The recall of relevant and incidental dimensional values as a function of perceptual salience, congitive set, and age.

In two experiments, subjects were presented an array of compound stimuli consisting of values from four, salience-assessed dimensions. Solution to an initial problem required recall of the array locations of values from only the most salient dimension. In addition to perceptual salience, instructions designed to establish cognitive sets for remembering value locations of certain dimensions were varied to explore the roles of these perceptual and cognitive variables in determining recall. In Experiment I, which involved subjects from grades kindergarten, third, and sixth, older subjects recalled more incidental as well as relevant information than younger subjects, and although instructions to remember values of a less salient incidental dimension facilitated their recall, the same instructions also facilitated the recall of values of a more salient incidental dimension even though no reference was made to those values. In Experiment II, adult recall of both relevant and incidental information was affected by instructions about differing numbers and types of dimensions. Adults and the oldest children did not differ in total information recalled, and there was no evidence for an increase with age in the cognitive ability to select only that information that was relevant to solving the initial problem. The results were discussed in terms of developmental changes in memory capacity and the absolute salience of the task information.     

Verbal reports of stimulus effects on learning: Introspection revisited

The accuracy of subjects' verbal reports on the respective causal roles of relevant and irrelevant stimulus factors on learning was investigated. In two experiments, university undergraduates learned strings of letters that were either grammatically structured or unstructured (a causal variable) and either color coded or black (a salient but irrelevant variable). Results indicated that subjects reported more causal impact of color than structure on the learnability of lists, despite the fact that the latter variable and not color had an actual effect on learning. It was proposed that verbal reports of stimulus effects on one's own behavior can be regarded as a task in estimates of covariation rather than direct retrieval of memory traces.     

Facilitating cognitive performance in children: A comparison of strategy modeling and strategy modeling with overt self-verbalization

Children, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 10 years old, were randomly divided into three training conditions—a strategy modeling condition, a strategy modeling with overt self-verbalization condition, and a control condition. The subjects in the two modeling conditions were given training on four cognitive tasks, a signal task, a match-to-standard task, a paired-associates task, and a twenty-questions task. A 6 (age) × 2 (sex) × 3 (treatment) × 2 (trial) analysis of variance was performed on each of the dependent variables associated with each of the four tasks. The results of these analyses indicate that both modeling conditions facilitated performance on the signal and match-to-standard tasks for all six age groups. However, the two modeling procedures facilitated performance on the paired-associates and twenty-questions tasks only in the three older age groups. Since the two modeling procedures did not differ in effectiveness, it was suggested that strategy modeling without overt self-verbalization is the more practical and efficient procedure for facilitating cognitive performance in normal children.     

Disposition-based categories: Structure and salience effects on memory

Two experiments investigated whether disposition-based categories influence the retrieval of behaviors related or unrelated to those categories. In Experiment 1, subjects studied a set of behaviors in order to form an impression of a target person. Impression ratings indicated which category had been activated. In an unexpected recognition test, accuracy was better for category-inconsistent information than for category-consistent behaviors. That result suggested that the structure of disposition-based categories includes qualitatively different representations of consistent and inconsistent acts related to the category. In Experiment 2, subjects rated behaviors with reference to a relevant or irrelevant disposition category. In an unexpected recall test, an advantage for category-inconsistent behaviors was found only when the behaviors had been studied from the perspective of the relevant category. It was concluded that categories are not represented in a form analogous to the representation of category-inconsistent behaviors.     

Effects of reinforcement and guidance procedures on instruction-following behavior of severely retarded children

Positive reinforcement, physical guidance, and fading procedures were used to teach two severely retarded children motor responses to a variety of verbal instructions. Subjects' responses to one set of instructions provided the focus for the training procedures. Their responses to a second set of instructions were used to assess the generalized effects of training. The frequency of responses to both sets of instructions was evaluated during Baseline 1, Training 1, Baseline 2, and Training 2 periods. During the training periods, this evaluation was made after the daily training sessions when no training procedures were in effect. Results indicated that the subjects showed pronounced increases in instruction-following behaviors (both trained and untrained) during training periods with decreases in such behavior occurring during the Baseline 2 period. The general findings demonstrate the applicability of the training procedures for producing and maintaining instruction-following behaviors in severely retarded children and for facilitating appropriate responding to instructions not directly involved in training.     

Social judgments of spurious and causal relations between attributes and outcomes

People can learn about relations between attributes and outcomes by observing the attributes and outcomes of others, but, as this experiment indicates, such learning is not always veridical. Each subject received information about the ages, educations, and salaries of groups of employees in a fictitious corporation. Within a group, either age or education was related to salaries and the two attributes were either orthogonal or correlated. In each case, subjects judged the strength of the causal relation between each attribute and salaries. The results confirmed our hypothesis that observers are more likely to view a causally relevant attribute as irrelevant, and a causally irrelevant attribute as relevant, when relevant and irrelevant attributes are correlated. However, this tendency seemed to be mediated by subjects' bias to prefer education as an explanation of salary differences: That is, when age and education were correlated, subjects tended to view education as relevant even when it was irrelevant and age as irrelevant even when it was relevant. The results suggest that when attributes are correlated, factors extraneous to observed data may have a major influence on inferred attribute-outcome associations.     

Teaching awareness of strategic behavior in combination with strategy training: Effects on children's memory performance

The present study examined the effectiveness of two components (rehearsal training and strategy awareness) of an instructional package designed to train the developmentally young in the use of mature information processing techniques. Two groups of children of equivalent developmental age (MA = 8), one mildly retarded and the other of average intelligence, participated. Rehearsal training was effective in improving recall scores on the training task; however, neither rehearsal training, memory awareness, nor their combination significantly altered memory performance on the generalization tasks. There was evidence, however, that the combination of rehearsal training and strategy awareness did increase the likelihood of strategy transfer on the generalization task (recognition) which most closely resembled the training task. Post-task questioning revealed that instructions concerning memory awareness did improve subjects ability to verbalize appropriate strategic behavior; however, these improvements were not consistently translated into either actual use of a rehearsal strategy or improved performance. Discussion centered on the implications of these results and on the need for increased research on the metamnemonic skills involved in strategy generalization.     

Caffeine ingestion,misattribution therapy,and speech anxiety

While theoretical analogs of misattribution therapy appeared promising (Nisbett & Schachter, 1966; Ross, Rodin, & Zimbardo, 1969), attempts with clinically relevant behaviors have not been so successful (Kellogg & Baron, 1975; Singerman, Borkovec, & Baron, 1976). Since the plausibility of the misattribution manipulation appears to be the central problem, the present study attempted to increase plausibility by manipulating familiarity with the setting and actual psychological arousal in a clinically relevant situation. Subjects only slightly fearful of giving speeches presented a speech in front of two observers. Familiarity was varied by having half of the subjects give a pretest speech, while arousal was manipulated by having half of the subjects ingest caffeine while the others ingested a placebo just prior to the test speech. The subjects' attributions were varied by giving them either arousal or irrelevant symptom instructions regarding the effects of the ingested drug. Direct suggestion rather than misattribution effects occurred: Those subjects receiving arousal symptoms reported more nervousness than subjects who had received irrelevant symptoms. The authors conclude that while the misattribution effect may have experimental validity, it is not effective with clinically relevant behavior.     

Social skills training and systematic desensitization in reducing dating anxiety.

Cooper et al. (1969) have criticized the types of target behavior chosen for therapy analogue studies for being irrelevant to clinical practice. A potential target behavior which appears to be pervasive, complex and directly relevant to clinical practice is interpersonal anxiety. Of special concern to college students is the interpersonal anxiety elicited by members of the opposite sex. especially in dating situations (Martinson and Zerface, 1970).An individual may experience interpersonal anxiety because of a deficit in social skills (reactive anxiety) or because of prior conditioning (conditioned anxiety) or because of some combination of both reactive and conditioned components. While it is possible that a treatment program aimed at a reduction of either of these anxiety components may be instrumental in ameliorating the other component, it would appear that a comprehensive treatment program would attempt to teach social skills as well as reduce conditioned anxiety.Desensitization procedures have demonstrated success in alleviating conditioned anxiety for a wide variety of clinical problems (Paul, 1969a. 1969b) and appears to be a logical choice for the conditioned component of dating anxiety. A number of outcome studies have reported some success in the use of in vivo desensitization (Rehm and Marston, 1968; Martinson and Zerface, 1970) and systematic desensitization (Stark, 1970) in reducing anxiety in date anxious subjects.The literature on treatment programs aimed at social skills training for date anxious subjects is meager. Melnick (1973) reported success in improving the appropriateness of the social behavior of subjects who had experienced a minimal dating history by the use of modeling, behavioral rehearsal and self-observation techniques.The present study was designed to test the relative effectiveness of two different types of treatment programs in alleviating interpersonal dating anxiety. The two experimental groups consisted of a systematic densensitization program which focused on the condition anxiety component and a social skills training program which focused on the reactive anxiety component.     

Eye movements of children, adults, and elderly persons during inspection of dot patterns

The effectiveness of three fading and two nonfading procedures were compared in training kindergarten children on an oddity problem in which shape was the relevant dimension. The fading procedures employed supplementary cues which were gradually eliminated during training. The cues included either saturating the odd stimulus with a red color, saturating the nonodd stimuli with a red color, or varying the degree of illumination of the nonodd stimuli. One nonfading group received training on a structurally simpler oddity problem prior to transfer to a more complex oddity problem, and a second nonfading group received the standard oddity training procedure. While significant differences in acquisition were not obtained between training groups, the oddity task performance and the results from a test of dimensional observation revealed that the fading procedures were differentially effective in transferring Ss′ observation from the dimension of the fading cue to that relevant for solution of the oddity problem.     

Task instructions and strategy transfer in the directed forgetting performance of mentally retarded adolescents

The influence of task explanation on strategy transfer was studied in educable mentally retarded adolescents (13 to 15 years old). A directed forgetting task was used in which the person was required to recall short sequences of picture names. In some sequences there was a cue to forget the first few pictures (irrelevant information) and to remember only the subsequent pictures (relevant information). During the first session the amount of explanation given the directed forgetting task was varied, and during the second, some of the subjects were trained to rehearse in a simple sequential memory task. Transfer of training was then examined on a retest of the directed forgetting task. The majority of subjects trained to rehearse and given a minimal explanation of the directed forgetting task maintained the strategy on trials which were identical to those used during rehearsal training, but failed to generalize the strategy on other trials. The results indicate that providing a full explanation of the task requirements does not assure strategy generalization, but providing only a minimal explanation makes strategy generalization unlikely.     

Feature saliency affects delayed matching of an attended feature

We examined how top-down attentional modulation and bottom-up stimulus saliency interact with feature memory. Experiment 1 used a delayed-matching-to-sample (DMS) task to examine the relative saliency between features by observing the relative accuracy of recognition at different stimulus durations. Feature salience decreased according to the following order: colour, form, and texture. In a modified DMS task (Experiments 2 and 3), participants were required to attend to one of three features and ignore the others. After a delay, they were required to choose which of the two test stimuli matched the reference stimulus on the attended feature, disregarding other task-irrelevant features. The target was either identical to the reference stimulus or mismatched the reference stimulus on one of the irrelevant features. The results showed that colour matching was affected neither by a form change nor by a texture change. Form matching was affected by a colour change, and texture matching was affected by a colour or form change. These results are consistent with the relative saliency hypothesis. Even when all features of an attended object are maintained, a relatively more salient task-irrelevant feature can interfere with the delayed recognition of a less salient feature.     

Development of strategic skills in impulsive and reflective children: a longitudinal study of metacognition

This study examined the relationships between metamemory and strategic behavior in impulsive and reflective children. One hundred thirty children from the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades participated. Seventy-seven of these children had been tested 3 years earlier on metamemory and cognitive tempo tasks. At pretraining, children were assessed on metamemory, cognitive tempo, summarization skills, and teacher ratings of impulsive behavior in the classroom. Next, children in three experimental groups received prose summarization instructions, summarization instructions in conjunction with metacognitive training about the importance of a reflective approach to learning, or no instructions. Following training, children were again measured on tempo, summarization skills, and teacher ratings of impulsivity. Analyses of strategy maintenance data indicated superior performance for children who had received both summarization and metacognitive training. Causal modeling analyses showed that early metamemory was an antecedent of later strategy acquisition. The dual role of metacognition as a precursor of later strategy acquisition and controller of lower level strategies was highlighted.     

Salience, induced muscle tension, and the ability to ignore irrelevant information

Two experiments are described that examined the effects of salience and induced muscle tension on subjects' ability to ignore irrelevant information in card sorting tasks. The results of the first experiment suggested that even though the responses appropriate to the relevant and irrelevant information were unrelated there was an effect of irrelevant information, but only when it was more salient than the relevant information. Induced muscle tension was found to improve performance based on less salient attributes but to degrade performance based on more salient attributes. The second experiment confirmed this latter finding using a version of the Stroop test. It is tentatively suggested that induced muscle tension may inhibit naming responses.     

Using recall to reduce false recognition: diagnostic and disqualifying monitoring

Whether recall of studied words (e.g., parsley, rosemary, thyme) could reduce false recognition of related lures (e.g., basil) was investigated. Subjects studied words from several categories for a final recognition memory test. Half of the subjects were given standard test instructions, and half were instructed to use recall to reduce false recognition. Manipulation checks indicated that the latter instructions did elicit a recall-to-reject strategy. However, false recognition was selectively reduced only when all the words from a category could be recalled (Experiment 1). When longer categories were used, thereby minimizing exhaustive recall, a recall-to-reject strategy was ineffective at reducing false recognition (Experiment 2). It is suggested that exhaustively recalling a category allowed subjects to disqualify the lure as having occurred, analogous to recall-to-reject demonstrations in other tasks. In contrast, partially recalling a category did not help to diagnose the lure as nonstudied. These findings constrain theories of recall-based monitoring processes.     

Maintenance and generalization of a semantic rehearsal strategy in educable mentally retarded children

Two groups of 11- to 12-year-old educable mentally retarded children, equated on the basis of a free recall pretest, were given a series of lists for free recall. Approximately half the subjects were trained in the use of a strategy designed to induce deeper level semantic encoding and the discovery of categorical relationships and half constituted a “no-training” control group with standard free recall instructions. The subjects received either related or unrelated lists during the training phase and related or unrelated lists during two post-tests, immediately following and 1 week after training. There was evidence not only that the semantic strategy was maintained over the 1-week delay, but that it also generalized to word lists unlike those used during training. The degree of generalization was greater for those subjects receiving related lists during training.     

Is information reduction an item-specific or an item-general process?

An important aspect of cognitive skill acquisition is the ability, developed through task practice, to ignore task-irrelevant information (i.e., information reduction, Haider & Frensch, 1996 1996). By this account, practice not only affects how information is processed, but also what information is processed. Performance increases because, with practice, cognitive resources are used more and more efficiently as irrelevant aspects of the task are discarded from processing. Human–machine interaction, educational and sports psychology are just some contexts where behaviour consistent with the notion of information reduction has been reported. Information reduction applies in situations in which tasks contain both relevant and irrelevant information, and denotes a change from a processing-all-elements-of-a-task strategy to a processing-relevant-elements-only strategy. In two experiments, we tested empirically if information reduction is an item-specific or an item-general process by manipulating the frequency with which items were repeated during task practice. Participants verified alphanumeric strings containing task-relevant and task-irrelevant information. As the latter was not mentioned in the instructions, information reduction was studied in an incidental learning situation. We found that string-specific repetition frequency was related to the amount of time participants spent processing relevant portions of the stimuli, but was not related to the time spent processing the irrelevant portions. Thus, repetition frequency did not affect the degree of information reduction. The conclusion that information reduction is an item-general phenomenon was further supported by frequency-independent high rates of transfer errors when, late in practice, the former regularity of an irrelevant and relevant string-part no longer applied. The findings are incompatible with most data-driven theories of skill acquisition that attribute strategy changes during task practice exclusively to automatically occurring learning mechanisms. The results are compatible with theories that assume a top-down influence on skill acquisition.     

Mental representation of length and weight series and transitive inferences in young children

Forty-eight second graders (8 years of age) were trained on length or weight relationships between adjacent members of a five-term series of colored objects. Feedback was visual and of either minimal or strong salience. Differences in weight were assessed by either a balance scale or a spring scale. Results showed that more salient visual feedback reduced the learning effort for length but not for weight comparisons. After training children were tested on all possible object pairs. Children's comparisons of items by length were very accurate in contrast to their comparisons by weight. An explanation for these findings is suggested by the data from a group of 6-year-olds who were trained on two independent pairs of a four-term series. Test results showed that subjects spontaneously encoded absolute lengths but tended to ignore information about the absolute weight of objects. It is suggested that high test accuracy depends on stimulus material for which the absolute values of the relevant dimension are encoded. The implications for taking test performance as an indicator of “transitive reasoning” ability are discussed.     

Sex differences in instructions to "be creative" on divergent and nondivergent test scores

Harrington (1975) found that both the magnitude and meaning of male subject scores on the Alternate Uses Test were altered by explicit instructions to “be creative,” and argued for the necessity of such instructions, plus qualitative scoring criteria, in the employment of tests of creativity. The present study elaborated upon this study by including female subjects, more than one test of divergent thinking and a test of nondivergent thinking. Instructions to be creative increased the proportion of creative responses output for both males and females, and sharpened correlations with Adjective Check List personality scales. Instructions did not alter performance on the nondivergent test. These results were interpreted to mean the instructions elicited strategies particularly relevant to divergent thinking and ruled out nonspecific effects such as those due to motivation. A reliable sex-difference in ideational fluency was also observed: instructions to be creative facilitated the total number of responses output for the male subjects. This supports a hypothesis that the instructions disambiguate I he test situation differently for men and women, suggesting the need to isolate individual conceptions of creativity in order to maximize test performance.