Maintenance and generalization of a semantic rehearsal strategy in educable mentally retarded children

Two groups of 11- to 12-year-old educable mentally retarded children, equated on the basis of a free recall pretest, were given a series of lists for free recall. Approximately half the subjects were trained in the use of a strategy designed to induce deeper level semantic encoding and the discovery of categorical relationships and half constituted a “no-training” control group with standard free recall instructions. The subjects received either related or unrelated lists during the training phase and related or unrelated lists during two post-tests, immediately following and 1 week after training. There was evidence not only that the semantic strategy was maintained over the 1-week delay, but that it also generalized to word lists unlike those used during training. The degree of generalization was greater for those subjects receiving related lists during training.     

Cerebral lateralization in individuals diagnosed as autistic in early childhood

Early infantile autism was found to be associated with an atypical pattern of cerebral lateralization. Based on EEG measures of hemispheric activation during cognitive processing, it was found that 7 of the 10 autistic individuals tested showed a pattern of hemispheric specialization rarely seen in the normal population; namely, a “reversal” in lateralization reflective of a lack of left-hemisphere specialization for linguistic functions. Furthermore, the autistic individuals' pattern of cognitive strengths and weakness is suggestive of a selective impairment of the left cerebral hemisphere.     

Getting older and living up to implicit followership theories: Implications for employee psychological health and job attitudes

Age discrimination at work is a widespread destructive phenomenon that often takes subtle forms. Based on negative stereotypes about older employees, we argue that older employees often experience that they are perceived as less ideal followers than younger employees. We propose that older and younger employees do not differ in what they assume their supervisors expect of an ideal follower (implicit followership theories, IFTs). Thus, we hypothesize that older employees perceive that they compare less favorably to their supervisors' IFTs than younger employees (i.e., worse IFT-fit). This should entail lower quality of the relationship between leader and follower (leader-member-exchange, LMX), which, in turn, should have detrimental effects on employees' health (i.e., burnout) and job attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and identification). We tested our model in a field study with 379 employees. Results differed for ideal and counter-ideal follower attributes. Concerning counter-ideal follower attributes (e.g., being incompetent), age had the proposed negative effect on psychological health and job attitudes that mediated through IFT-fit and LMX. Concerning ideal follower attributes (e.g., thinking ahead), older employees expected their supervisors not only to think less of them than of their younger colleagues, but also expected them to have less demanding IFTs—contrary to our expectations. Employee age was negatively related to psychological health and job attitudes, mediated through lower perceived IFTs, worse perceived appraisal of the actual employee and their joint effects on LMX.     

Managing one's body using self-management techniques: practicing autonomy

This paper discusses some of the anthropological andphilosophical features of the use of self-managementplans by patients with a chronic disease, focusing onpatients with asthma. Characteristics of thistechnologically mediated form of self-care arecontrasted with the work of Mauss and Foucault on bodytechniques and techniques of self. The similaritiesand differences between self-management of asthma andFoucault's technologies of self highlight some of theways in which self-management contributes tomodifications in the definitions of patients andphysicians. Patients, in measuring their lungfunction, first come to rely on measurements more thanon felt disturbances, but next, felt disturbancesbecome modified by previous measurements. Physicians,on the other hand, see their role changed from expertto being a participant in a joint treatment. It isargued that the concept of agency is more appropriatefor describing the advantage of self-management forpatients than autonomy.     

The variability of practice hypothesis in motor learning: does it apply to Alzheimer's disease?

Based on Schmidt's (1975) variability of practice hypothesis, this study examined acquisition and transfer of a gross motor skill, namely tossing, in 58 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 58 healthy older adults under constant, blocked, and random practice conditions. While healthy older adults were able to learn the tossing task equally well under the three practice conditions, only AD patients receiving constant practice showed significant improvements. Tests of intermediate transfer yielded the expected random practice advantage in healthy controls but not AD patients. None of the practice conditions facilitated intermediate transfer in AD patients; however, constant practice did benefit these impaired individuals on tests of near transfer. These results indicate that the variability of practice hypothesis does not extend to AD patients. As motor learning and transfer were clearly a function of constant practice, future attempts to retrain basic activities of daily living in AD patients should emphasize consistency in training.     

An on-line task for contrasting auditory processing in the verbal and nonverbal domains and norms for younger and older adults

Contrasting linguistic and nonlinguistic processing has been of interest to many researchers with different scientific, theoretical, or clinical questions. However, previous work on this type of comparative analysis and experimentation has been limited. In particular, little is known about the differences and similarities between the perceptual, cognitive, and neural processing of nonverbal environmental sounds and that of speech sounds. With the aim of contrasting verbal and nonverbal processing in the auditory modality, we developed a new on-line measure that can be administered to subjects from different clinical, neurological, or sociocultural groups. This is an on-line task of sound to picture matching, in which the sounds are either environmental sounds or their linguistic equivalents and which is controlled for potential task and item confounds across the two sound types. Here, we describe the design and development of our measure and report norming data for healthy subjects from two different adult age groups: younger adults (18–24 years of age) and older adults (54–78 years of age). We also outline other populations to which the test has been or is being administered. In addition to the results reported here, the test can be useful to other researchers who are interested in systematically contrasting verbal and nonverbal auditory processing in other populations.     

Clever hands: uncontrolled intelligence in facilitated communication

Five studies examined how people who are answering questions on behalf of another person may use their own knowledge to answer correctly while attributing authorship of their answers to the other. Experiments 1 and 2 found that participants instructed to answer yes/no questions randomly were unable to do so. They were more often correct on easy than hard questions, and extended opportunity and incentive did not reduce this effect. Experiments 3-5 found similar correctness for participants who were asked to answer yes/no questions by sensing either the ostensible keyboard finger movements or unvoiced inclinations of another person who had been admonished not to answer, and who was infact a confederate and was not even given the questions. In this paradigm, the answers were often attributed to the other.