Complex decision making: A longitudinal study of process and performance

Two studies using a computer-simulated, strategy-formulation game and business students were conducted using simultaneous verbal protocols. It was found that a number of information-processing and information-evaluation thought processes were significantly related to game performance. Consistent with what is known about individual decision making, the present results suggest that, for the task used in this study, individuals who engage in causal analysis perform better than those who do not. But those who focus on negative emotions, blindly repeat previously successful decisions, and engage in illogical through processes perform more poorly than those who do not. Causal replication using real managers within organizational settings, however, is needed before firm conclusions can be drawn from this research.     

Psychosocial characteristics of preschool siblings of handicapped and nonhandicapped children

This project examined psychosocial characteristics of 24 preschool-aged siblings of handicapped children in relation to a control group of 22 siblings of nonhandicapped children. Subjects were matched on family size and income, sibling age, birth order, sex, age spacing, and marital status of their parents. Results indicated no statistically significant differences between groups of children on measures of perceived self-competence and acceptance, understanding of developmental disabilities, empathy, and child care responsibility. Significant group differences were found where brothers of handicapped children were rated by their mothers as being more depressed and aggressive than brothers of nonhandicapped control children. Sisters of handicapped children were rated by mothers as being more aggressive than sisters of nonhandicapped children. Sisters of handicapped children and brothers of nonhandicapped children had significantly fewer privileges and more restrictions on their home activities than other groups. Results are discussed in relation to previous research on older silbings of handicapped children and the general literature on family stress and childhood disability and disease. The importance of examining sibling functioning via multiple measures of child behavior is stressed.The authors are grateful to the children and families who participated in the project. The assistance of Dr. Ricardo Barrera, Christine DiBlasio, Lisa Kaye, Paola Bellabarba, Jeanne Logozzo, Donna Motley, Jennifer Harter, and Tina Meisell is also gratefully acknowleged. This project was funded by Grant Number G008300345 from the U.S. Department of Education.     

Separating the redundancy of voicing from nasality in American English

This paper reports the results of a study designed to separate the voicing redundancy from nasality in American English and to determine their individual saliencies. Sixty-seven subjects judged the similarity of nonnasal pairs versus nasal pairs of CV and VC nonsense syllables on a 5-point magnitude-estimation task. The 80 stimuli were constructed to control and to demand subjects' cognitive strategies for coping with redundancy rather than experimental manipulation of the data. They were developed from the consonantal repertoire of / b d g m n p t k / paired with the vowels / i a u /, totaling 72 pairs of dyads. Eight additional stimuli of similar structure, testing multifeature and identity contrasts, were included to monitor the validity of the experimental procedure. Results indicated that (a) speech redundancy can be circumvented cognitively, (b) nasality was more salient (different) than voicing, and (c) a recency effect was found. These findings are discussed in reference to existing data.     

Phonological coding in word reading: Evidence from hearing and deaf readers

The ability of prelingually, profoundly deaf readers to access phonological information during reading was investigated in three experiments. The experiments employed a task, developed by Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy (1974), in which lexical decision response times (RTs) to orthographically similar rhyming (e.g., WAVE-SAVE) and nortrhyming (e.g., HAVE-CAVE) word pairs were compared with RTs to orthographically and phonologically dissimilar control word pairs. The subjects of the study were deaf college students and hearing college students. In Experiments 1 and 2, in which the nonwords were pronounceable, the deaf subjects, like the hearing subjects, were facilitated in their RTs to rhyming pairs, but not to nonrhyming pairs. In Experiment 3, in which the nonwords were unpronounceable, both deaf and hearing subjects were facilitated in their RTs to both rhyming and nonrhyming pairs, with the facilitation being significantly greater for the rhyming pairs. These results indicate that access to phonological information is possible despite prelingual and profound hearing impairment. As such, they run counter to claims that deaf individuals are limited to the use of visual strategies in reading. Given the impoverished auditory, experience of such readers, these results suggest that the use of phonological information need not be tied to the auditory modality.     

Difficulty and familiarity norms for 192 single-solution word fragments

Normative data are presented for the probability of successfully completing 192 single-solution word fragments. Normative data on the familiarity of college students with the solution words are also given, along with estimates of word frequency from existing norms. Regression analyses were performed in order to predict fragment completion difficulty from familiarity, frequency, and several structural characteristics of the fragments. Familiarity, whether or not first and/or last letters appeared in the fragment, and the ratio of letters to missing letters in the fragment were included in the regression equation as significant predictors of difficulty for this fragment set.     

Problem representation: The effects of spatial arrays

Two studies examined how characteristics of spatial arrays contribute to efficient problem representation. Thirty-two adults were presented with information about family relationships in one of two arrays: a hierarchy or a matrix. Their answers to two different sets of questions were timed. The matrix format was superior to the hierarchy for one set of questions only; no differences between the arrays emerged for the other set. The data were interpreted in terms of how the family relationships were mapped onto the arrays; the mapping differences between the arrays affected the number of mental steps needed to solve some questions, but not others. In a second experiment (N=32), the same problem information was remapped onto the arrays, with the mapping relations reversed. As predicted, the pattern of response times exactly reflected the change in mapping. It is proposed that, for spatial arrays, efficiency of problem representation is best understood in terms of the number of mental steps in the problem solution.