The illusion of knowing: Failure in the self-assessment of comprehension

The illusion of knowing is the belief that comprehension has been attained when, in fact, comprehension has failed. In the present experiment, the illusion was defined operationally as having occurred when readers who failed to find a contradiction in a text rated their comprehension of the text as high. Texts containing contradictions between adjacent sentences were presented, and readers were explicitly asked to search for contradictions. The frequency of illusions was greater when the contradictory sentences came at the end of three-paragraph texts rather than at the end of one-paragraph texts and when the contradictory information was syntactically marked as new. These results are interpreted within a framework that emphasizes that the goal of reading expository text is to establish coherence within and among sentences. In addition, the results are apparently incompatible with the notion that readers engage in active and accurate on-line monitoring of the degree to which this goal is met.     

Toward an understanding of the fundamental attribution error: Essay diagnosticity in the attitude attribution paradigm

The observer error in attitude attribution was examined, focusing upon the perceiver's conception of the relationship between a writer's attitude and the quality of performance on an essay task. Subjects appear to have invested essays, written under assignment, with diagnostic value on the presumption of a correlation between the quality or strength of the essay and the writer's attitude. When subjects were given essays varying in direction, strength, and constraint, their attributions indicated a reversal of correspondent inference for weak essays produced under high constraint, replicating an earlier, conceptually important result (E. E. Jones, S. Worchel, G. R. Goethals, & J. Grumet, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1971, 7, 59–80). It was suggested that the attribution error need not reflect general misunderstandings about, or the low salience of, situational factors, but rather is based on the perceiver's inclination to adopt a diagnostic judgmental set in the attitude attribution paradigm.     

Improving reading and self-concept through communication and social skills training

A course of psychological education is described in which disruptive children were taught social and communication skills over two terms. The course was designed for 26 eight-year-olds in an EPA junior school. Ten of the children were from broken homes, six were itinerants, most had displayed undesirable behaviour, and their level of achievement had been below average. Tested at the end of the second term, they showed dramatic improvements in self-concept and reading ability.     

Regional cerebral blood flow patterns during verbal and nonverbal auditory activation

Current views of the relationship between audition and cerebral function suggest that increases in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) would occur in the superior, mid, and posterior portions of the temporal lobes, and that these changes would be more lateralized to the left hemisphere for a verbal than a nonverbal auditory task. We measured rCBF using the xenon inhalation technique in a group of healthy subjects during three conditions: (1) resting baseline, (2) auditory verbal activation (listening for word meaning), and (3) auditory nonverbal activation (listening for reduction of intensity in a series of noise bursts). Both verbal and nonverbal conditions produced highly significant increases in rCBF over the left posterior Sylvian region with a trend for verbal activation to evoke a wider area of flow increase than the nonverbal task.     

Conditions on rate normalization in speech perception

Recent work by Summerfield (1975) and others indicates that a listener’s phonemic judgments may vary with the utterance rate of prior context. In particular, if a phonemic distinction is signaled by a temporal cue such as voice onset time (VOT), faster utterance rates tend to shift the phoneme boundary toward smaller values of that cue. The listener thus appears to “normalize” temporal cues according to utterance rate. In the present experiment, subjects identified syllables varying in VOT ([ga]-[k^ha]) following either a slow or a fast version of the phrase “Teddy hears_ _ _ _ .” Typical normalization effects were observed when the precursor phrase and target syllable had formant frequencies corresponding to an adult male vocal tract. However, a reversal of the typical pattern (i.e., a shift in the perceived voicing boundary towardlarger values of VOT with an increased utterance rate) occurred when the precursor and target had formant frequencies corresponding to an adult female vocal tract. Both normalization and “reverse” normalization effects were reduced or eliminated under several conditions of source change between precursor and target. These conditions included a change in fundamental frequency, a change in implied vocal-tract size (as reflected in an upward or downward scaling of formant frequencies), or both.     

The eye blink as a time-locked response: implications for serial and second-order conditioning

A series of experiments were conducted to determine what factors control responding to the first element of a two-element serial compound in rabbit eyelid conditioning. An examination of response topography indicated that the eye-blink CR is rigidly timed to occur when the US is expected. This response-system characteristic prevents the occurrence of a CR during the first element of a serial compound or during the second-order CS in second-order conditioning. The comparison of a serial gap procedure with conventional serial and trace conditioning procedures suggested that the associative strength of the first element of a serial CS is not strongly influenced by either a second-order conditioning process or by the variable-reinforcement principle.     

Occupational expectations and the hypothesis of increasing realism of choice

A two-wave analysis of the dynamics of occupational expectations in a rural youth panel generally failed to support the hypothesis of ‘increasing realism of choice.’ An analysis of four multiple regression equations indicated (1) that Black youth tended to lower their levels of occupational expectations over time and (2) that occupational expectations tended to vary with changes in occupational aspirations and educational expectations. However, family SEI, perception of occupational goal blockage, three measures of self image and change in perception of occupational goal blockage, were not found to be associated with the dynamics of occupational expectation. Two alternate explanations for the findings were presented.     

The Validity of Construction Workers' and Students' Perceptions of Each Other: A Research Note

Following the spring 1970 confrontations between undergraduate college students and construction workers in lower Manhattan, a study of attitudes of a sample of undergraduates and construction workers was conducted. One hunderd Columbia University undergraduates and 100 apprentice construction workers were asked to indicate their level of agreement with 10 statements which were intended to embody "basic American tenets". The respondents within each group were also asked to predict the attitude that a member of the other group would hold. A "liberal/conservative" dichotomy was developed for the instrument by having independent judges categorize each of the 10 items as representing a "liberal" or a "conservative" attitude.
The expectations that student responses would be more liberal than construction worker responses and that each group would perceive this difference were tested and supported. The expectation that students perceive construction workers to be even more conservative than the workers report themselves to be was also supported. But the construction workers did not demonstrate the expected exaggeration of the students' liberalism.