Evidence of deontic reasoning in 3- and 4-year-old children

Deontic reasoning is reasoning about what one may, ought, or ought not do in a given set of circumstances. Virtually all of our social institutions and child-rearing practices presume the capacity to reason about deontic concepts, such as what is permitted, obligated, or prohibited. Despite this, very little is known about the development of deontic reasoning. Two experiments were conducted that contrasted children’s reasoning performance on deontic and indicative reasoning tasks (i.e., the reduced array selection version of the Wason card selection task). Like adults, children as young as 3 years of age were found to adopt a violation-detecting strategy more often when reasoning about the deontic case than when reasoning about the indicative case. These results indicate that violation detection emerges as an effective deontic reasoning very early in human development.     

At the Crossroads: Racial and Womanist Identity Development in Black and White Women

This study explored the hypothesis that womanist identity and racial identity development are related. The racial identiy and womanist identity attitudes of 214 women were measured using the Black Racial Identity Attitude Scale, the White Racial Identity Attitude Scales (WRIAS), and the Womanist Identity Attitude Scale. Canonical correlation analysis was used to determine the nature of relationships among racial identity and womanist identity attitudes. Results showed that for Black women there was a significant relation between racial identity and womanist identity attitudes. Specifically, Internalization attitudes on the WRIAS were positively related to Level II (Encounter) and Level IV (Internalization) attitudes on the Womanist Identity Attitude Scale. Despite a larger number of White participants, no such relationship emerged for White women. Implications for theory, research, and counseling are discussed.     

Memory for movement in blind children: the role of previous visual experience

The role of previous visual experience in the reproduction of a criterion movement was examined in sighted, late-blinded, and congenitally blind children. Results showed that the congenitally blind reproduce movements at a low level of accuracy compared with the other two groups. Detailed analysis showed that although the congenitally blind could reproduce the extent of the movement accurately, the movement was poorly reproduced in terms of its orientation to the criterion movement and its orientation from a reference point. The role of prior vision in establishing a frame of reference is discussed.     

The relationship between sexual identification and the use of defense mechanisms

A distinction is made between two levels of sexual identification. The deeper level was measured by May's Deprivation/Enhancement fantasy pattern, while the surface level was assessed using the Masculinity-Femininity of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank. These measures, while clearly differentiating between college males and females, were found to be unrelated to each other. Moreover, the deeper level was found to be related to the use of "masculine" and "feminine" defense mechanisms.     

Sensitivity to shifts of a point stimulus: An instance of tactile hyperacuity

The sensitivity of the tactile sense to shifts in the position of a point stimulus was determined at four body loci: the index finger, forehead, belly, and back. Water-jet stimulation was used, a method which allows frictionless travel of a point stimulus over the skin. Three subjects were tested by means of the method of forced choice, with the task being to say whether the stimulus moved to the right or to the left. The shift threshold was defined as that shift excursion which gave rise to 75% correct responding. The basic finding was that shift thresholds were on the order of 10 to 30 times smaller than the corresponding two-point limens obtained by Weinstein (1968) for the same body loci. These unexpectedly small shift thresholds indicate an exquisite sensitivity of the cutaneous sense to rapid changes in position of a point stimulus. A physiological model is presented which accounts for the difference between localization and spatial resolution. nt]mis|This research was supported by Department of Health~ Education, and Welfare Grant 14-P-SS282/9 from the Social and Rehabilitation Services, NIH Research Grant R01-EY-00686 from the National Eye Institute, and the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Foundation.     

The locus of sex differences in spatial ability

College men and women judged whether pairs of stimuli were identical or mirror images. One stimulus of a pair was presented upright; the other was rotated 0°–150° from the vertical. The stimuli were either alphanumeric symbols or unfamiliar letter-like characters of the type found on the Primary Mental Abilities Spatial Relations Test. For each individual, the linear function relating response latency to degree of rotation was computed. The slope of this function was steeper for women than for men. Further, the distribution of slopes was more variable among women, with approximately 30% falling outside the range of distribution for men. Women and men were quite similar in the accuracy of their judgments, the intercepts of the latency functions, and the precision with which the linear function characterized the latency data. It is suggested that the sex difference in the slope of the rotation function may reflect differences in strategies of mental rotation.     

Cognitive processing of multidimensional stimuli in schizophrenia: formal modeling of judgment speed and content

This article presents a formal, mathematical account of relations between response times on simple cognitive tasks and content of complex judgments involving multiple stimulus dimensions for people with schizophrenia. Changes in multidimensional judgments were viewed as the result of interference from increased stages of encoding with respect to the individual dimensions. Information on dimensional properties encoded earlier in a judgment trial was considered to be more susceptible to loss over the rest of the trial, because of a larger number of encoding stages applied to the remaining dimensional properties. Model predictions were tested with samples of paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenic participants and controls. Unidimensional encoding speed was assessed by reaction times in an explicit similarity ratings task, and multidimensional judgment content was assessed by the relative importance of different stimulus dimensions to participants' ratings in an implicit similarity ratings task. Results support validity of the model.