Judgments of recency for long sequences of pictures: the absence of a developmental trend

Recency judgments were examined for four groups (N = 40 per group) aged 7, 8, 10, and 18 years. The Ss were required to choose either the near or far item on a series of test pairs embedded within a long sequence of single inspection items. No age effects were found. Performance was more accurate the longer the separation between the original presentation of the two test items and the shorter the lag from the most recently presented item to the test. Implications for general and developmental theories of memory were discussed. The data supported the hypothesis that tasks, which do not require deliberate mnemonic strategies, are not developmentally sensitive.     

Bases of young children's judgments about more

While the young child's difficulties in correctly comprehending the term less are well known, it appears less widely recognized that young children may also encounter difficulties with the term more. The present study shows that in a task which requires judgments about more to be based on the relative numerosity of sets, 3–4-year-old children may base their judgments on other parameters, such as the extent to which the sets are homogenous with respect to the color of their components. The implications of such findings are briefly considered.     

On the problems of being more or less the same

Sixty children aged 2–3 to 5-2 were given four quantity tasks which tested their understanding of more and same. Two tasks involved addition, two involved judgment of static quantities. One of each type of task required a manipulative response, and one of each required a yes/no judgment. The tasks involved judgments of equality and inequality. Tasks involving a manipulative response were significantly easier than those involving a yes/no judgment, indicating that the nature of the response required of the child is crucial. All other differences were negligible, indicating that the other task variables investigated do not affect the child's ability to respond correctly. The ability to make accurate responses was not strongly associated with counting ability. There was a significant difference in the children's counting responses depending on the method used to elicit it.     

On the development of more and less

More and less were analyzed into two meaning dimensions, “occurrence” (derived from children's early language) and “quantity,” which were hypothesized to be developmentally related to acts of addition and subtraction. Two experiments tested 2- and 3-yr-old's comprehension of these concepts when initially equal or unequal rows were added to, subtracted from or left static. Addition and subtraction had little effect on Ss′ comprehension of either term. Two-year-old Ss understood more when differences in the number of objects in the array were relatively large, suggesting “many” as an intermediate stage of meaning for more. Three-year-olds understood less first as “smaller in amount,” not as more as others have found. Less was acquired later than more, a difference possibly due to its relatively restricted meaning and use or to its converse perceptual and logical relation to more.     

Less obscure? Pragmatics and 3–4-year-old children's semantics

Young children's understanding of the terms more and less is considered. In a context where a response bias operates in favour of appropriate responses to more, 3–4-year-old children respond to less as they do to more, apparently indicating assimilation of meaning. However, in a context where there is an absence of any response bias, children respond to less at random. Further, young children can respond appropriately to an alternative expression for the concept of lesser amount, doesn't have many. These results suggest that young children's observed difficulties with the term less do not arise from assimilating the meaning of less to that of more. Rather, difficulties with less stem from young children's failure to understand the meaning of that particular term, responses to instructions containing less being determined by pragmatic rather than semantic factors. When the context exhibits a response bias, children's responses to less are in accord with it. When there is no response bias, children guess and respond to less at random.     

Shaping reality vs. hiding from reality: Reconsidering the effects of trait need for closure on information search

For tentative and final decisions on real and artificial issues, three studies revealed a positive relation between trait need for closure and selective approach to supportive (vs. unsupportive) information. Specifically, individuals with high (vs. low) trait need for closure selected more decision-supportive information and less decision-challenging information for viewing. Furthermore, Study 1 showed that the effect of trait need for closure functioned independently of authoritarianism and dogmatism, and Study 3 showed that the effect of trait need for closure on selective approach to decision-supportive information was mediated by a current concern to get closure on the experimental issue. These findings provide a new understanding of how trait need for closure shapes post-decisional information search and decision making.     

A reappraisal of the relation between performances of quantitative identity and quantitative equivalence conservation tasks

Previous studies of children's performance on quantitative identity and equivalence conservation problems in the number domain are suggested to be flawed because of the low numbers of items in the arrays. In Experiment 1, children were tested on three different number versions of identity and equivalence conservation tasks. Their performance varied with the number of items and no child was found to pass a large number version of an equivalence conservation task and fail the corresponding version of an identity conservation task. In Experiment 2 the notion that the contextual effect of asking two similar questions might underlie the difference in performance on the two tasks was tested and rejected. The results are discussed in relation to recent analyses of conservation problems.     

Incidental learning in preschool children as a function of level of cognitive analysis

Preschool children's recall and clustering of organized lists of pictures were examined under deliberate instructions to remember or in incidental learning situations. The incidental tasks either required comprehension (categorization, or a rating of pleasantness-unpleasantness) or were formal orienting tasks involving processing in terms of physical features.Explicit instruction to remember and formal incidental instructions did not differ, and both lead to poorer performance than the comprehension activities. Categorization, whether accompanied by explicit instructions to recall, or occurring in the context of a meaningful activity, was no more efficient than categorization in and for itself. With children as with adults, it is the activity of the children which determines depth of processing and subsequent retention, not the intent to remember per se.     

‘I Won't Trust You if I Think You're Trying to Deceive Me': Relations Between Selective Trust,Theory of Mind,and Imitation in Early Childhood

This study explores connections between 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds’ performance in theory-of-mind tasks, their performance on an assessment of selective trust, and their decisions to (not) imitate the questionable tool choices of an adult model. The prediction was that all the tasks would be related, with improvements in theory of mind and selective trust leading children to be less likely to imitate a model who could be construed as deceptive or unreliable. Controlling for age, we found a positive correlation between false-belief understanding and selective trust but no relation between theory of mind and tool choices. Unexpectedly, children who were more discriminatory in their trust were more likely to imitate. Possible explanations for children's reasoning are discussed.     

The development of conceptual and rote recall skills among school age children

One hundred eighty children from Grades K, 5, and 9 performed a recall task within one of four instructional conditions: serial recall; standard free recall; labeling free recall; labeling cued recall. The task required that Ss view and recall items from three successively presented sets of categorized pieture stimuli. Controls were imposed upon the associatice relatedness of items within sets so as to minimize the occurrence of associative responding during recall. The clustering data showed that kindergarten and fifth grade children are able to use conceptual skills to effectively mediate recall, but fail to effect these skills on a spontaneous basis in free recall. The results were discussed in line with the hypothesis that young children fail to engage in planful cognitive activity in recall tasks.     

The cognitive basis of the comprehension and production of relational terminology

The comprehension of big, little, and same number and the productio of relational terminology was assessed in 168 preschool children. Stimuli were used which varied the relationships of length, number, and density. Language comprehension and production were related to the complexity of cognitive operations required by the task. Specifically, comprehension was easier in the situations in which length and number were positively correlated than when length provided no cue to number. Comprehension was most difficult when length and number were negatively correlated. There was asymmetry in language comprehension such that the positive term big, was comprehended earlier than little in some tasks; there was also asymmetry in production in that the child was more likely to use language related to the positive pole than to the negative pole. These data were interpreted as providing support for theories of the cognitive basis of language acquisition.     

Children's comprehension of comparative forms

Children aged from 3.5 to 5.5 years were tested on their comprehension of the terms taller, shorter, more, and less in five types of sentences: truncated, explicit standard, expanded explicit standard, two-dimensional second-clause subject noun, and two-dimensional second-clause subject pronoun. Many childen performed poorly on less and shorter in truncated sentences; the presence of explicit comparative cues did not improve these children's performance. Children who performed perfectly on truncated sentences still had difficulty understanding two-dimensional comparisons, especially those with a second-clause subject pronoun. These children interpreted only the first clause of the second-clause subject pronoun sentences. The results suggest that many children are capable of understanding two-dimensional comparisons, but perform poorly on the second-clause subject pronoun sentences because of uncertainty about the referent of the pronoun.     

The role of overt activity in children's sentence production

Nursery schooler's abilityto associate pairs of toys was assessed under four experimental conditions: (1) control, (2) S manipulating the toys, (3) S generating a sentence, and (4) S generating a sentence while manipulating the toys. All three S-involvement conditions produced significantly better recognition performance than the control but contrary to initial predictions, the difference between the sentence-only and sentence-plus-manipulation conditions was not significant. In contrast to previous research, Ss in the sentence-only conditions had little difficulty producing sentences when asked. Of interest was the finding that the quality of sentence production was poorer in the sentence-plus-manipulation condition than in the sentence-only condition. Results are discussed in terms of the possible “conflict” produced when the child is required to engage in more than one overt activity simultaneously.     

Children's use ofGet passives

Children's use ofget in passivelike constructions was examined in this study. Fifty-eight children at three age levels were tested twice on imitation, comprehension, and production tasks. For the imitation and comprehension tasks, passive sentences withget were modeled in one instance and withbe in the other instance. On both tasks, children performed significantly better on theget items than on thebe items. For the production tasks, active sentences were used as the experimental stimuli. Among 928 production responses possible, children produced 423get passives and 6be passives. The frequency ofget passives increased with increasing age. Qualitative analyses were performed to determine agerelated changes in the pattern of linguistic strategies chosen. These data were consistent with predictions derived from a model of lexical directionality: Children used moreget thanbe passives and more truncated than full passives.     

Flooding therapy: Effectiveness,stimulus characteristics,and the value of brief in vivo exposure

Three analogue experiments examined flooding therapy. Experiment 1 showed that flooding was more effective than standardized desensitization in reducing snake phobia. Experiment 2 examined three different modes of presenting the feared stimuli in flooding: taped auditory presentation, pictorial presentation, and a combination of these two. An additional combination group were given a brief in vivo exposure to the feared object immediately after each of three treatment sessions. Both a behavioral test and subjective estimates of fear showed advantages for the combined group that had the in vivo exposure, although it appeared that auditory instructions to imagine interaction with the snake was the best method for presenting the feared stimuli. Experiment 3 compared the auditory imagined method with and without ‘aversive’ or ‘implosive’ scenes, and with either an immediate or a delayed in vivo exposure. The only procedure to produce marked effects was the one that omitted ‘aversive’ scenes and provided immediate post-treatment in vivo exposure.     

Links between family gender socialization experiences in childhood and gendered occupational attainment in young adulthood

Gendered occupational segregation remains prevalent across the world. Although research has examined factors contributing to the low number of women in male-typed occupations – namely science, technology, engineering, and math – little longitudinal research has examined the role of childhood experiences in both young women's and men's later gendered occupational attainment. This study addressed this gap in the literature by examining family gender socialization experiences in middle childhood – namely parents' attitudes and work and family life – as contributors to the gender typicality of occupational attainment in young adulthood. Using data collected from mothers, fathers, and children over approximately 15 years, the results revealed that the associations between childhood socialization experiences (~ 10 years old) and occupational attainment (~ 26 years old) depended on the sex of the child. For sons but not daughters, mothers' more traditional attitudes toward women's roles predicted attaining more gender-typed occupations. In addition, spending more time with fathers in childhood predicted daughters attaining less and sons acquiring more gender-typed occupations in young adulthood. Overall, evidence supports the idea that childhood socialization experiences help to shape individuals' career attainment and thus contribute to gender segregation in the labor market.     

THE RELATION BETWEEN CHOOSING AND WORKING PREVOCATIONAL TASKS IN TWO SEVERELY RETARDED YOUNG ADULTS

This study investigated the relation between prevocational preference, as measured by the client's selection of a task object, and the work that followed that choice. After selecting a task object, the clients worked a task previously assessed to be more or less preferred than the one indicated by the object. The results indicated that when the selection represented a task that was less preferred than the one actually worked, choices for that object increased on subsequent trials. Conversely, when the selection represented a task that was more preferred than the task subject actually worked, choices for the object decreased on subsequent trials. The work that followed object choices reinforced or punished subsequent selections. These findings indicated that the clients' object choices were valid indicators of their preference for working different tasks. They were also consistent with Premack's principle that one class of responses may reinforce or punish a different class of responses for the same individual.     

Measuring a macho personality constellation

A Hypermasculinity Inventory was developed to measure a macho personality constellation consisting of three components: (a) calloused sex attitudes toward women, (b) violence as manly, and (c) danger as exciting. The 30 forced-choice items were selected by a two-stage internal consistency item analysis. Issues of substantive and structural validity were addressed by considering item content, test format, homogeneity of items, and the factor structure of items. The Cronbach α coefficient for the Hypermasculinity Inventory was .89 in the present sample of 135 college men. External validity was assessed by correlating scores of the Hypermasculinity Inventory with self-reported drug use, r(135) = .26, p < .01, aggressive behavior r(135) = .65, p < .001, and dangerous driving, r(136) = .47, p < .001, following alcohol consumption, and delinquent behavior during the high school years, r(135) = .38, p < .01. Construct validity was supported further by a pattern of theoretically meaningful correlations with the Personality Research Form (D. N. Jackson, 1974, Goshen, NY: Research Psychologists Press). The discussion considered further research that is needed to adduce additional evidence for the construct validity of the Hypermasculinity Inventory as a measure of the macho personality pattern.     

Sequences of phonemic approximations in aphasia

The trends of sequences of phonemic approximations to a single target were studied in three types of aphasia (Broca's, conduction, and Wernicke's), as gathered in five tasks (spontaneous speech, repetition of meaningful words, repetition of nonsense words, reading aloud, and automatized sequences). A phonemic error ratio was defined in order to quantify the distance between each approximation of a given sequence and its target. The results of a computer analysis based on this ratio were analyzed according to three parameters. A study of three types of patients revealed that conduction aphasics exhibited the most regular trend toward the target in sequences of phonemic approximations; the analysis of the various tasks indicated that sequences produced in repetition by conduction aphasics form an exception to the regularity of this trend, and an examination of the various lengths of sequences indicated that longer sequences showed a less decisive trend toward the target than shorter sequences. The discussion bears on some theoretical aspects of the phonological production mechanism and its control: the initial strength and permanence of the internal representation of the target emerge as important factors required for the good functioning of this mechanism.     

The effects of overtraining on flooding of jump-up and shuttlebox avoidance responses

Two experiments are reported which test the effects of overtraining (2, 4 or 6 days) on the efficacy of flooding (response-prevention) in hastening the extinction of jump-up and two-way shuttlebox avoidance responses. In the jump-up box, overtraining reduces the effectiveness of flooding in two ways: Rats trained for 6 days and given a flooding treatment are more resistant to extinction than rats trained for only 2 or 4 days and given a flooding treatment. By contrast, rats trained for 6 days and given a control treatment are less resistant to extinction than control rats trained for 2 or 4 days. In the shuttlebox, overtraining neither reduces the effectiveness of flooding in hastening avoidance response extinction, nor reduces the resistance to extinction of control animals. Implications of these different effects of overtraining on jump-up and two-way shuttlebox responses are discussed.