FOCAL,FORTRAN, and BASIC programs for reformatting and analyzing data collected by the SKED program

Several programs have been written in the FOCAL, FORTRAN, and BASIC languages for reformatting and analyzing SKED data. These programs include selection and explicit labeling of sets of recording counters representing distributions and/or total counts of events, several general manipulations of distributional data, and standard statistical treatment of distributions.     

Alternative versions of SKED: Current systems and future plans

SKED was originally designed to be the least expensive user-oriented system for on-line control and recording of behavioral experiments. Recent price reductions in the cost of memory and peripheral devices has permitted cost-effective development of more convenient and powerful versions of the software.     

Econometrics and psychometrics: A survey of communalities

Several themes which are common to both econometrics and psychometrics are surveyed. The themes are illustrated by reference to permanent income hypotheses, simultaneous equation models, adaptive expectations and partial adjustment schemes, and by reference to test score theory, factor analysis, and time-series models.     

The Relationship of Sex to Occupational Prestige

This study asked the question, Does the prestige of an occupation vary with the sex of the worker? For example, do male and female vocational counselors have the same occupational prestige? An equisection scaling procedure was used to develop an instrument to measure occupational prestige. When this instrument was administered to a sample of graduate students in guidance, some significant results were found but none of them held up on cross-validation. Neither was the differential allocation of prestige a function of the sex of the judge nor the form of the instrument     

An adjacency effect in free recall

An adjacency effect was demonstrated at a high level of significance in the free recall, by 123 subjects, of a list of 40 high-frequency nouns presented in varying order on successive trials. The phenomenon referred to as the adjacency effect consists of the fact that when a subject is given repeated trials of study and free recall of a list of words (always presented in a different order), the probability of recalling a given item is greater when the item is presented temporally adjacent to an item which is already learned (as evidenced by recall on the previous trial) than when the item stands temporally between other items which are not yet learned. The enhancement of recall is greater when the item is presented between two previously learned items. The implications of the adjacency effect for verbal learning theory, particularly for the serial-position effect in serial learning and the concepts of interference and neural consolidation, are discussed.     

L. L. Thurstone: A new assessment

Most psychologists have heard of Thurstone, and know him as a pioneer of mathematical psychology and factor analysis. But his appearances in history books are rare and peripheral, as a man of technical prowess rather than intellectual achievement, and at best he is seen as a link in the tradition culminating in signal detection and mathematical learning theory. Nineteen eighty-seven is the centenary of his birth, so it is a timely moment to correct this picture. Thurstone was influenced by G. H. Mead, and his work is best placed within the pragmatist movement, not as moving towards the mechanistic psychology that now dominates psychology. Viewed in this way, his true status and the reasons for his relative neglect become apparent. This is illustrated by a detailed consideration of his mathematical learning models.     

Race differences and type II errors: A comment on Borkowski and Krause

Magnitude comparisons of black-white differences on a variety of cognitive tests give a somewhat different picture of the results of a small-sample study by Borkowski and Krause (1983), who based their conclusions mainly on significance tests. Some of the critical variables in the study consisted of differences scores with unacceptably low reliability, inclining the results toward the favored hypothesis, namely, that the locus of the difference between blacks and whites in psychometric intelligence lies in metaprocesses, or the executive system, and not in the elementary cognitive processes. The results actually show fairly comparable black-white differences in measures of both types of processes.