Assessing attitudes toward gay marriage among selected Christian groups using the lost-letter technique

100 each envelopes were distributed to Christian church parking lots and general public parking lots. Letters were addressed to either the "Gay Marriage Foundation" or to a neutral organization. Significantly more neutral letters (n = 75) were returned than "Gay Marriage Foundation" letters (n = 36) from both types of locations, but no differences were found for return rates. Gay marriage may be a controversial topic for people in this area of California. The limitations of the lost-letter technique prohibit fine distinctions; however, one may infer attitudes toward gay marriage may not be more negative among Christian church attendees than in the general public.     

Evidence for an addition to the reading scan hypothesis

Letters were tachistoscopically presented in pairs to the left or right of fixation for 40 msec. The pair consisted of a target letter (B, D, P, or T) and a noise letter (all other letters of the alphabet except I), with the noise letter appearing either to the inside or the outside of the stimulus letter. S’s task was to report verbally the target letter as fast as possible. Reaction times and number of errors indicated that there was more interference when the noise letter occurred further from the fixation point than the target letter for both the left and right visual field. Since a reading scan cannot account for the results in the right visual field, an outside-toward-fixation scan is proposed. An analysis of the different kinds of errors indicated that the outside to fixation scan is more primitive than the reading scan in that it produces less detailed information about the letters than does the reading scan.     

IRTs of the ABCs: children's letter name acquisition

We examined the developmental sequence of letter name knowledge acquisition by children from 2 to five years of age. Data from 2 samples representing diverse regions, ethnicity, and socioeconomic backgrounds (ns = 1074 and 500) were analyzed using item response theory (IRT) and differential item functioning techniques. Results from factor analyses indicated that letter name knowledge represented a unidimensional skill; IRT results yielded significant differences between letters in both difficulty and discrimination. Results also indicated an approximate developmental sequence in letter name learning for the simplest and most challenging to learn letters--but with no clear sequence between these extremes. Findings also suggested that children were most likely to first learn their first initial. We discuss implications for assessment and instruction.     

The lost e-mail method: Milgram’s lost-letter technique in the age of the Internet

We examined Milgram’s (1977) lost-letter technique using e-mail. In the first experiment, 79 college faculty received mock lost e-mail messages. Nineteen percent of those who received the messages responded, in all cases by returning the message to the “sender” instead of forwarding it to the “recipient.” In the second study, attitudes toward presidential candidate Ross Perot were examined by sending out two different messages to 200 randomly selected e-mail addresses in the United States. Although there was no differential response rate, examination of content revealed attitudes consistent with concurrent poll data.     

Social science involvement in voir dire: Preliminary data on the effectiveness of “scientific jury selection”

The validity of what has been termed “scientific” or “systematic” jury selection (SJS) techniques is addressed using data from two actual cases; one criminal and one civil. Data from the highly publicized Joan Little trial indicated that where validity data were available for the survey approach and in-court rating of authoritarianism, these techniques measured what they purported to measure. Validation data were not available for a third technique—in-court rating of nonverbal communication. Data from the civil case indicated that the survey approach could successfully predict verdicts of mock jurors. It is concluded that while these data are suggestive of the validity of two of the techniques used in SJS, more rigorous tests are essential before conclusions can be drawn.     

Parent-Child Psychotherapy: A Follow-Up Study Comparing Two Techniques

The “lost letter technique” was validated against actual election returns in two randomly selected precincts in Greensboro, North Carolina. The technique was not successful in predicting the outcome of the presidential race. It was found that letters addressed to The Health Research Center were significantly more likely to be returned than letters addressed to presidential candidates. This indicated that the failure to predict was due either to voter apathy in this particular election or to an active dislike of both candidates.     

Processing letters in words at different levels

Subjects indicated whether two letters, two words, or a letter and the first letter of a word were the same. Letter targets were matched more quickly than word targets when the stimuli were presented simultaneously. When the target and comparison stimuli were separated by a 3-sec interval, word targets were matched more quickly than a letter and a letter in a word. It was also shown that the physical similarity of the targets and comparison stimuli had a greater effect in the simultaneous matching conditions. These findings are consistent with a model of word processing in which letters are individually compared prior to word identification at a physical level of processing. At a higher level of processing, words may be encoded as a unit, and the identification of the letters within the word may require a decoding of the word unit.     

The effects of the binocular disparity differences between targets and maskers on visual search

A visual search for targets is facilitated when the target objects are on a different depth plane than other masking objects cluttering the scene. The ability of observers to determine whether one of four letters presented stereoscopically at four symmetrically located positions on the fixation plane differed from the other three was assessed when the target letters were masked by other randomly positioned and oriented letters appearing on the same depth plane as the target letters, or in front, or behind it. Three additional control maskers, derived from the letter maskers, were also presented on the same three depth planes: (1) random-phase maskers (same spectral amplitude composition as the letter masker but with the phase spectrum randomized); (2) random-pixel maskers (the locations of the letter maskers’ pixel amplitudes were randomized); (3) letter-fragment maskers (the same letters as in the letter masker but broken up into fragments). Performance improved with target duration when the target-letter plane was in front of the letter-masker plane, but not when the target letters were on the same plane as the masker, or behind it. A comparison of the results for the four different kinds of maskers indicated that maskers consisting of recognizable objects (letters or letter fragments) interfere more with search and comparison judgments than do visual noise maskers having the same spatial frequency profile and contrast. In addition, performance was poorer for letter maskers than for letter-masker fragments, suggesting that the letter maskers interfered more with performance than the letter-fragment maskers because of the lexical activity they elicit.     

Effects of perceptual quality and visual field of probe stimulus presentation on memory search for letters

Observers indicated whether a single probe letter presented to the left visual field/right hemisphere (LVF-RH) or to the right visual field/left hemisphere (RVF-LH) was contained in a memory set of 2, 3, 4, or 5 letters. For positive trials, the increase in reaction time caused by perceptually degrading the probe letter became progressively larger as memory set size became larger when the probe was presented to the LVF-RH but not when the probe was presented to the RVF-LH. These results were obtained regardless of whether the case of the probe letter varied randomly (Experiment 1) or only capital letters were used (Experiment 2). The results on LVF-RH trials suggest a relatively visuospatial memory comparison process, whereas the results on RVF-LH trials suggest a more abstract memory comparison process. In addition to these effects, the intercept of the memory set size function was lower on LVF-RH trials than on RVF-LH trials when the probe letter was perceptually degraded, consistent with the hypothesis that the right hemisphere is more efficient than the left at early visuospatial processes. Perhaps it is this efficiency at early visuospatial processes that produces the bias toward visuospatial memory comparison on LVF-RH trials.     

Can “words” be processed as integrated units?

Three experiments examined the information processing of letters embedded within one-syllable words and similar unpronounceable sequences. A speeded discrimination task was used to detect processing differences between words and nonwords in a situation where both the identity and position of critical display information was known to subjects before stimulus presentation. Results indicated that word pairs differing by two letters were more quickly discriminated than two words differing in a single letter, while nonword pairs differing in two letters were discriminated no faster than two nonwords differing in a single letter. A further comparison showed a performance advantage for words over nonwords in a condensation task that forced a scan of stimulus letters for correct responding. These results suggest that familiarity affects information processing at a perceptual level, and are incompatible with theories suggesting that familiarity effects are due to inferential factors following letter feature analysis.     

Some temporal characteristics of processing during reading

College students read passages displayed on a cathode-ray tube as their eye movements were being monitored. During occasional fixations, all letters to the left of the directly fixated letter or all letters more than four to the right of the fixated letter were replaced by other letters. This replacement occurred either for only the first 100 ms of the fixation or only after the first 100 ms of the fixation. The eye movement data indicated that the eyes can respond to change in the visual stimulus within less than 100 ms and to orthographic irregularity in the text within less than 160 ms. No evidence was found for a left-to-right attentional scan during a fixation. The results were interpreted within the framework of a chronology of processing events occurring during a fixation in reading.     

An analysis of tactile letter confusions

A confusion matrix of the whole block capital letters of the alphabet was obtained so as to examine the nature of tactile letter recognition, using a 17 by 17 matrix of tactile stimulators placed against blind subjects’ backs. A hierarchical cluster analysis and a nonmetric multidimensional scaling technique were applied to the matrix. The results of the two analyses were consistent with each other and indicated that at least three independent basic letter features—enclosing shapes, vertical parallel lines, andangle of lines—play important parts in tactile letter recognition. Most confusion may be attributable to displacement of the apparent loci, omission or fusion of loci of stimulation, and failure to detect gaps in the tactile letters.     

Processing order in visual perception

Initial increases in the availability of items for report following tachistoscopic presentation of centrally-fixated rows of seven random letters were directly evaluated by measuring report accuracy following exposure durations of 10, 20, 40, 80 and 160 ms. A partial-report technique was used, and each presentation of a letter row was immediately followed by the presentation of a masking stimulus. Each of 10 subjects received 840 trials which reflected 24 trials for each exposure-duration by position-probed combination. The letters at both ends of a row became available for report prior to the centre letters. In addition, report of the left-most letter was consistently better than report of the right-most letter, and report of the centre item at fixation improved at a more rapid rate with increased exposure duration than report of the other centre letters. This pattern of results provides support for certain components of several different previous proposals concerning the order in which individual items from multi-element displays become available for report.     

Letter position dyslexia in Arabic: from form to position

This study reports the reading of 11 Arabic-speaking individuals with letter position dyslexia (LPD), and the effect of letter form on their reading errors. LPD is a peripheral dyslexia caused by a selective deficit to letter position encoding in the orthographic-visual analyzer, which results in migration of letters within words, primarily of middle letters. The Arabic orthography is especially interesting for the study of LPD because Arabic letters have different forms in different positions in the word. As a result, some letter position errors require letter form change. We compared the rate of letter migrations that change letter form with migrations that do not change letter form in 10 Arabic-speaking individuals with developmental LPD, and one bilingual Arabic and Hebrew-speaking individual with acquired LPD. The results indicated that the participants made 40% letter position errors in migratable words when the resulting word included the letters in the same form, whereas migrations that changed letter form almost never occurred. The error rate of the Arabic-Hebrew bilingual reader was smaller in Arabic than in Hebrew. However, when only words in which migrations do not change letter form were counted, the rate was similar in Arabic and Hebrew. Hence, whereas orthographies with multiple letter forms for each letter might seem more difficult in some respects, these orthographies are in fact easier to read in some forms of dyslexia. Thus, the diagnosis of LPD in Arabic should consider the effect of letter forms on migration errors, and use only migratable words that do not require letter-form change. The theoretical implications for the reading model are that letter form (of the position-dependent type found in Arabic) is part of the information encoded in the abstract letter identity, and thus affects further word recognition processes, and that there might be a pre-lexical graphemic buffer in which the checking of orthographic well-formedness takes place.     

Assessment of the Readability of Genetic Counseling Patient Letters

Patient letters are a powerful tool that genetic counselors use to communicate with their patients. Patient letters are often sent to provide information on a new diagnosis, reiterate test results, and to serve as a permanent record of the visit. Patient letters, however, are only helpful if the patients can understand them. More than 50 % of the US population reads below a 9th grade reading level and over one-third of the population has low health literacy skills. In this study we evaluate the readability of genetic counseling patient letters by assessing reading level, image use, and terminology use. One hundred forty-nine genetic counselors participated in the survey and of these, 79 submitted a sample patient letter. Analyses of the letters revealed a mean reading level of 10.93. On average, 6 genetic terms were included in each letter, and only 25 % of these terms were defined. Analyses of survey responses revealed over 75 % of the genetic counselors did not include images in their patient letters. These results indicate there is room for improvement in order to make genetic counseling patient letters more accessible to the general population.     

Interference in letter identification: A test of feature-specific inhibition

The role of perceptual interference in letter identification was investigated in three experiments designed to test the feature-specific inhibition model proposed by Bjork and Murray (1977). According to their extension of Estes’ (1972, 1974) interactive channels model, input channels leading to the same feature detector inhibit one another more than do channels leading to different detectors. The model therefore predicts perceptual interference between two letters to be a function of the degree of their feature overlap. Experiment 1 confirmed the feature-specific inhibition model and Bjork and Murray’s finding that the accuracy of report is lower when a briefly presented target letter is flanked by an identical letter than when flanked by another target letter or by a nontarget letter. Results from Experiment 2 indicated that single-target performance is a function of the degree of feature similarity between the target letter and background characters in a stimulus display. Experiment 3 ruled out a spatial-uncertainty explanation of feature-specific inhibition in a new paradigm that does not require subjects to process a poststimulus cue. The results of these experiments are discussed in relation to recent studies exhibiting strong effects of noise letters at the response stage of processing. It is suggested that discrepancies between feature-specific interference and response-interference studies may be a function of the particular mode of stimulus presentation and of the dependent measures that are used.     

Preliminary letter identification in the perception of words and nonwords.

Words with mixed uppercase and lowercase letters (e.g. fAdE) were perceived more accurately than mixed-case pseudowords (e.g. gAdE), and mixed-case pseudowords were perceived more accurately than mixed-case unrelated letter strings (e.g. eFdT). In addition, same-case words were perceived more accurately than their mixed-case counterparts. The same held true for pseudowords but not for unrelated letter strings. The results are compatible with the view that both letter identify and visual form information are used in word perception.     

Application of geometric models to letter recognition: distance and density

This article reviews studies in which a single letter is visually presented under adverse conditions and the subject's task is to identify the letter. The typical results for such studies are (a) certain pairs of letters are more often confused than other pairs of letters; (b) certain letters are more easily recognized than others; and (c) confusion errors for a letter pair are often asymmetric, the number of errors differing depending on which letter of the pair is presented as the stimulus. A geometric model incorporating the properties of distance and spatial density (after Krumhansl) is presented to account for these results. The present application of the distance-density model assumes that each letter is constructed in a typical 5 X 7 dot matrix. Each letter is represented in 35-dimensional space based on its constituent dots. A central idea behind the model, embodied in the property of spatial density, is that an explanation of typical results must take into account the relationship of the entire stimulus set to both the presented letter and the responded letter. Specifically, according to the model, (a) pairs of letters that are close in geometric space are more often confused than pairs of letters that are distant; (b) letters that are in less spatially dense regions are more easily recognized than letters that are in more spatially dense regions; and (c) asymmetric confusion errors result when one member of a letter pair is in a denser region than the other member of the letter pair. The distance-density model is applied to published and unpublished results of the authors as well as published results from two other laboratories. Alternative explanations of the three typical letter recognition results are also considered. The most successful alternative explanations are (a) confusions are an increasing function of the number of dots that two letters share; (b) letters constructed from fewer dots are easier to recognize; and (c) asymmetries arise when one member of a letter pair is more easily recognized, since that letter then has fewer confusion errors to give to the other letter of the pair. The model is discussed in terms of the distinction between template matching and feature analysis. An alternative classification of letter recognition models is proposed based on the global versus local qualities of features and the spatial information associated with each feature. The model is extended to explain reaction time study results. It is suggested that the distance-density model can be used to create optimal letter fonts by minimizing interletter confusions and maximizing letter recognizability.     

Identification in the Self-Managing Organization Characteristics of Target and Tenure

This study examines the characteristics of worker identification with two targets at the same time: the workers' self-managing team and the larger organization that created the teams. We administered the Organizational Identification Questionnaire in such a way as to tap levels of identification with each target and used the results of an ethnographic study of the subjects to enhance our analysis. Our data suggest that workers identified more strongly with their team than with their company, particularly in terms of loyalty. In addition, long-term workers reported more identification with both their team and company than did short-term workers. The results support the assertion that a concertive (or team-based) system of control is more powerful, even if less obtrusive, than its bureaucratic predecessor.