Visual search,complex backgrounds,mental counters,and eye movements

For 30 days, three Ss searched for 1, 5, or 10 targets (N), any one of which had to occur once (as in past research). twice, or four times (FREQ). The N=1 and N=5 items were subsets of N=10 items. When FREQ=1. Ss searched longer for 5 targets than for 1 or 10 targets. This nonintuitive result was due to (a) Ss searching for all 10 targets even at N=5, and (b) the reported “pop-out effect” of the 5 target items as well as the other 5 items in the N=10 set. When FREQ > 1, Ss could search for only 2-3 targets at once, because they could not keep mental counters on more items. The presence of a complex background merely added a constant to search time. The main change in eye movements, with 30 days practice, was to reduce greatly the number of eye fixations, thus suggesting an increase in the useful fidld of view and/or a change in search strategy. A speculative model, based upon two comparison processes, was suggested to explain the results.     

Developing the Individual: Life Skills and Family Therapy

Two bodies of literature on life skills and on family therapy have developed from different sources but have interesting similarities. Life skills comes from training and educational thinking, and concentrates upon the skills of and strategies for coping. Family therapy focuses upon the disturbance of an individual as symbolic of the dynamics of the family, but has at its roots a more-or-less explicit model of what constitutes an effective family, where the interactions can be readily understood in life-skill terms. The two approaches are compared and contrasted.     

Need for achievement,career mobility,and the Mexican-American college graduate

Need for achievement and career mobility were measured for 111 Mexican-American college graduates. Those with a moderate need for achievement were found to have the highest upward mobility. Those with either a high or low need for achievement had lower mobility. The implications of this finding are discussed.     

Acoustical determinants of the “neurotic pattern” in rats

The Psychological Record - The experiments reported in the present paper show that the peculiar behavior called the “neurotic pattern” by Maier is dependent upon the intensity and the...     

Memory access: The effects of fact-oriented versus problem-oriented acquisition

This study examined the effects of similarity between the processing of acquisition and the processing of test materials on performance in a problem solving task. Previous work by Perfetto, Bransford, and Franks (1983) demonstrated that uninformed subjects’ failure to utilize relevant acquisition information in a later problem solving task is the result of a failure to spontaneously access such information. The present study demonstrated that spontaneous access can be enhanced when both acquisition and test materials are processed in a similar manner, that is, in a problem-oriented manner. Furthermore, the present findings indicate that the processing similarity leading to enhanced access is specific to particular acquisition and test items, rather than a general problem solving set induced at acquisition and the subsequent testing situation. Results are interpreted within a transfer-appropriate processing perspective.