Attention-switching and grouping in counting interaurally presented clicks.

The present study tests the hypothesis that attention-switching is time-consuming and performance-limiting. Analysis of previous research on counting interaurally presented clicks shows that estimates of ‘switch-times’ can be made, based on the data of Guzy and Axelrod (1972). In the earlier click-counting studies, however, the number of clicks to be counted and the number of physical switches between the ears were confouned. Hence the number of clicks, number of physical switches and interval between clicks were independently varied. The results showed that (a) counting performance did not decrease monotonically with increasing number of switches in the click sequence; (b) no difference in counting performance could be found between the monaural and completely alternating interaural presentation; (c) when the number of switches in the sequence was small and equal groups of clicks alternated between ears, performance dramatically improved. With these kinds of sequences, subjects presumably do not count the clicks one at a time, but subitize a group of clicks.     

Maximum likelihood estimation for Luce's choice model

A terminology for general choice models based on the choice axiom is given. It applies to all kinds of choice experiments, such as confusion choice experiments, paired comparisons, triadic comparisons, directional rankings, scores on binary test items, and others. Maximum likelihood estimation for such general choice models is considered. Conditions for the uniqueness of maximum likelihood estimates are given, and it is shown that the estimates can be derived by iterative proportional fitting. This offers the opportunity of a general test of the choice axiom for all kinds of choice experiments using the likelihood ratio. The estimation and testing procedure is applied to data from a form recognition experiment, reported by W. A. Wagenaar (Nederlands Tijdschrift voor de Psychologie, 1968, 23, 96–108).     

Effects of visual-field and matching instruction on event-related potentials and reaction time

Vertical letter pairs were presented randomly in the left and right visual hemifields in a physical identity match and name identity match condition. The reaction times showed a right visual field superiority for name matches, and a left visual field superiority for physical matches. Event-related potentials to letter pairs showed a sequence of three waves: a negative wave (N2, around 270 msec), a positive wave (P3, around 500 msec), and a broad positive slow wave (SW, around 600-700 msec), respectively. P3 and SW amplitudes were consistently larger at the left hemisphere than at the right hemisphere, regardless of the field of stimulation. At both hemispheres, N2 waves were always larger to stimuli presented in the visual field contralateral to a hemisphere than stimuli presented in the visual field ipsilateral to a hemisphere. The positive waves (P3, SW) showed the opposite pattern: smaller amplitudes to stimuli that were presented contralaterally than stimuli that were presented ipsilaterally to a given hemisphere. These results were attributed to a shift in sustained negativity on the directly stimulated hemisphere, relative to the indirectly stimulated hemisphere, reflecting either sensory at attentional processes in the posterior cerebral hemispheres.     

A developmental study of choice reaction time: the effect of two forms of stimulus degradation on encoding.

To assess the effects of environmental enrichment, 156 normal, full-term institutionalized infants were randomly assigned to Group I (30 min per day of supplementary vestibular stimulation), Group II (30 min per day of supplementary vestibular-plus-verbal stimulation), or Group III (untreated controls). Stimulation began at about the age of 12 days and continued until the children were adopted, approximately 6 weeks later. Children were assessed at regular intervals on the Gesell Developmental Schedules, until the age of 27 months. Group comparisons revealed no significant treatment effects.     

Test anxiety and reaction time for matching decisions

Subjects selected by test-anxiety level were presented pairs of words and asked to make judgments of physical identity, acoustic matching, or taxonomic category membership. Experiment 1 varied type of judgment between subjects; in Experiments 2 and 3, each subject made all three decisions. There was no consistent support for the hypothesis that, relative to low-anxiety subjects, high-anxiety subjects would show a more pronounced decrement in reaction times for semantic decisions than for nonsemantic decisions.     

Stimulus probability and prediction outcome as determinants of choice reaction time: Some procedural considerations

Effects of stimulus probability and prediction outcome on two-choice reaction speed (CRS) were determined when a frequency imbalance was reversed half-way through 300 samples of a 70/30 stimulus distribution and when the same 70/30 distribution was sampled for 1200 trials. Prior to each presentation Ss made a prediction; following each presentation Ss identified the stimulus by pressing a right-hand or left-hand trigger. CRS was faster to correctly predicted stimuli, and faster to the more probable stimulus. Ss who were informed of the frequency imbalance reacted significantly faster than Ss who were not. Both practice and boredom effects were demonstrated by using the extended number of trials. CRS was faster during the second session of 300 trials than during the first; after two sessions, CRS was slower during the second half of two additional sessions.     

Prediction outcome and choice reaction time: Inhibition versus facilitation effects

In two-choice RT tasks Ss verbally predicted all stimulus presentations, two-thirds of the presentations, or none of the presentations. Effects of stimulus probability were similar for each type of prediction trial: Correct Prediction Outcome (PO), Incorrect PO, and No-Prediction (NP). When comparisons between Prediction and NP trials were between Ss, reactions on NP trials were significantly faster than reactions POs, but were not slower than reactions to Correct POs. However, when Prediction and NP trials occurred within Ss, reactions on NP trials were not faster than reactions to Incorrect POs, but were significantly slower than reactions to Correct POs. Speculations about Ss' implicit stimulus predictions are offered to interpret differential implications of inhibition and facilitation.     

Predicting persistence,stability, and achievement in college by major choice consistency: A test of Holland's consistency hypothesis

This study examined the relationships between students' level of consistency in choosing a major in college and their persistence, stability, and achievement in a 5-year follow-up. In contrast to the findings of most previous studies, it was found that consistent students tend to persist in college, not to change majors, and that they have higher achievement than inconsistent students. It was suggested that the current findings, which support Holland's theory, were different from the results of previous studies because of the use of behavioral definition for consistency level (actual student major choices) rather than responses to various inventories. The significance of these findings were discussed.     

Exposure and response prevention in the natural environment: A comparison with obsessive-compulsive patients

Thirteen obsessive-compulsive clients were treated with different methods of response prevention. Four experimental conditions were obtained through a 2 × 2 factorial design, in which the two main variables were varied: (1) gradual treatment vs flooding; and (2) modeling vs no-modeling. Clients were treated at their homes, three times weekly. Each session lasted 2 hr. Results at the post-test revealed, that modeling was superior to no-modeling (p < 0.05) on avoidance-other compulsions, therapist-rating only. On anxiety-main compulsions, clients rating the gradual method of treatment had been superior to flooding (p < 0.05). No other significant differences were found.     

Negative reinforcement and choice in humans

Participants chose between reinforcement schedules differing in delay and/or duration of noise offset. In Experiment 1 it was found that (1) immediate reinforcement was preferred to delayed reinforcement when amounts (durations) of reinforcement were equal; (2) a relatively large reinforcer was preferred to a smaller one when both reinforcers were obtained immediately; and (3) preference for an immediate, small reinforcer versus a delayed, large reinforcer increased as the delay preceding the large reinforcer increased, a sign of “impulsivity”. In Experiment 2, the schedules differed in amount or delay and equal intervals were added either to the constant parameter or the varied parameter. A shift from virtually exclusive preference to indifference occurred in the latter case but not the former, a result supporting a model of self-control that assumes that the value of a schedule depends on the ratio of amount and delay, and that choice between schedules depends on the ratio of these values.     

Exploring and reexploring issues of integrality,perceptual sensitivity,and dimensional salience

Some observations that can be described conveniently by investigators in terms of dimensional sensitivity and dimensional salience actually need not implicate the psychological reality of the dimensions for the subjects. The developmental hypothesis that stimuli are perceived often as integral in early childhood can account for such phenomena only with the assumption that young children often apprehend objects as global wholes, related to one another by overall similarity. Classification data, recently presented by J. R. Aschkenasy and R. D. Odom (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1982, 34, 435–448) can be reinterpreted in this way. On this reinterpretation, Aschkenasy and Odom's findings are exactly what the developmental form of the integrality-separability hypothesis predicts. Moreover, a variety of other findings and lines of inference converge on the conclusion that, in young children, the use of overall similarity relations to organize perception and cognition predominates over the use of dimensional relations (and that the relative balance between these stimulus relations changes in development). Examples are selected from the literature on the natural development of word meanings, as well as from the literatures on children's and adults' classification.     

The ability for dimensional analysis in preschool and retarded children: evidence from comparison, conservation, and prediction tasks

Previous findings of a developmental trend from holistic to analytic modes of processing yield to two possible interpretations—the ability to analyze into dimensions increases with age, or a production deficiency for the strategy of analyzing decreases with age. In the three studies reported here an attempt is made to elucidate which of these interpretations is the more correct by investigating the performance of preschoolers and retarded children in three tasks, all of which require dimensional analysis. The three tasks involve (a) same-different comparisons of selected dimensions of stimuli, (b) judgments of whether dimensions are conserved through transformations of objects, and (c) predictions of the outcomes of transformations that selectively modify dimensions of objects. Normal 3-year-old children and mildly retarded preadolescents make many errors on all three tasks and the patterns of these errors are predictable from holistic processing. Older groups of normal preschoolers, 4.5 to 5 years old, perform very well on the tasks, although they show some hints of remaining analytic deficits. It seems likely that the ability to analyze does undergo development in the preschool years, but that the production-deficiency interpretation also has merit, particularly for explaining developmental trends within the elementary school range.     

The expectancy model in the analysis of occupational preference and occupational choice

The differences between the factors related to occupational preference and occupational choice were explored for upper-division college students from business and psychology classes. The results strongly supported a valance-instrumentality-expectancy model in the context of occupational choice. Occupational preference was primarily a function of occupational valence, the multiplicative relation between the outcome valences and the instrumentalities of the occupations for these outcomes. Occupational choice was primarily a function of the force to choose an occupation, the multiplicative relaitonship between occupational valence and the expectancy of attaining an occupation and the expected costs of attaining an occupation.     

Effect of perceived choice,expected outcome,and observed outcome of an action on the causal attributions of actors

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that actors' causal attributions for success and failure would be affected by the degree of perceived choice they had in taking an action. Actors either were assigned, or selected one of four therapeutic outlines which were expected to have either a positive or a negative effect, and which actually had either a positive or negative outcome on a purportedly phobic person. For negative outcomes, it was predicted that perceived choice would induce a sense of personal responsibility when a positive outcome was expected, and lead actors to attribute more responsibility to themselves as a result. Results supported this prediction. For positive outcomes, however, actors attributed responsibility to themselves regardless of expectancy or choice. Actors were also found to attribute generally more responsibility to themselves for positive than negative outcomes. Results were discussed in terms of self-esteem motivation and the information available to the actor.     

Short-term memory for time intervals

The effect of intertrial interval, preset interval, and retention interval on the performance of rats in a time estimation task was described. On each trial a signal was presented for a duration of 2 to 8 sec. Eighteen rats were trained to press one lever (the short response) if the signal was shorter than 4 sec, and another lever (the long response) if the signal was longer than 4 sec. When trials were massed (Experiment 1), the percentage long response was affected by the classification of the previous signal, but not by its actual duration. This suggests that the animals remembered the response made on the previous trial, but not the signal duration. If a response was not permitted on the previous trial (Experiment 2), the duration or classification of the previous signal had no effect on performance. This supports the conclusion from the first experiment and suggests that an animal can reset its internal clock in less than 2 sec. In Experiment 3, the difference limen of the psychophysical function increased with the duration of the retention interval, but the point of subjective equality did not change. This suggests that resetting of the internal clock occurs on a non-time dimension.     

Yesterday,today and tomorrow

1260 American subjects were timed as they responded to one of the three questions (‘What day of the week is today?’ (Tod question), ‘What day of the week was yesterday?’ (Y question), and ‘What day of the week will tomorrow be?’ (Tom question)) at one of three times of the day (early morning, mid-day and the late evening). Response times as a function of the day on which the question was posed defined an inverted U-curve for all questions in all three conditions. The Tod question always triggered the fastest responses. In the morning, responses to the Y question were faster than responses to the Tom questions, whereas in the evening the converse was the case. At mid-day responses to the Y question were faster than responses to the Tom question at the beginning of the week and slower than those at its end. The patterns of introspection associated with the responses also defined reversed U-functions. The results are interpreted in the framework of a multi-channel spreading activation model.     

Ambiguity of acceptance,social desirability,and dating choice

Male subjects differing in social desirability (likableness, physical attractiveness) chose a date from an array of females of three levels of physical attractiveness. Choices were made under two conditions: one where acceptance was assured regardless of whom subject chose; the other where acceptance was left ambiguous. The findings were as follows: (a) subjects selected a more physically attractive female when assured of acceptance than when acceptance was left ambiguous; (b) subjects estimated that highly physically attractive females were less likely to accept them as a date than were either moderately physically attractive or physically unattractive females; (c) subjects' self-ratings of their likableness were not related to the physical attractiveness of their choices under either choice condition nor to their estimates of their chances that the females would accept them as a date; and (d) subjects' self-evaluated physical attractiveness, although unrelated to the physical attractiveness of the subjects' choices, did relate to subjects' estimates of their chances of acceptance. Highly physically attractive subjects estimated their chances of acceptance as better than did subjects who considered themselves low in physical attractiveness. The implications of the findings for the “matching hypothesis” are discussed.