Sometimes we fail

Pastoral Psychology -     

Pupillary responses in a pitch-discrimination task

Pupils were measured while observers made pitch judgments under the method of constant stimuli. A substantial dilation occurs immediately after the presentation of the comparison tone, and the size of this response is closely correlated to the difficulty of the discrimination. Baseline changes occur within each block of trials, but have little effect on the magnitude of dilations. Responses to redundant stimuli, including the standard itself, decrease during the experimental session. The results support the validity of pupillary measurements as an index of processing load.     

Increased Proportion of Farm Animal Names Generated by Patients with Alzheimer's Disease: What Does it Mean?

Binetti et al. (1995) reported that patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) produced fewer semantic clusters than controls on the Animals Fluency task; of the clusters produced, 80% involved farm animals for the patients with AD compared to 40% for controls. In the present study we replicated the finding of Binetti et al.; however, the differential distribution of animal names by subcategory for the patients and controls could be accounted for by differences in the overall output and by assuming that word generation was strictly determined by prototypicality of the animal names. Thus, the increased proportion of farm animal names produced by patients with AD can be accounted for simply by postulating impaired access to semantic memory rather than degraded representations, the idea favored by Binetti et al.     

Cognitive Function in Parkinson's Disease: Association with Anxiety but Not Depression

To reexamine the relationships of depression, anxiety and cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD), 27 patients with idiopathic PD received two measures of depression, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS). Contrary to some earlier studies, measures of depression, even those that separated mood from somatic symptoms, were not correlated with any measure of cognitive performance. By contrast, measures of anxiety were signifiantly and negatively correlated with all RBANS indexes. Because anxiety and depression are partially overlapping psychiatric disorders, inconsistent reports concerning the relationship of depression and cognition in PD may have arisen because different studies included varying proportions of depressed patients who were also highly anxious.     

Monitoring the Changing Status of Semantic Memory in Alzheimer's Disease: An Evaluation of Several Process Measures

The deficits in generating correct words on verbal fluency tasks exhibited by patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) are accompanied by fewer switching responses, smaller phonemic and semantic cluster sizes, and greater than normal percentages of errors and category labels. On category fluency tasks, patients generate a greater proportion of words that are prototypical of their semantic class. To determine whether any of these supplementary measures of verbal fluency performance might be useful in revealing processes involved in the decline of semantic memory in AD, we studied 219 patients with AD and 115 elderly control participants longitudinally. Previously reported group differences between patients and controls were replicated, but changes in average cluster size, error rates, and prototypicality were not related to changes in overall severity of dementia and test-retest stability was only modest. The change in the percentage of labels generated on the Supermarket task was related to changes in dementia severity, but test-retest stability on this measure was quite low. All of these process measures appear to reflect only the current status of the patient's attention to the task and access to semantic knowledge, but they do not forecast future performance. The numbers of switching responses on the fluency tasks were sensitive to differences between clinically deteriorated and clinically stable patients and showed fairly high test-retest stability. However, the number of switching responses is so highly correlated with the number of correct words that it contributes little to the understanding of the processes involved in the progressive decline in performance on fluency tasks by patients with AD.     

On the Distribution of Job Performance: The Role of Measurement Characteristics in Observed Departures from Normality

In a recent article, O'Boyle and Aguinis ( 2012 ) argued that job performance is not distributed normally but instead is nonnormal and highly skewed. However, we believe the extreme departures from normality observed by these authors may have been due to characteristics of performance measures used. To address this issue, we identify 7 measurement criteria that we argue must be present for inferences to be made about the distribution of job performance. Specifically, performance measures must: (a) reflect behavior, (b) include an aggregation of multiple behaviors, (c) include the full range of performers, (d) include the full range of performance, (e) be time bounded, (f) focus on comparable jobs, and (g) not be distorted by motivational forces. Next, we present data from a wide range of sources—including the workplace, laboratory, athletics, and computer simulations—that illustrate settings in which failing to meet one or more of these criteria led to a highly skewed distribution providing a better fit to the data than a normal distribution. However, measurement approaches that better align with the 7 criteria listed above resulted in a normal distribution providing a better fit. We conclude that large departures from normality are in many cases an artifact of measurement.     

Ability-performance relationships in education and employment settings: critical tests of the more-is-better and the good-enough hypotheses

The nature of the relationship between ability and performance is of critical importance for admission decisions in the context of higher education and for personnel selection. Although previous research has supported the more-is-better hypothesis by documenting linearity of ability-performance relationships, such research has not been sensitive enough to detect deviations at the top ends of the score distributions. An alternative position receiving considerable attention is the good-enough hypothesis, which suggests that although higher levels of ability may result in better performance up to a threshold, above this threshold greater ability does not translate to better performance. In this study, the nature of the relationship between cognitive ability and performance was examined throughout the score range in four large-scale data sets. Monotonicity was maintained in all instances. Contrary to the good-enough hypothesis, the ability-performance relationship was commonly stronger at the top end of the score distribution than at the bottom end.     

The Role of Socioeconomic Status in SAT-Grade Relationships and in College Admissions Decisions

This article examines the role of socioeconomic status (SES) in the relationships among college admissions-test scores, secondary school grades, and subsequent academic performance. Scores on the SAT (a test widely used in the admissions process in the United States), secondary school grades, college grades, and SES measures from 143,606 students at 110 colleges and universities were examined, and results of these analyses were compared with results obtained using a 41-school data set including scores from the prior version of the SAT and using University of California data from prior research on the role of SES. In all the data sets, the SAT showed incremental validity over secondary school grades in predicting subsequent academic performance, and this incremental relationship was not substantially affected by controlling for SES. The SES of enrolled students was very similar to that of specific schools' applicant pools, which suggests that the barrier to college for low-SES students in the United States is a lower rate of entering the college admissions process, rather than exclusion on the part of colleges.