Spacing repetitions over 1 week

Does varying the spacing of repetitions over intervals as long as 1 week aftect recall? The answer from three experiments is yes. Subjects incidentally processed words repeated within a single list and words repeated in separate lists at list spacings of up to 1 week. Memory was tested by free recall shortly after the second presentations or after retention intervals of up to 1 week. Recall of the words repeated across separate lists conformed to a proportionality rule. When the retention interval is short relative to the spacing intervals, performance is inversely related to spacing. When the retention interval is a large proportion of the spacing intervals, performance is directly related to spacing. Does varying the spacing of repetitions within a single list affect recall after a retention interval of 2 weeks? The answer depends on the processing used while studying the words. Processing that generated interitem associations resulted in a within-list spacing effect even after a 2-week retention interval. Without the interitem associations, the effect was absent after a 1-day retention interval. Most of these findings were explained by examining the changing relationship between the retrieval context and the context stored during study.     

Incorporating inferences in narrative representations: A study of how and why

Four experiments examined the conceptual organization of narrative passages and the extent to which these representations were explanatory in a variety of experimental tasks. The conceptual representation of a passage consisted of a graph of labeled nodes and labeled, directed arcs which were adopted from the Conceptual Dependency Theory. These representations included both explicitly stated information and inferences which had been empirically extracted by a question-answering procedure. Symbolic procedures for answering how- and why-questions were also delineated. The conceptual representations and the symbolic procedures that operate on these representations together accounted for 91% of the answers generated from question-answering protocols in Experiment 1, and also the rated quality of specific answers to specific questions in Experiment 2. Experiments 3 and 4 supported the hypothesis that structural properties of the representations can predict recall of explicitly stated nodes and verification ratings of inference nodes. The results provide encouraging support for the proposed graphic representations and also for the use of question-answering protocols in uncovering prose inferences.     

Reality therapy: Icing on the cake of behavior modification

The paper presents a conceptual model for therapeutic intervention based on a behavioral orientation. Behavioral therapy is viewed on a continuum ranging from basic operant techniques to cognitive strategies applied to human interaction. It is hypothesized that the elements of reality therapy, with its emphasis on human interaction, are needed to provide closure to the therapeutic intervention and to help maintain new coping behaviors. Utilizing the context of an institutionalized client, suggestions for how this process might occur are discussed.     

Raising the IQ: The Ramey and Haskins study

The Ramey and Haskins intervention experiment succeeded in producing IQ gains at three years of age averaging about one standard deviation in young children who were selected for being at risk for subnormal intellectual development. The study is examined in terms of its consistency with other findings, the heritability of IQ, the g aspect of IQ, the simplex pattern of longitudinal interage mental test score correlations, mother-child IQ correlations, and criteria for establishing educationally and socially significant gains in intelligence defined as g rather than as a score on a particular test. Narrow transfer of training from cognitive intervention techniques to IQ test performance in early childhood, rather than enhancement of the g factor itself, is hypothesized as a cause of the typical fadeout of early IQ gains in later childhood.     

Forest lights: Notes on the conceptualization of the unconscious

Using the metaphor of lights appearing unexplained in the night, the author argues for a conceptualization of the unconscious based on a posture of trust and acceptance rather than one of fear and explanation.His last book,Idea and Experience, dealt with Husserl's project of phenomenology inIdeas I. He has recently completed another book,The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature.     

A preliminary report on the nature of interactions in a mental-handicap institution

A preliminary analysis of the reactions by staff and other residents to the behaviour of mentally-handicapped people living in a medium-sized institution is presented. The subjects' behaviour was categorized as appropriate, inappropriate or neutral according to culturally-normative criteria. It was found that, for the majority of time there was no reaction to the subjects' behaviour by staff or by other residents. The implications of utilizing culturally-normative criteria for categorizing behaviour are discussed. It is proposed that this type of analysis is potentially useful for understanding the nature of interactions in institutions.     

Are variations among right-handed individuals in perceptual asymmetries caused by characteristic arousal differences between hemispheres?

We propose that much of the variance among right-handed subjects in perceptual asymmetries on standard behavioral measures of laterality arises from individual differences in characteristic patterns of asymmetric hemispheric arousal. Dextrals with large right-visual-field (RVF) advantages on a tachistoscopic syllable-identification task (assumed to reflect characteristically higher left-hemisphere than right-hemisphere arousal) outperformed those having weak or no visual-field asymmetries (assumed to reflect characteristically higher right-hemisphere than left-hemisphere arousal). The two groups were equal, however, in asymmetries of error patterns that are thought to indicate linguistic or nonlinguistic encoding strategies. For both groups, relations between visual fields in the ability to discriminate the accuracy of performance followed the pattern of syllable identification itself, suggesting that linguistic and metalinguistic processes are based on the same laterally specialized functions. Subjects with strong RVF advantages had a pessimistic bias for rating performance, and those with weak or no asymmetries had an optimistic bias, particularly for the left visual field (LVF). This is concordant with evidence that the arousal level of the right hemisphere is closely related to affective mood. Finally, consistent with the arousal model, leftward asymmetries on a free-vision face-processing task became larger as RVF advantages on the syllable task diminished and as optimistic biases for the LVF, relative to the RVF, increased.     

Resolving Ethical Dilemmas in Management: Experimental Investigations of Values, Accountability, and Choice

Hypotheses regarding the effects of personal values and accountability on the resolution of ethical dilemmas in management were formulated and tested experimentally with a sample of 135 M.B.A. students. Personal values were found to be related to how subjects chose to resolve an ethical dilemma presented to them; but, as expected, this relationship did not hold when subjects were made to feel accountable to another for their choices. Accountability, unexpectedly, however, did not have a main effect on choices. This lack of an effect tentatively was attributed to the inexplicitness of the accountability manipulations. In a second and third experiment, support for the importance of explicitness in accountability research was obtained. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings from all three experiments were discussed.