Hair loss,personality and attitudes

Personality and attitude measurements were carried out on 204 adult males suffering from hair loss. Three groups were tested: those in the first group had had a hair weave fitted and were retaining the weave as a viable solution to their hair problem; the second had worn the weave for a trial period but had decided against its continued use; the third had had no form of treatment and seemed little concerned about their hair loss. Results showed that all three groups possessed N and P scores which were significantly higher than those shown by a normative group of males in the same age range, but that the weave-retaining group scored significantly lower on E than the normative group: other personality differences were non-significant. The group who had rejected the hair-weave treatment as a viable solution to their hair-loss problem was significantly more neurotic and possessed a significantly lower self-esteem than the group that retained the weave: this latter group had scores on these and all other variables tested which were very similar to those of the group that had had no treatment.     

When celebrities talk,children listen: An experimental analysis of children's responses to TV ads with celebrity endorsement

Two studies tested the effects of TV ads with celebrity endorsement on the product preference and understanding of 8- to 14-year-old boys. Study 1 compared two ads for a model racer. One had celebrity endorsement (by a famous race driver) and footage of real automobile racing featuring the celebrity (live action); the second had neither feature. Study 2 employed one ad for a different brand of model racer edited to generate a 2 (endorser presence) by 2 (inclusion of live racetrack action) factorial design. A total of 415 boys were exposed to one of the experimental ads or a control ad, embedded in a new animated children's adventure program. Preference for the advertised brand of model racer (pre- and postviewing) and a number of cognitive variables were assessed. Exposure to endorsement led to increased preference for the toy and belief that the celebrity was expert about the toy. Live action led to exaggerated estimates of the physical properties of the toy and the belief that the ad was not staged. The 8- to 10-year-olds associated the glamour of the endorser with the toy and were more reliant on his advice than were 11- to 14-year-olds. However, the two age groups were not differentially affected by the ads. Contrary to the speculation of many researchers, understanding about advertising intent and techniques and cynicism about ads had almost no influence on product preference after viewing.     

Intelligence and age as predictors of motor performance

The Yule-Oseretsky test of motor performance was administered to 10 ‘undifferentiated’ mentally-retarded adults, 10 normal children and 10 normal adults. In accordance with Denny's (1964) 3-group design, the children were matched on mental age with the retardates, the normal adults were matched on chronological age with the retardates, and the children and normal adults were matched on intelligence quotient. The results showed that mental age predicted performance on both fine and gross motor tasks, with the children and retarded adults both obtaining similar relatively-low scores.     

Motor programme information as a separable memory unit

Summary Two experiments produced further evidence for the claim that motor programme information may be considered as a separate memory unit, partially independent of other memory representations. In Experiment 1, it was shown that for the comparison of shared movement components in two actions such as turning the handle and stirring the ingredients, the activation of their motor programmes is required. This is demonstrated by the finding that the execution of the first action, which preactivates its motor programmes, leads to shorter reaction times than under control conditions in which the verbally described action is only spoken. In Experiment 2, it was further shown that the execution of the action does not in every case expedite the assessment of a connection between a prime item and a target item vis à vis verbal repetition, but only where the task requires the activation of motor programmes.     

Odor recognition: familiarity, identifiability, and encoding consistency

The investigation examined the association between the perceived identity of odorous stimuli and the ability to recognize the previous occurrence of them. The stimuli comprised 20 relatively familiar odorous objects such as chocolate, leather, popcorn, and soy sauce. Participants rated the familiarity of the odors and sought to identify them. At various intervals up to 7 days after initial inspection, the participants sought to recognize the odors among sets of distractor odors that included such items as soap, cloves, pipe tobacco, and so on. The recognition response entailed a confidence rating as to whether or not an item had appeared in the original set. At the time of testing, the participants also sought to identify the stimuli again. The results upheld previous findings of excellent initial recognition memory for environmentally relevant odors and slow forgetting. The results also uncovered, for the first time, a strong association between recognition memory and identifiability, rated familiarity, and the ability to use an odor label consistently at inspection and subsequent testing. Encodability seems to enhance rather than to permit recognizability. Even items identified incorrectly or inconsistently were recognized at levels above chance.     

Representation of linear orders

Two binary classification tasks were used to explore the associative structure of linear orders. In Experiment 1, college students classified English letters as targets or nontargets, the targets being consecutive letters of the alphabet. The time to reject nontargets was a decreasing function of the distance from the target set, suggesting response interference mediated by automatic associations from the target to the nontarget letters. The way in which this interference effect depended on the placement of the boundaries between the target and nontarget sets revealed the relative strengths of individual interletter associations. In Experiment 2, students were assigned novel linear orders composed of letterlike symbols and asked to classify pairs of symbols as being adjacent or nonadjacent in the assigned sequence. Reaction time was found to be a joint function of the distance between any pair of symbols and the relative positions of those symbols within the sequence. The effects of both distance and position decreased systematically over 6 days of practice with a particular order, beginning at a level typical of unfamiliar orders and converging on a level characteristic of familiar orders such as letters and digits. These results provide an empirical unification of two previously disparate sets of findings in the literature on linear orders, those concerning familiar and unfamiliar orders, and the systematic transition between the two patterns of results suggests the gradual integration of a new associative structure.     

Detection versus discrimination of visual orientation

The role of focused attention in vision is examined. Recent theories of attention hypothesize that serial search by focal attention is required for discrimination between different combinations of features. Experiments are reported which show that the mixture of a few (less than five) horizontal and vertical line segments embedded in an aggregate of diagonal line segments can be rapidly counted (also called 'subitizing') by a parallel (preattentive) process, while the discrimination between horizontal and vertical orientation requires serial search by shifting focal attention to each line segment. Thus detecting and counting targets that differ in orientation can be done in parallel by a preattentive process, whereas knowing 'what' the orientation of a target is (horizontal or vertical, ie of a single conspicuous feature) requires a serial search by focal attention.     

The micro-structure of tapping movements in children

In order to investigate the development of movement speed in relation to movement organization, children of 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 years of age and adults carried out a reciprocal tapping task, in which time pressure and distance were manipulated. The duration, velocity, acceleration and accuracy of the movements were compared between age groups. Age differences appeared mainly in the homing time, not in the duration of the distance covering movement phase. Accuracy and velocity of the distance covering movement phase differed with age. Time pressure affected the homing time, but not the duration of the distance covering phase. Distance manipulation affected mainly the velocity and duration of the distance covering movement phase and the homing time. In the discussion it is contended that age differences in homing time may be related to both the accuracy of the distance covering movement phase and the rate of information processing of the subject.     

Rapid error correction during human arm movements: evidence for central monitoring

Studies were made of rapid error correction movements in eight subjects performing a visually guided tracking task involving flexion-extension movements about the elbow. Subjects were required to minimize reaction times in this two-choice task. Errors in initial movement direction occurred in about 3% of the trials. Error correction times (time from initiation to reversal of movement in incorrect direction) ranged from 30-150 ms. The first sing of correction of the error movement was a suppression of the electromyographic (EMG) activity in the muscle producing the error movement. This suppression started as early as 20-40 ms after the initiation of the error-related EMG activity and as much as 50 ms before any overt sign of limb movement. The correction of the error movement was also accompanied by an increase in the drive to the muscle which moved the arm in the correct direction. This increased activity always occurred after the initiation of the error movement. it is concluded that the first step in the error correction, suppression of drive to the muscle producing the error movement, cannot be based on information from the moving limb. It is thus suggested that this earliest response to the error movement is based on central monitoring of the commands for movement.     

On the measurement of storage and retrieval contributions to memory development

We report two free recall experiments and a cued recall experiment in which a new two-stage model was used to obtain numerical measurements of age changes in various aspects of storage and retrieval. The subjects in all three experiments were 7-year-olds (second graders) and 11-year-olds (sixth graders). The major findings in the free recall experiment were that getting a trace into storage posed less of a problem for elementary schoolers than learning how to get it out on test trials, that retrieval development is more rapid during the elementary school years than storage development, and that the superiority of older children's storage and retrieval abilities tends to become more pronounced as learning progresses. A similar pattern of results was obtained under different conditions in the cued recall experiment.