PROBLEM SOLVING,PLANNING AND PERSONALITY*

The present study was designed to investigate student behaviour in a river-crossing problem in light of prior experience, intelligence, personality, mode of presentation and age. Ninety-six students at Year 6 and 61 students at Year 8 from schools in Australia were administered the Eysenck Junior EPQ and IVE scales, together with six cognitive tasks used to index the Luria successive and simultaneous processing and planning functional units. Each student was given a river-crossing problem presented in one of two modes and at one of two levels of difficulty. Success on the river-crossing problem was found to be independent of age, mode of presentation or prior experience on the task. There was a significant effect due to problem awareness, intelligence and empathy and a mode by success interaction. An attempt was made to group students into problem-solver ‘types’. The results were discussed in terms of the link between cognitive and affective variables and intervention programmes.     

Child care and influence among the mekranoti of central brazil

Various researchers have argued that women's influence may be limited by child-care requirements. This study uses quantified data from the Mekranoti-Kayapó of Central Brazil to examine some specific arguments. Among the Mekranoti, women who spend more time caring for children rate lower on influence. But the reasons for this correlation are less clear. Child care does not seem to hinder a woman's ability to contribute to subsistence. Nor does it seem to have much effect on the personality characteristics that might affect the leadership potential of child caretakers. Child care may, however, restrict a woman's ability to acquire the personal connections needed to exercise influence.This article is based on a chapter from the author's doctoral dissertation. The author thanks Daniel R. Gross, Carol R. Ember, Madeline Ritter, Nancy Flowers, Daniel G. Bates, and Robert A. LeVine for their many helpful suggestions in preparing the study. The author also thanks various people for help in carrying out the fieldwork on which they study is based: S. Gross, G. Verswijver, R. Thomson, K. Jefferson, M. Stout, F. Leoi, and R. Cardoso de Oliveria, G. Diaz, K. Taylor, A. Ramos, G. Zarur, R. De Barros Laraia, L. Vidal, D. Montagner Melatti, J. C. Melatti, and J. Bispo dos Santos. The study was generously supported by NSF grants BNS 76-03378, BNS 73-25295, and BNS 78-24706.     

Rats' lever-press durations as psychophysical judgments of time

Hungry rats received food following lever-press durations exceeding a minimum value, which ranged from 0 to 6.4 sec. When no intertrial intervals separated successive presses, modal press durations remained at very short values as the minimum value required for food was increased. This was particularly true immediately after a food presentation. When an 8-sec intertrial interval followed each lever release, modal press durations were always at or beyond the minimum value required for food, and outcome of the preceding press had no effect on press duration. Possible reasons for the effects of intertrial intervals included punishment of short presses, increased delay of reinforcement of short presses, and reduced density of reinforcement. In addition, functions relating discrete-trials lever-press duration to minimum duration required for food were found to be qualitatively and quantitatively similar to the power functions recently proposed by Catania (1970) for interresponse time and response latency. This similarity was taken as support for a general psychophysical law of temporal judgments.     

Mechanisms of aural encoding: IV. Hear-see,say-write interactions for vowels

Six vowel sounds were presented in rondom orders for recall from short-term memory. Four groups of 25 Ss each in a2by 2 design either heard or saw the words, and either had to say them or write them. In general, accuracy was greater when the sounds were seen rather than heard, especially when they were verbatty reported. The major concern was the degree to which the major distinctive feature systems could predict the intrusion errors in each of the four conditions. The best prediction occurred in the auditory-input/verbal-output condition, as would be expected from the models on which distinctive feature specifications are based. However, as in a previous study by these authors, the most accurate predictions were not always made by the same combination of distinctive features. It is concluded that distinctive features are identifled in the initial encoding bef ore any retrieval processes are activated and that further errors made at the time of retrieval are aho related to distinctive features. Most importantly, however, both at initial registration and at retrieval, different features are implicated, depending upon the sound presented for recall and the input-output modalities involved.     

Effects of Supervisor Style and Empathy on Counselor Perceptions in Simulated Counseling

Effects of supervisor style (techniques type and counseling type) and supervisor empathy upon counselor perceptions in a supervision analogue were examined. Three groups of 14 students heard two sets of recorded client statements and responded as counselors. The two experimental (E) groups had 20-minute conferences with supervisors between the first and second sets. Controls (C) received no supervision. Counselor perceptions were measured by questionnaire responses. Although subjects supervised by an emphasis on techniques rated themselves less relaxed and less confident about the meaning of empathy than those with an emphasis on counseling, their performance on the criterion of empathy was higher. Both E groups perceived themselves as higher than C's in amount learned, but they were no higher on the performance measure. No differences were found for reactions to supervision (items given E's only) or reactions to participation in the experiment. Empathy of supervisors did not appreciably affect counselor perceptions.     

Human auditory-evoked response: Specific effects of signal strength and performance criterion

Computer-averaged auditory-evoked responses were recorded from the scalp of seven human Sa in order to study the effects of both low-signal levels and different performance criteria upon specific components of the waveform. Noise bursts of ?2, 0. +2. or +6 dB seDl8tion level (SL) were presented contingent upon the S’s correct bisection of a temporal interval as the degree of accuracy required from him was systematically varied. Analyses of variance indicated that a positive peak in the waveform at a latency of approximately 300 msec increased in amplitude as the stringency of the performance criterion increased but showed no change as signal strength varied. The negative peak at approximately 125 msec latency increased with increasing signal strength but remained constant as the stringency of the performance criterion was varied.     

The amount seen in brief exposures

The experiments reported are a series of attempts to test the consequences of assuming that a subject exposed to briefly presented tachistoscopic information does not have access to a visual image. The partial report procedure is examined under several conditions with the letter row cues immediately following stimulus exposure, and at different levels of cue delay.

The results of eye movement monitoring, and of instructing subjects where to look, agree with the guessing data of a previous experiment in showing a sharp decline in the number of letters correctly reported when the subject is looking at the wrong row, in conformity with the anticipative selection hypothesis. The result of varying the subject's uncertainty about what is to be reported is to vary the slope of the delay curve; with the implication that inefficient strategies of rehearsal, rather than visual image decay, are responsible for the reported delay effects.