Contextual constraints on usage of cognitive words

The conversations of 36 41/2 to 5-year-olds differing in race (black and white) and social class (professional and working class) and the adults with whom they spoke were tape-recorded during play and teaching time at preschool and dinnertime at home. Usage of cognitive words was analyzed for six levels of meaning that differed in depth of processing from reference to (1) perception and attention, (2) recognition, (3) fact recall, (4) understanding, (5) metacognition, and (6) evaluation of presuppositions. Although the rank order of usage was the same, children devoted less of their lexicon to the three higher levels of meaning than adults. Even in adults, perceptual references predominated. Use of higher-level meaning was less prominent in school and in the black working-class population. There were significant correlations between exposure to adult conversations with high-level meaning and child use of those meanings, and between the diversity of cognitive vocabulary in children and adults, but those correlations were smallest in the black working-class population.Funds to the project on which this paper is based were given by The Carnegie Corporation of New York to William S. Hall. The authors wish to thank the Computer Science Center of the University of Maryland for funds for data analysis.     

Spontaneous alternation behavior in hamsters

Male and female golden hamsters spontaneously alternated successive entries of T-maze arms (derived from a + − maze) rather than body turns during a series of eight consecutive trials except when not confined to the arm chosen on each trial. Only unconfined males failed to alternate on their first opportunity. Confinement to an entered arm for 30 seconds had no effect on females but increased alternation in males. Increasing the visual discriminability of the arms had no effect on alternation in either sex. It was concluded that spontaneous alternation behavior in hamsters depended upon whether or not they were confined to a chosen arm and their sex. It is possible that the phenomenon was escape-related.     

Phoneme-monitoring reaction time and preceding prosody: Effects of stop closure duration and of fundamental frequency

In an earlier study, it was shown that listeners can use prosodic cues that predict where sentence stress will fall; phoneme-monitoring RTs are faster when the preceding prosody indicates that the word bearing the target will be stressed. Two experiments which further investigate this effect are described. In the first, it is shown that the duration of the closure preceding the release of the target stop consonant burst does not affect the RT advantage for stressed words. In the second, it is shown that fundamental frequency variation is not a necessary component of the prosodic variation that produces the predicted-stress effect. It is argued that sentence processing involves a very flexible use of prosodic information.     

Sex differences in the structure of intelligence: A confirmatory factor analysis

The LISREL model of Jöreskog and Sörbom was used to perform a comparative factor analysis on intelligence data from four sex by generation groups. The covariance matrices for 10 psychometric ability measures were used to isolate Spatial and Verbal Intelligence factors. Results from a series of factor analysis models indicated substantial invariance in the factor pattern and factor covariance matrices, although the hypothesis of complete invariance in factor pattern was rejected. The groups did differ in observed and unique variances. The results were basically consistent with the hypothesis that males and females have similar intellectual structure, which would have been obscured had standardized factor analysis been employed. There were also sex and generation differences in the Spatial and Verbal factor means.     

Evaluation of self-contained training procedures for the Time-Sample Behavioral Checklist

The comparative effectiveness of two time-limited modes of training observers to code the behavior of clients in residential treatment programs on the Time-Sample Behavioral Checklist (TSBC) was evaluated. The susceptibility of training procedures to consensual observer drift and the predictability of TSBC mastery from trainee characteristics were also examined. Two equated groups of undergraduate students (N=15 each) participated in full-time training on the TSBC and another instrument for 27 days, followed by criterion testingin vivo and on videotapes. One group was trained by experienced personnel using procedures known to be effective but potentially subject to consensual observer drift. The other group was trained using a previously untested set of written and videotape procedures that do not rely on experienced personnel. Comparative effectiveness and observer drift were evaluated by multivariate and univariate ANOVAs on mastery scores reflecting both pattern agreement and level differences between each trainee and criterion codings. The new, more efficient training procedures were found to be as effective as the original training procedures in the degree of mastery achieved by trainees. Original training procedures were found to be resistant to consensual observer drift, with such a phenomenon appearing in only 1 instance of 156 opportunities. The high degree of mastery achieved by trainees during the time-limited training period was comparable to that previously achieved with the original training procedures. No meaningful predictions of coding mastery were found, with only one trainee characteristic being significantly related to one of six mastery criteria. The results document procedures that are both efficient and resistant to invalidity for training observers in the use of multidimensional observational systems, as well as providing guidelines for the development of standardized procedures.This article is based on a thesis submitted to the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree in psychology by the first author and under direction of the second author. The third and fourth authors also participated as supervisors. Appreciation is extended to other members of the thesis committee, Fred Kanfer, Ross Parke, and Julian Rappaport, and to John Gottman and W. Robert Nay for their comments and recommendations. This study was partially supported by Public Health Service Grants MH-25464 and MH-14257 from the National Institute of Mental Health and by grants from the Joyce Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities.     

An interactive program for observation and analysis of human behavior in a long-term continuous laboratory

An Apple II microcomputer is used for processing observations of human behavior in a long-term live-in laboratory. On-line analysis produces multiple measures of response strength and response pattern for experiments on the reinforcement value of ordinary human activities. An interactive program with an informative screen display monitors observers’ data input and operation of the experimental procedures, preventing certain classes of errors. Redundant storage is included to avoid loss of data in the event of equipment failure. The data are handled by humans only one time, as opposed to three with the previous system, reducing both expense and errors. Immediate availability of fine-grained analysis allows more sophistication in within-subjects designs.     

Units of episodic memory in perceptual recognition

Two studies examined the cognitive units of sentence memory using a perceptual recognition task. Four candidate cognitive units were considered: concepts, propositions, integrated propositions, and nonintegrated propositions. Subjects first received a list of acquisition sentences and then were asked to reproduce sentences presented under a white-noise mask. These masked sentences were replicas of the acquisition sentences, were formed of recombined clauses from the acquisition sentences, or were formed of recombined words from the acquisition sentences. Reproduction accuracy was employed as the dependent measure. Results supported propositions (operationalized by clauses) as cognitive units of episodic memory. No conclusive evidence was obtained for concepts, integrated propositions, or nonintegrated propositions as cognitive units. The utility of perceptual recognition tasks for studying the cognitive units of episodic memory is discussed.     

Facilitating referential communication among children: The listener as teacher

This study was designed to test the hypothesis that systematic variations in listener behavior can have an important influence on both speaker behavior and communicative success among children. In particular, we investigated the idea that systematic variations in listener behavior might have not only within-trial effects on the adequacy of speakers' messages and the accuracy of communication among children, but also cumulative effects on speakers' initial messages across trials. Effects of stimulus complexity were also examined. Pairs of 7- and 9-year-old children participated in a referential communication game, with the younger child serving as speaker and the older one as listener. Half of the listeners were given a plan for effective listening which emphasized the importance of asking questions if the speakers' messages were ambiguous. Replicating earlier findings, the plan manipulation was successful in encouraging listeners to ask questions when necessary. The major result was that listener questions not only had the expected trial-by-trial effect on message adequacy and communicative accuracy, but also showed a cumulative effect on speaker performance. When exposed to systematic listener feedback, speakers improved their initial messages over trials. Stimulus complexity was not a major determinant of performances. These findings suggest that provision of systematic listener feedback may be an effective method for teaching speaker skills to young children.     

Machiavellianism and spontaneous cheating in competition

Seventy-two undergraduates were assigned to groups defined by the combinations of the factors opportunity to cheat (yes, no), type of competition (personal, impersonal), and subject Machiavellianism (high, low). As predicted, cheating occurred in the opportunity to cheat, impersonal competition, high Mach group and in the opportunity to cheat, personal competition, low Mach group, extending the results of previous Machiavellianism research from situations in which cheating was explicitly encouraged by another person to a situation in which cheating was undertaken at the subject's own initiative.     

The comparative effectiveness of two modes of observer training on the Staff-Resident Interaction Chronograph

The comparative effectiveness of two time-limited modes of training observers to code activity on the Staff-Resident Interaction Chronograph (SRIC) in residential treatment programs for mentally disabled adults was evaluated. The susceptibility of training procedures for consensual observer drift was also examined, as was the predictability of SRIC mastery from trainee characteristics. Two equated groups of undergraduate student trainees (N=15 each) participated in full-time training for 27 days, followed by two weeks of criterion testing in vivo and on videotapes. One group received training by experience personnel using procedures known to be effective (original method). The other group received training via a previously untested set of written and videotaped procedures that do not rely on experienced personnel (package method). Multivariate and univariate analyses of variance found both methods to be equally effective in the degree of mastery achieved by trainees, without evidence of observer drift. No meaningful predictions of coding mastery were found, but conceptual mastery was predictable from individual characteristics. Differences were obtained for both groups between in vivo versus videotaped criterion tests. The results document procedures that are both efficient and resistant to invalidity for complex observational methodology as well as feasible for standardizing assessment of staff functioning across residential settings.This article is based on a thesis submitted to the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree in psychology by the first author under direction of the second author. The third and fourth authors also participated as supervisors. Appreciation is extended to other members of the thesis committee, Fred Kanfer, W. Robert Nay, Julian Rappaport, and James Wardrop, for their comments and recommendations. This study was partially supported by Public Health Service Grants MH-25464 and MH-14257 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and by grants from The Joyce Foundation and the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities.