The Effect of a Final Exam on Long-Term Retention

Testing on a final exam in a college course improved long-term retention over material that had not been tested on the final. Students from an upper level psychology course took a long-term retention test, four to five months after the end of the course. For half of the items, a related question had been on the final. For the remaining half, a related question had appeared on an earlier exam, but not the final. On the long-term retention test, percent correct was 79% when a related question had appeared on the final and 67% when a related question had not appeared on the final. These results have both theoretical and practical implications.     

Multimethod Probes of Allocentrism and Idiocentrism

Collectivism and individualism are cultural syndromes that have some common cores. Allocentrism and idiocentrism are constructs at the individual level that correspond to collectivism and individualism respectively at the cultural level. In two studies, the first with American (from Illinois) and the second with Japanese subjects, we examined the best way to measure these common cores. We also present the recommended items in two appendices, and provide information about the reliability and convergent validity of the items in these appendices. Finally, we tested the hypothesis that women will be more allocentric than men. We obtained only directional support in the US but fairly good support of this hypothesis in Japan.     

Connect within to connect outside: effect of salespeople's political skill on relationship performance

Scholars have recently explored the effects of salespeople's intraorganizational relationships on salespeople's job-related outcomes. Grounded in social influence theory, we explore the effects of salespeople's intraorganizational skills on salesperson relationship performance. We empirically tested the proposed relationships using the data from a non-Western sales force working with an organization in an emerging economy. The results indicate that salespeople's political skill positively contributes to salespeople's identification with the organization and to creative performance, while strikingly, we also find that salesperson task adaptivity weakens these effects. Moreover, salespeople's identification and creative performance are positively related to customer satisfaction. These findings demonstrate that salespeople's intraorganizational relationships play a key role in enhancing customer satisfaction. In light of these results, we explore implications for marketers and academics and conclude by suggesting directions for further research.     

Is pigmentation important for face recognition? Evidence from contrast negation

It is extraordinarily difficult to recognize a face in an image with negated contrast, as in a photographic negative. The variation among faces can be partitioned into two general sources: (a) shape and (b) surface reflectance, here termed 'pigmentation'. To determine whether negation differentially affects the processing of shape or pigmentation, we made two sets of faces where the individual faces differed only in shape in one set and only in pigmentation in the other. Surprisingly, matching performance was significantly impaired by contrast negation only when the faces varied in pigmentation. This provides evidence that the perception of pigmentation, not shape, is selectively disrupted by negation and, by extension, that pigmentation contributes to the neural representation of face identity.     

Effects of early experience on children's recognition of facial displays of emotion

The present research examines visual perception of emotion in both typical and atypical development. To examine the processes by which perceptual mechanisms become attuned to the contingencies of affective signals in the environment, the authors measured the sequential, content-based properties of feature detection in emotion recognition processes. To evaluate the role of experience, they compared typically developing children with physically abused children, who were presumed to have experienced high levels of threat and hostility. As predicted, physically abused children accurately identified facial displays of anger on the basis of less sensory input than did controls, which suggests that physically abused children have facilitated access to representations of anger. The findings are discussed in terms of experiential processes in perceptual learning.     

Vulnerability of facial attractiveness perception to early and multi-year visual deprivation

Judgments of facial attractiveness invariably accompany our perception of faces. Even neonates appear to be capable of making such judgments in a manner consistent with adults. This suggests that the processes supporting facial attractiveness require little, if any, visual experience to manifest. Here we investigate the resilience of these processes to several years of early-onset visual deprivation. Specifically, we study whether congenitally blind children treated several years after birth possess the ability to rate facial attractiveness in a manner congruent to normally sighted individuals. The data reveal significant individual variability in the way each newly sighted child perceives attractiveness. This is in marked contrast to data from normally sighted controls who exhibit strong across-subject agreement in facial attractiveness ratings. This variability may be attributable, in part, to atypical facial encoding strategies used by the newly sighted children. Overall, our results suggest that the development of facial attractiveness perception is likely to be vulnerable to early visual deprivation, pointing to the existence of a possible sensitive period early in the developmental trajectory.     

Selective Literature Review and Selective Data Analyses: Implications for the (Re)Analysis of Public Access Research Data

This article addresses concerns raised by Pashler et al. (2016/this issue) about the effect size and data of Study 3 of Chatterjee et al. (2013). The analysis of the original data of Study 3, corrected for coding errors, shows that cash priming is associated with cost-related words (Cohen’s d = 0.49) and effect sizes of all three studies are within the range reported in the relevant literature. While this article underscores the importance of public access to research data to strengthen research enterprise, it alerts researchers that the use of selective literature and partial analysis can lead to misleading inferences.