Undertakers' sense of humor.

A group of 60 middle-aged morticians at a professional seminar in the midwestern USA who completed a multidimensional sense of humor scale scored significantly lower than another group of 136 men from other occupations. The difference between the two groups appeared almost entirely on scale items having to do with humor generation or creativity.     

The formation of structurally relevant units in artificial grammar learning

A total of 78 adult participants were asked to read a sample of strings generated by a finite state grammar and, immediately after reading each string, to mark the natural segmentation positions with a slash bar. They repeated the same task after a phase of familiarization with the material, which consisted, depending on the group involved, of learning items by rote, performing a shortterm matching task, or searching for the rules of the grammar. Participants formed the same number of cognitive units before and after the training phase, thus indicating that they did not tend to form increasingly large units. However, the number of different units reliably decreased, whatever the task that participants had performed during familiarization. This result indicates that segmentation was increasingly consistent with the structure of the grammar. A theoretical account of this phenomenon, based on ubiquitous principles of associative memory and learning, is proposed. This account is supported by the ability of a computer model implementing those principles, PARSER, to reproduce the observed pattern of results. The implications of this study for developmental theories aimed at accounting for how children become able to parse sensory input into physically and linguistically relevant units are discussed.     

Rural and urban elderly construe health differently.

Samples of people aged 65 or older (N = 396) living in the metropolitan Omaha area and in the rural Sandhills counties of central and western Nebraska completed an instrument to assess health satisfaction, health behaviors, and attitudes toward health care. Few intergroup differences were found that could be attributed to the area of residence. However, factor analysis and item analysis of the attitudes toward health items indicated that older respondents in rural areas may have very different perceptions of health in general and of health care services in particular than those of elderly urban residents.     

Visual stability with goal-directed eye and arm movements toward a target displaced during saccadic suppression

This experiment tested whether the perceived stability of the environment is altered when there is a combination of eye and visually open-loop hand movements toward a target displaced during the eye movements, i.e., during saccadic suppression. Visual-target eccentricity randomly decreased or increased during eye movements and subjects reported whether they perceived a target displacement or not, and if so, the direction of the displacement. Three experimental conditions, involving different combinations of eye and arm movements, were tested: (a) eye movements only; (b) simultaneous eye and rapid arm movements toward the target; and (c) simultaneous eye and arm movements with a restraint blocking the arm as soon as the hand left the starting position. The perceptual threshold of target displacements resulting in an increased target eccentricity was greater when subjects combined eye and arm movements toward the target object, specially for the no-restraint condition. Subjects corrected most of their arm trajectory toward the displaced target despite the short movement times (average MT = 189 ms). After the movements, the null error feedback of the hand's final position presumably overlapped the retino-oculomotor signal error and could be responsible for the deficient perception of target displacements. Thus, subjects interpreted the terminal hand positions as being within the range of the endpoint variability associated with the production of rapid arm movements rather than as a change of the environment. These results suggest that a natural strategy adopted for processing spatial information, especially in a competing situation, could favour a constancy tendency, avoiding systematic perception of a change of environment for any noise or variability at the central or peripheral levels.     

Some empirical justification for a modest proposal regarding data acquisition via intermittent direct observation

Computer simulations of behavior and event records of a child's visual fixation on an adult person were generated and sampled using a modified time sampling procedure. The modified approach required making two independent scoring judgments per observation interval: if the behavior was initiated within the interval, the interval was scored; if the behavior was ongoing precisely at the end of the interval, the interval was again scored. The results showed that the within-interval and end-of-interval scores yielded, respectively, estimates of behavioral frequency and duration. The accuracy of the estimates was a function of the number of observations. Several field studies demonstrated high agreement among observers who employed the measurement system.     

Concomitant changes in classically conditioned heart rate and corneoretinal potential discrimination in the rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus)

Corneoretinal Potential (CRP) and heart rate changes were measured in a series of differential classical conditioning experiments in which the directionality of the heart rate response was related to (a) CRP acquisition, and (b) the certainty or uncertainty of the stimulus situation. The results suggested that heart rate decelerations were associated with stimuli that predict upcoming aversive events, while heart rate accelerations were associated with asymptotic CRP responding late in conditioning. These findings were interpreted in terms of (a) changes in general somatic activity, and (b) the cue properties associated with CSs which predict aversive events.