The Levels Hypothesis and the Study of Stimulus Value of Projective Test Items

Summary

Anagrams and semantic differential (S-D) test responses of Ss for whom words were “loaded” on a free association test were compared with those of Ss for whom the words were neutral. No differences in rate of word building or mean productivity of the two groups on the anagrams test were found. Mean S-D scale values similarly failed to differentiate between the two groups. However, when numbers of neutral (0) and extreme (+3 and ?3) responses were compared, “loaded” Ss were found on the whole to rate words more neutrally or more positively. The conclusion was that the stimulus value of the words in the associative condition could not be directly determined from responses in other conditions. The strategy of studying stimulus value of projective test items by using those items as stimuli on tests eliciting different levels of response was, therefore, questioned. Several other related experimental strategies which may mix response levels were also discussed and more appropriate techniques were suggested.     

Pavlovian processes do mediate control of the “advance” response strategy

Two parallel experiments used pigeons in a transfer of control design to determine the basis of the transfer of the use of the “advance strategy” across successive discriminations (W. K. Honig & H. Lindsay, Learning and Motivation, 1975, 6, 157–178). Pigeons were first trained under instrumental contingencies to use an “advance” response to maximize their exposure to S^D and minimize their exposure to S^Δ. Then orthogonal stimuli (key lights in Experiment 1 and diffuse illuminations in Experiment 2) were independently established through separate discriminative Pavlovian procedures as CS+ and CS? or as CS^o's. Later in special tests, it was demonstrated that the associative values of the Pavlovian CS's were a major factor governing the use of the advance strategy: only pigeons exposed to $\text{CS+}\text{CS?}$ used the advance response to regulate their exposure to either CS. Although these experiments showed that the necessary and sufficient conditions for utilization of the advance strategy are the Pavlovian associative values of the discriminative stimuli, opportunity for differential “operant” responding during the discriminative stimuli seems to be a contributor to the optimal use of the advance response across successive discriminations.     

What makes an event: Temporal integration of stimuli or actions?

In this article, we ask what serves as the “glue” that temporarily links information to form an event in an active observer. We examined whether forming a single action event in an active observer is contingent on the temporal presentation of the stimuli (hence, on the temporal availability of the action information associated with these stimuli), or on the learned temporal execution of the actions associated with the stimuli, or on both. A partial-repetition paradigm was used to assess the boundaries of an event for which the temporal properties of the stimuli (i.e., presented either simultaneously or temporally separate) and the intended execution of the actions associated with these stimuli (i.e., executed as one, temporally integrated, response or as two temporally separate responses) were manipulated. The results showed that the temporal features of action execution determined whether one or more events were constructed; the temporal presentation of the stimuli (and hence the availability of their associated actions) did not. This suggests that the action representation, or “task goal,” served as the “glue” in forming an event in an active observer. These findings emphasize the importance of action planning in event construction in an active observer.     

Free recall and retrieval speed of categorized items by kindergarten children

Kindergarten Ss were presented with 16 pictorial items in four category sets or a partially random ordem with one item from each category composing the four presentation sets. The pictures were presented either on conceptually related background pictures or on white backgrounds. The categorically grouped presentation facilitated free recall performance, both in terms of number of items recalled and the speed with which the items were recalled, and increased the amount of clustering in recall. Categorical clustering in recall was associated with shorter within- than between-category intervals and for those Ss who recalled items from each of four categories successively, the over-all temporal pattern in recall closely approximated that found with adults. No background effects were found.     

Mental rotation of random two-dimensional shapes

Two experiments are reported in which Ss were required to determine whether a random, angular form, presented at any of a number of picture-plane orientations, was a “standard” or “reflected” version. Average time required to make this determination increased linearly with the angular departure of the form from a previously learned orientation. The slope and intercept of the reaction-time (RT) function were virtually constant, regardless of the perceptual complexity of the test form and the orientation selected for initial learning.When Ss were informed in advance as to the identity and the orientation of the upcoming test form and, further, were permitted to indicate when they were prepared for its external presentation, RT for determining the version of the form was constant for all test-form orientations. However, the time needed to prepare for the test-form presentation increased linearly with the angular departure of the form from the learned orientation.It is argued that the processes both of preparing for and of responding to a disoriented test form consist of the mental rotation of an image, and that both sorts of mental rotation (pre-stimulus and post-stimulus) are carried out at essentially the same constant rate.     

Active versus passive maintenance of visual nonverbal memory

Forgetting over the short term has challenged researchers for more than a century, largely because of the difficulty of controlling what goes on within the memory retention interval. But the “recent-negative-probe” procedure offers a valuable paradigm, by examining the influences of (presumably) unattended memoranda from prior trials. Here we used a recent-probe task to investigate forgetting for visual nonverbal short-term memory. The target stimuli (two visually presented abstract shapes) on a trial were followed after a retention interval by a probe, and participants indicated whether the probe matched one of the target items. Proactive interference, and hence memory for old trial probes, was observed, whereby participants were slowed in rejecting a nonmatching probe on the current trial that nevertheless matched a target item on the previous trial (a recent-negative probe). The attraction of the paradigm is that, by uncovering proactive influences of past-trial probe stimuli, it can be argued that active maintenance in memory of those probes is unlikely. In two experiments, we recorded such proactive interference of prior-trial items over a range of interstimulus (ISI) and intertrial (ITI) intervals (between 1 and 6 s, respectively). Consistent with a proposed two-process memory conception (the active–passive memory model, or APM), actively maintained memories on current trials decayed, but passively “maintained,” or unattended, visual memories of stimuli on past trials did not.     

Entertainment events in shopping malls—profiling passive and active participation behaviors

This paper presents an empirical framework for operationalizing passive versus active participation in the context of shopping mall entertainment events (e.g., school holiday events and fashion shows) and assesses the framework's utility for segmenting and profiling shopping mall entertainment audiences. Exploratory factor analysis of data collected at shopping mall events revealed two distinct dimensions, “relax and be entertained” and “socialize and explore,” reflecting passive and active participation, respectively. From nine activities operationalizing passive versus active participation, two distinct audience segments reporting different levels of immediate and future shopping behaviors were identified. The “engage me” segment (active‐dominant audience) was more likely to stay longer at the mall, purchase food and nonfood items, share the event experience with others, and attend similar entertainment events in the future than the “entertain me” segment (passive‐dominant audience). The activities operationalizing passive versus active participation were tested with 280 participants at two family‐oriented shopping mall entertainment events. This paper extends the knowledge in the retail event marketing literature whereby it confirms passive versus active participation levels at retailing events, and verifies that passive and active participation levels can be measured and differentiated operationally. The findings provide insights on the utility of shopper participation level as a meaningful segmentation variable, pertinent to both the marketing and management of shopper experiences within a retailing entertainment event. Managerial implications and limitations of this paper are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Transfer of fear reduction through systematic desensitization

Systematic desensitization therapy involves the presentation of fear-provoking situations through visualization As the visualizations cease to evoke emotional responses, the fear-provoking potential of the real situations decreases. Research has clearly shown that such transfer does indeed occur with a wide variety of fears. Transfer has been demonstrated, for example, with fear of small animals (Lang and Lazovik, 1963), interpersonal performance anxiety (Paul, 1966), classic phobias (Lazarus, 1961), test anxiety (Katahn, Strenger and Cherry, 1966), impotence (Wolpe, 1958) and frigidity (Lazarus, 1963). However, the nature of transfer has received little attention. Wolpe (1963) has claimed that transfer from therapy to the real life situation is almost complete and direct: “There is almost invariably a one-to one relationship between what the patient can imagine without anxiety and what he can experience in reality without anxiety”. This claim has received support from Rachman (1966) who found that fear reduction transferred immediately to the real situation in 82 per cent of his observations. Hoenig and Reed (1966) reported that after a brief delay, transfer effects were observed in the case of words representing fearful stimuli but were inconsistent in the case of the real stimuli. Agras (1967) found transfer to be delayed in all his cases. He further reported that, though all patients improved, a direct relationship between therapeutic progress and symptom reduction was not found. Both Hain et al. (1966) and Meyer and Crisp (1966) have described the failure of therapeutic effects to transfer to real life.These somewhat inconsistent reports may stem in part from the measurement of transfer effects at different times. Another possibility is that more fearful Ss may evidence less transfer than less fearful Ss. Lang and Lazovik (1963) reported that Ss who completed less than 75 per cent of the hierarchy showed little improvement although direct transfer effects were observed for less fearful Ss (those who complete 75 per cent or more hierarchy items). The present study of transfer effects was designed to remove confoundingof level of fear with extent of progress in systematic desensitization.     

Item frequency in probe-recognition memory search: Converging evidence for a role of item-response learning

In short-term probe-recognition tasks, observers make speeded old–new recognition judgments for items that are members of short lists. However, long-term memory (LTM) for items from previous lists influences current-list performance. The current experiment pursued the nature of these long-term influences—in particular, whether they emerged from item-familiarity or item-response-learning mechanisms. Subjects engaged in varied-mapping (VM) and consistent-mapping (CM) short-term probe-recognition tasks (e.g., Schneider & Shiffrin, Psychological Review, 84, 1–66, 1977). The key manipulation was to vary the frequency with which individual items were presented across trials. We observed a striking dissociation: Whereas increased presentation frequency led to benefits in performance for both old and new test probes in CM search, it resulted in interference effects for both old and new test probes in VM search. Formal modeling suggested that a form of item-response learning took place in both conditions: Each presentation of a test probe led to the storage of that test probe—along with its associated “old” or “new” response—as an exemplar in LTM. These item-response pairs were retrieved along with current-list items in driving observers’ old-– recognition judgments. We conclude that item-response learning is a core component of the LTM mechanisms that influence CM and VM memory search.     

Tactile discrimination of competing sounds

Discriminably different sounds, concurrently presented from the left and right of the medial plane, were reduced in angular separation until subjects could no longer detect which sound was “left” and which was “right.” The procedure was repeated with hearing masked and judgments made on the basis of the tactile signals at two fingertip vibrators that received their inputs from two miniature microphones bilaterally located on the subject’s head. Auditory and tactile performance were compared under active (head movements permitted) and passive (head held still) conditions. Active and passive performance were not significantly different. Auditory and tactile performance became no better than chance at angular separations of 2.7° and 4.4°, respectively. Touch compared sufficiently well with audition to support arguments for the inclusion of sound localization information in devices which use the skin as a substitute for the ear. nt]mis|This research was conducted at the Smith-Kettlewell Institute of Visual Sciences, San Francisco, California. This institute provided the apparatus for the experiment. B. L. Richardson was on Staff Development Leave from the Applied Psychology Department of the Caulfield Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.     

Stimulus hierarchy generalization in systematic desensitization

A group of snake phobic Ss were desensitized to the first 5 items of a standard 7 item snake fear hierarchy in which the items were ordered on the basis of distance from a snake. This group and a no-treatment control group (which did not receive the desensitization) were treated for fear of all the hierarchy stimuli in terms of ratings both before and after the desensitization. The Ss rated their fear responses to all the stimuli as presented to them in (1) real form (2) by slide, and (3) in imaginal form. The results verified all four experimental hypotheses: (1) The experimental Ss showed greater fear reduction than the control Ss to both the training stimuli (the stimuli on which desensitization done) and the generalization stimuli (the other two stimuli), (2) The systematic desensitization (SD) group showed (a) more fear reduction to the last training stimuli than to the lower generalization stimulus and (b) more to the latter than to the higher generalization stimulus, (3) The SD group showed less fear reduction to the generalization stimuli in their real form than in both the slide and imaginai modalities (in the desensitization each stimulus presentation was done first in slide form and then in imaginal form), and (4) There were significant overall individual differences in generalization of fear reduction to the generalization stimuli.     

Influence of linguistic complexity,rate of presentation,and interphrase pause time on auditory-verbal comprehension of adult aphasic patients

Among the variables affecting comprehension of linguistic stimuli by aphasic subjects are syntactic complexity and processing time. Comprehension performance of 15 aphasic adults was studied while altering the rate of speech presentation and varying the pause time between the major phrases within sentences of increasing grammatical complexity.Simple Active Affirmative Declarative Sentences, Negative, and Passive sentences were presented (1) at the rate of 150 words per minute (wpm) with 1-sec interphrase pause time (IPT); (2) 150 wpm with no pauses; (3) 120 wpm with 1-sec IPT; (4) 120 wpm with no pauses added.Performance was seen to vary with increasing syntactical complexity and as a function of processing time. Greater comprehension was seen with active affirmative than negative; greater with passive affirmative than with active negative. Clinical implications are discussed. Subjects demonstrated greater comprehension when sentences were presented at slower than normal rate; addition of interphrase pause time intervals aided comprehension. Combining slower rate of presentation and IPT intervals provided greatest increase in auditory processing time and showed concomitant increase in comprehension performance.     

A model of three-choice discrimination learning under complete and incomplete feedback conditions

The Bower and Trabasso model of concept identification was extended to cover problems in which three stimuli were presented simultaneously and S pointed to the one he thought was correct. The E gave complete feedback by indicating the correct stimulus, or incomplete feedback by saying “correct” or “wrong.” The model accurately accounted for the significant difference in total errors between the two feedback conditions by incorporating process assumptions reflecting the logical difference in information content of the two types of feedback. Using a single set of parameter estimates, the model made satisfactory quantitative predictions of several statistics for both feedback conditions. Some deviations from the model's predictions were found in the length of terminal error runs, indicating that Ss were possibly using memory more extensively than posited by the model.     

Short-term retention of superimposed and of spatially distinct multiletter visual arrays

On each trial, Ss attempted to retain a series of five visually presented letters while concurrently “shadowing” (repeating aloud) a rapid series of aurally presented letters. If serial-position accuracy is ignored, they were able to store more than only the last letter of a typical series, even though all five letters appeared on the same screen, and that performance was superior to the retention of five auditorily presented letters. Together, these findings suggest that a form of visual storage might have been employed for the retention of visual stimuli and, specifically, one that was relatively immune to erasure as compared to “iconic” storage. In further support of that hypothesis, retention of such visual series as measured by free-recall accuracy was not inferior to that of five letters, each of which was presented on a separate screen.     

The midstream order deficit

The relative order of an auditory sequence can be more difficult to apprehend when it is presented repeatedly without pause (i.e., cycling) than when it is presented only once (Warren, Obusek, Farmer, & Warren, 1969). We find that this phenomenon, referred to as themidstream order deficit (MOD), can also occur with visual stimuli. The stimuli need not form separate perceptual “streams,” and the effect can occur with presentation rates as slow as five items per second, even though the identification of individual letters is very accurate at this rate. However, if the first item of the sequence is visually very distinct from the preceding items, relative order reports can be as accurate in the cycling condition as in the single-presentation condition. Our results suggest that the MOD is not due to masking, attentional blink, repetition blindness, Reeves and Sperling’s (1986) order illusion, memory limitations, or decision criteria. The MOD may reflect an attentional cost to the initiation of order encoding, which is distinct from the allocation of attention is required in order to detect and identify individual items. To initiate order encoding successfully, one’s attention must be set for, or captured by, an initial salient event.     

Recognition in a visuospatial memory task: The effect of presentation

The influence of the mode of presentation (simultaneous vs. sequential) on accuracy and latency of visuospatial recognition was explored in three experiments. In Experiment 1, two groups were administered a visuospatial task in which a number of positions were shown either simultaneously or sequentially (in a random order); memory was tested using a recognition procedure of visuospatial patterns, either identical or different (a single cell displaced). The results showed that (1) performance was higher in the simultaneous than in the sequential presentation, and (2) decision time increased with complexity in the sequential presentation but not in the simultaneous presentation. In Experiment 2, the same task was used in three conditions of presentation, simultaneous, random sequential, and ordered sequential; at test, a single location, rather than a pattern, was presented for recognition. The results showed that (1) performance was higher in the simultaneous and in the ordered sequential presentations than in the random sequential one, and (2) decision time increased with complexity. In Experiment 3, the same task was used in the same three conditions of presentation, simultaneous, random sequential, and ordered sequential; at test either an identical or a “displaced” pattern was presented for recognition. The results showed that (1) performance was equivalent in the three types of presentation, and (2) decision time increased with complexity for “hit” items; different patterns of linear relations were observed for “correct rejections” items. The results are interpreted in terms of the organisation of visuospatial working memory, and three types of encoding—extrafigural spatial encoding, visual pattern encoding, and spatial path encoding—were proposed.     

Storage and later recognition of exemplars of concepts

This paper concerns the problem of abstraction: whether when we encounter several exemplars of a concept, we retain only the abstracted concept, only the exemplars, or both. Although many studies concur that both are stored, a recent article argued strongly that only the abstracted concept is stored. The present study, aimed at replication of this recent finding, follows the earlier procedural details but adds appropriate controls and uses simpler material. A set of 24 exemplars of four concepts, in the form of four-tuples of letters and numbers, was presented to Ss who, after presentation, rated a larger set of exemplars for recognition. One group of Ss experienced the conceptual exemplars; control group Ss experienced items that were similar in composition but not exemplars of a concept. Two major results appeared: Unlike the study on which this was based, all Ss were able to distinguish those items that were originally experienced from those that were not. And, the more completely an exemplar fit the concept (the longer the item), the more confident the S was that it had been presented. In contrast, in the control condition, the longer the item, the more confident the S was that it had not been presented earlier. Two models are described to account for these results. One is based on the S's initial storage of the exemplars in a concept-plus-correction format; the other is based on a procedure whereby the S can make recognition judgments without having previously abstracted and retained the concepts.     

Dissociating electrophysiological correlates of subjective,objective, and correct memory in investigating the emotion-induced recognition bias

Performance on tasks requiring discrimination of at least two stimuli can be viewed either from an objective perspective (referring to actual stimulus differences), or from a subjective perspective (corresponding to participant’s responses). Using event-related potentials recorded during an old/new recognition memory test involving emotionally laden and neutral words studied either blockwise or randomly intermixed, we show here how the objective perspective (old versus new items) yields late effects of blockwise emotional item presentation at parietal sites that the subjective perspective fails to find, whereas the subjective perspective (“old” versus “new” responses) is more sensitive to early effects of emotion at anterior sites than the objective perspective. Our results demonstrate the potential advantage of dissociating the subjective and the objective perspective onto task performance (in addition to analyzing trials with correct responses), especially for investigations of illusions and information processing biases, in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience studies.     

False recognition following study of semantically related lists presented in jumbled word form

Three experiments explored a jumbled word effect in false recognition. Lists of theme-related items were presented in word or nonword form. Results indicated that critical lures semantically related to studied items were falsely recognised regardless of whether they were presented as words or nonwords. High false recognition rates to either SLEEP or SELEP following study of an appropriate theme list of items in nonword form should only occur if nonwords are recoded at study. With study conditions conducive to recoding, jumbled words induced false recognitions based on semantic associations among their respective base words. Disrupting a recoding process by creating “difficult” letter rearrangements for jumbled words (Experiment 2) appeared to eliminate the false recognition effect. In Experiment 3, presentation durations ranged from 110 ms to 880 ms. Although there was little evidence of a semantic false recognition effect at the fastest presentation rate, the brief durations appeared to be effective in eliminating the effect when items were studied in nonword form. These results appear to be consistent with an encoding activation/retrieval monitoring model.