Effects of Information on Preference for an Occupation

Thirty-two undergraduate female volunteers were randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups in which occupational information was presented in these ways: glamorous-reinforced, glamorous-nonreinforced, objective-reinforced, and objective—nonreinforced. They were given the Holland Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) and shown a 5 minute slide/tape presentation about an occupation with the appropriate glamour and model reinforcement variation. Posttesting used a modified semantic differential scale and a ranking questionnaire. The results of an analysis of variance (ANOVA) suggest that the glamorous groups rated the occupation as more professional and more rewarding than the nonglamorous groups. While there were no effects for reinforcement and no significant differences on the ranking test, they were in the expected direction, as were the results on 13 of 14 semantic differential scales. Within limitations, the results are discussed with respect to the impact of information on career preference.     

The role of generation in recognition

In contrast to the widely accepted opinion, a negatively accelerated RT function was obtained with varied mapping of stimuli to responses in Sternberg's (1966) recognition task when the task was designed to reduce proactive inhibition. These results are similar to the results obtained in the distractor task. Those aspects of the distractor task that proactively inhibit recall of the trigram are also necessary to produce a linear RT function in the recognition task. Hence, the varied-set procedure only results in a linear RT function when the memory sets on successive trials contain similar items, but not when successive trials contain different kinds of items, e.g., digits versus letters. Also, once subjects have been trained on the fixed-set procedure to produce a negatively accelerated RT function, the training transfers completely and immediately to entirely new sets of targets and distractors. The results of both tasks, as well as other retrieval tasks, can be explained by a model containing a single comparison process and an optional serial generation process which is invoked to increase the discriminability of the memory set from distractors.