The timing of shifts of head postures during conservation

The timing of shifts of head postures in relation to speech during conservation was investigated by continuously monitoring, with a polarised light goniometer, the head movement of four subjects engaged in conservation.Postural shifts (PSs), defined as wide, linear movements, were found to occur primarily towards the initiation of speech, be it between speaking turns, or between syntactic boundaries inside speaking turns. This suggested that PSs are involved in regulating turn taking and marking syntactic boundaries inside speaking turns.Also, PSs usually started prior to and continued till after speech onset. This suggested a possible involvement in speech production, probably in helping to regulate the complex motor processes of beginning to speak.It is suggested that interactive, linguistic and speech productive functions may combine together to create a movement pattern by mutually constraining head movement.     

Brothers Under the Pin

Two commonly held assumptions about fraternity men were tested by multiple discriminant analysis. Findings indicated that no identifiable personality pattern distinguishs pledges of one fraternity from pledges of another, active members of one fraternity from active members of another, or pledges from active members of the same fraternity. These results were supported in a cross-validation study.     

The “magic” paradigm revisited

The “magic” paradigm was devised to assess conservation of number in young children. Previous results with the paradigm have suggested that children acquire the ability to conserve number by 3 years of age. Because these results indicate a very precocious development of number conservation relative to performance on the classic conservation task, a comparison of these two procedures was made. Several differences which might account for the superior performance with the magic paradigm were noted: The arrays are presented successively rather than simultaneously, the arrays are presented side by side rather than parallel to one another, and the displacement is performed surreptitiously rather than openly. In the present research the magic paradigm was modified in several steps so that these differences between procedures were removed. None of the changes had an impact on the performance of 3-year-olds. It was concluded that insofar as small numbers are concerned, young children treat displacement as irrelevant to number. In regard to the question of whether young children are capable of conserving small numbers, it was concluded that no answer can be given. Basically, the problem is that we lack sufficient information on how young children solve the magic paradigm.     

Practical skills and personality development

Declarers of above average, average, and below average Practical Skills on the ACT Student Profile Report were compared on the basis of OPI personality scale scores by means of multivariate analysis of covariance. Results indicated significant differences by level of Practical Skill and no significant interaction between sex and practical skill category. Distributional differences of above average, average, and below average practical skills by various vocational choices were investigated by X². The personality differences found were interpreted as developmental, according to Erikson's theory.     

The effects of learning instructions and cueing on free recall

Eighty unrelated high-imagery words were presented for free recall learning in groups of four words each. Learning instructions were varied, with one group told to relate the words in each input group by means of images, another group told to use verbal (sentence) mediators, and the control group not given specific learning instructions. During recall, list items were presented as retrieval cues in some conditions. In comparison with the control condition, imagery and verbal mediation instructions produced greater recall, more clustering, and a largez number of instances per group recalled. When the retrieval cues were selected such that one cue came from each of the input groups and when the strength of within-group organization was quite high, Ss recalled more words and a larger number of input groups. It was concluded that instructions and cueing conditions influenced different aspects of the free recall process. Instructions influenced the organization of individual words into units, and cueing affected the retrieval of specific units.     

An investigation into hemisphere differences in adaptation to contrast

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - Suggestions that the cerebral hemispheres differ in their ability to adapt to high-contrast visual stimuli were investigated using vertical sinusoidal...     

Self-punitive behavior in humans: Effects of a self-fulfilling prophecy

Human subjects were exposed to contingencies which programmed aversive tones (100 db). Two types of contingencies were employed: self-confirming (i.e., self-fulfilling prophecies), in which the aversive tone was occasioned by the prediction it was about to occur; and self-disconfirming, in which the tone was probable when subjects predicted it would not occur. Experiments 1 and 2 used a modified classical conditioning paradigm, and demonstrated that a self-confirming contingency maintained reliable self-punitive responding, i.e., subjects consistently predicted and therefore obtained tones on every trial. Subjects in Experiment 3 were instructed to express predictions continuously throughout four sessions to ensure adequate sampling of the various predictions. Subjects exposed to a self-disconfirming contnngency reliably evidenced awareness of the contingency in effect (judged by answers on a postexperimental questionnaire), whereas subjects exposed to a self-confirming contingency failed to show effective avoidance behavior or contingency awareness. Experiment 4 investigated free-operant self-punitive behavior, utilizing a single prediction response button, which subjects depressed repeatedly. Subjects were exposed to either periodic or aperiodic punishment schedules over as many as four sessions. In general, more persistent self-punitive responding was found in the groups receiving periodic punishment. The results from the four experiments show that self-confirming contingencies can effectively prolong self-punitive responding in human subjects. The findings are consistent with a blocking interpretation of self-punitive behavior, which asserts that when an aversive event is already predicted by stimuli in the situation (including temporal cues), the association between a response and punishment is impaired, and self-punitive responding is likely to be maintained. An integration of human and animal self-punitive research is proposed.     

Encoding variability,levels of processing,and the effects of spacing of repetitions upon judgments of frequency

Two experiments were carried out to compare the component-levels theory and the levels-of-processing hypothesis as explanations of the effect the spacing between repetitions of an item has upon the retention of that item. Retention was measured by judgments of frequency, frequency discrimination, and derived recognition scores. Variable encoding contexts facilitated recognition relative to repeated encoding contexts, while the latter biased subjects toward giving high judgments of frequency. The results in general were consonant with predictions derived from a levels-of-processing explanation of the spacing effect rather than the component-levels theory. A modification of the latter theory to incorporate the former was suggested as a view of the memorial representation of repeated stimuli.