Object color affects identification and repetition priming

We investigated the influence of color on the identification of both non-studied and studied objects. Participants studied black and white and color photos of common objects and memory was assessed with an identification test. Consistent with our meta-analysis of prior research, we found that objects were easier to identify from color than from black and white photos. We also found substantial priming in all conditions, and study-to-test changes in an object's color reduced the magnitude of priming. Color-specific priming effects were large for color-complex objects, but minimal for color-simple objects. The pattern and magnitude of priming effects was not influenced either by the extent to which an object always appears in the same color (i.e., whether a color is symptomatic of an object) or by the object's origin (natural versus fabricated). We discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical accounts of object perception and repetition priming.     

Measurement of individual differences: lessons from memory assessment in research and clinical practice

An examination of test manuals and published research indicates that widely used memory tests (e.g., Verbal Paired Associates and Word List tests of the Wechsler Memory Scale, Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, and California Verbal Learning Test) are afflicted by severe ceiling effects. In the present study, the true extent of memory ability in healthy young adults was tested by giving 208 college undergraduates verbal paired-associate and verbal learning tests of various lengths; the findings demonstrate that healthy adults can remember much more than is suggested by the normative data for the memory tests just mentioned. The findings highlight the adverse effects of low ceilings in memory assessment and underscore the severe consequences of ceiling effects on score distributions, means, standard deviations, and all variability-dependent indices, such as reliability, validity, and correlations with other tests. The article discusses the optimal test lengths for verbal paired-associate and verbal list-learning tests, shows how to identify ceiling-afflicted data in published research, and explains how proper attention to this phenomenon can improve future research and clinical practice.     

NAMING,THE FORMATION OF STIMULUS CLASSES,AND APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS

The methods used in Sidman's original studies on equivalence classes provide a framework for analyzing functional verbal behavior. Sidman and others have shown how teaching receptive, name-referent matching may produce rudimentary oral reading and word comprehension skills. Eikeseth and Smith (1992) have extended these findings by showing that children with autism may acquire equivalence classes after learning to supply a common oral name to each stimulus in a potential class. A stimulus class analysis suggests ways to examine (a) the problem of programming generalization from teaching situations to other environments, (b) the expansion of the repertoires that occur in those settings, and (c) the use of naming to facilitate these forms of generalization. Such research will help to clarify and extend Horne and Lowe's recent (1996) account of the role of verbal behavior in the formation of stimulus classes.     

Innovation in Guidance: A Mobile Counseling Center

A mobile counseling center staffed by 4 counselors serves high schools in 4 counties of southern Indiana. The operation of the center is designed to enrich, supplement, and improve the quality of counseling services for secondary students of the area. The mobile center also serves as a model to stimulate the development of exemplary and innovative guidance services in regular school programs.     

Maternal and Paternal Perception of Child Vulnerability and Behaviour Problems in Very Preterm Born Children

Preterm born children have more behaviour problems than term born children. Perinatal risks, current child functioning, sociodemographic characteristics, parental psychological distress and parental perceptions of child vulnerability (PCV) have been shown to be risk factors for behaviour problems. However, the role of maternal and paternal PCV is unclear, as these have not been investigated as a risk factor for behaviour problems, with all other risk factors taken into account. Aim of this study is to investigate whether maternal and paternal PCV are independent risk factors for behaviour problems in very preterm (VP) and term born children. The present study is a single centre prospective cohort study. Preterm children (n = 104), born at <30 weeks' gestation and/or birth weight <1000 g, and term children (n = 95) were assessed at age 5. Results showed that risk factors for parent‐rated behaviour problems were low/middle parental education, VP birth, parental stress and, in VP children, maternal PCV. Risk factors for teacher‐rated behaviour problems were low/middle parental education, foreign parental country of birth, intrauterine growth restriction and objective child vulnerabilities. It can be concluded that maternal PCV is a risk factor for parent‐rated behaviour problems in VP children. When VP children are presented with behavioural problems, clinicians ought to be aware of the possibility that parents might still perceive their child as vulnerable. The neonatal history of the child, the way parents experienced that period, their perceptions of the child and possible consequences of these perceptions could be subjects for conversation during visits at follow‐up clinics. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mindless resistance to persuasion: Low self‐control fosters the use of resistance‐promoting heuristics

In our consumer society, people are confronted on a daily basis with unsolicited persuasion attempts. The present research challenges the prevailing view that resisting persuasion is more likely to fail when consumers have low self‐control. Four experiments tested the hypothesis that impaired self‐regulation may actually facilitate resistance to persuasion when the influence context contains resistance‐promoting heuristics. Indeed, participants with low self‐control were less likely to comply with a persuasive request (Experiments 1 and 3), reported a less favourable attitude towards an advertised product (Experiment 2), and generated more negative responses towards a persuasive message (Experiment 4) than participants with high self‐control, when they could rely on resistance‐promoting heuristics: a violation of the norm of reciprocity (Experiments 1 and 3), an advertisement disclaimer (Experiment 2), or negative social proof (Experiment 4). Together, these studies demonstrate that contextual cues can bolster resistance when one does not carefully scrutinize an influence attempt.     

Functions in biological kind classification

Biological traits that serve functions, such as a zebra's coloration (for camouflage) or a kangaroo's tail (for balance), seem to have a special role in conceptual representations for biological kinds. In five experiments, we investigate whether and why functional features are privileged in biological kind classification. Experiment 1 experimentally manipulates whether a feature serves a function and finds that functional features are judged more diagnostic of category membership as well as more likely to have a deep evolutionary history, be frequent in the current population, and persist in future populations. Experiments 2-5 reveal that these inferences about history, frequency, and persistence account for nearly all the effect of function on classification. We conclude that functional features are privileged because their relationship with the kind is viewed as stable over time and thus as especially well suited for establishing category membership, with implications for theories of classification and folk biological understanding.