W H R Rivers (1864-1922): the founder of research in cross-cultural perception.

This paper presents a brief review of Rivers's contribution to psychology, especially to his cross-cultural studies of the basic perceptual processes of vision, and examines the lasting influence of his findings. It reports briefly on the scientific milieu in which Rivers carried out his work and traces the growth of his interest in the psychology of perception from the early days of his medical work to his appointment as a foundation lecturer of two English universities, London and Cambridge. It is argued that Rivers's contribution has been undervalued by psychologists.     

Encoding specificity: a reply to Croker (1981)

Crocker's (1981) comment on the Lee and Hirota (1980) paper essentially raises two issues. First, objection is made to the applicability of the encoding specificity principle to the resuits found in our study. Second, on a more general level, Crocker questions the heuristic value of utilizing theoretical issues in non-motor domains to guide scientific experimentation in the study of motor behavior. In this reply I posit that Crocker's reservations about encoding specificity are based upon improper theoretical and methodological considerations. Regarding the more philosophical issue however, I argue that Crocker's view may be counterproductive to progress in the area of memory research.     

Melioration revisited: a systematic replication of Vaughan (1981)

Organisms that behave so as to forfeit a relatively higher overall rate of reinforcement in favor of a relatively lower rate are said to engage in suboptimal choice. Suboptimal choice has been linked with maladaptive behavior in humans. Melioration theory offers one explanatory framework for suboptimal choice. Melioration theory suggests behavior is controlled by differences in local reinforcer rates between alternatives. Vaughan (1981) arranged two experimental conditions in which maximizing the overall rate of reinforcement required behavior that was compatible, or incompatible, with melioration. Vaughan found pigeons allocated more time to a locally richer alternative even when doing so resulted in suboptimal choice. However, Vaughan did not show whether these effects could systematically reverse and did not provide within‐session data to show that choice across short time spans remains under the control of differences in local reinforcer rates. The present study used pigeons to replicate and extend Vaughan's findings. We investigated shifts in overall‐ and within‐session choice across repeated conditions, according to arranged local contingencies. Behavior systematically followed changes in local contingencies for most pigeons. Within‐session data suggests that, providing differences in local reinforcer rates are discriminated, pigeons will allocate more time to a locally richer alternative, even if this leads to suboptimal choice. These findings facilitate the more confident use of similar procedures that investigate how melioration contributes to suboptimal choice.     

An appreciation of Bruce and Young's (1986) serial stage model of face naming after 25 years

The current status of Bruce and Young's (1986) serial model of face naming is discussed 25 years after its original publication. In the first part of the paper, evidence for and against the serial model is reviewed. It is argued that there is no compelling reason why we should abandon Bruce and Young's claim that recall of a name is contingent upon prior retrieval of semantic information about the person. The current status of the claim that people's names are more difficult to recall than the names of objects is then evaluated. Finally, an account of the anatomical location in the brain of Bruce and Young's three processing stages (face familiarity, retrieval of semantic information, retrieval of names) is suggested. In particular, there is evidence that biographical knowledge about familiar people is stored in the right anterior temporal lobes (ATL) and that the left temporal pole (TP) is heavily involved in retrieval of the names of familiar people. The issue of whether these brain areas play a similar role in object processing is also discussed.