure. The hypotheses were supported, and a model of reward-punishment behavior and attribution is discussed.     

The influence of attention upon anticipatory arousal,habituation, and reactivity to a noxious stimulus

Forty subjects were assigned to four groups, an External-attending Group, an Internal-attending Group, a Control Group, and a Distracted Group. All groups were presented with six trials of a 0.5-sec 110-db white noise. A measure of heart rate deceleration verified the experimental manipulation of attention. During the anticipatory period, the Internal-attending Group exhibited the greatest and the Distracted Group exhibited the least reactivity among the four groups. The two specially attending groups exhibited greater galvanic skin-response conditioning during the anticipatory period than the other groups. There was no support for the hypothesis that heightened attention facilitates habituation. Two measures were differentially sensitive to direction of attention during the anticipatory period. The External-attending Group exhibited reliably greater anticipatory deceleration of heart rate than the Internal-attending Group, while the Internal-attending Group exhibited reliably more nonspecific electrodermal responses than the External-attending Group. This latter finding, along with other evidence, suggests that an inward direction of attention tends to exacerbate anticipatory anxiety as well as reactivity to the impact of a noxious stimulus.     

The layman's use of trait and behavioral information to predict behavior

This study investigated conditions that determine subjects' preferences for information about another person's traits versus his specific past behavior in order to predict his future behavior. The similarity-dissimilarity between the situation for which past behavior was available and the one to which predictions had to be made strongly influenced the choice of specific behavioral information versus more general trait information. As expected, behavioral information was preferred most when the situation to which behavior had to be predicted was highly similar to the one for which the past behavioral data were available. On the other hand, more general trait information was preferred in predicting to situations that were not directly similar to those for which past behavioral information was available. The effect of the temporal span covered by available information was also explored.