Repetition of previously novel melodies sometimes increases both remember and know responses in recognition memory

Recognition memory for previously novel melodies was tested in three experiments in which subjects usedremember andknow responses to report experiences of recollection, or of familiarity in the absence of recollection, for each melody they recognized. Some of the melodies were taken from Polish folk songs and presented vocally, but without the words. Others were taken from obscure pieces of classical music, presented as single-line melodies. Prior to the test, the melodies were repeated for varying numbers of study trials. Repetition of the Polish melodies increased both remember and know responses, while repetition of classical melodies increased remember but not know responses. When subjects were instructed to report guesses, guess responses were inversely related to remember and know responses and there were more guesses to lures than to targets. These findings establish that remembering and knowing are fully independent functionally and, by the same token, they provide further evidence against the idea that response exclusivity causes increases in remembering to force decreases in knowing. The findings also suggest that simultaneous increases in remembering and knowing occurred because the Polish melodies came from a genre for which the subjects had relatively little previous experience.     

Dimensionality of three adult, objective locus of control scales

Summary: The current conceptualization of the locus of control construct as unidimensional was challenged. The Rotter I-E scale, James I-E scale, and Adult Nowicki-Strickland I-E scale were examined with regard to their reported psychometric properties. The three scales were factor analyzed using a principal components method with varimax rotation. Results indicated a multifactor makeup for the three scales. It was suggested that attempts to measure a generalized expectancy for control be abandoned and that, instead, measurement attempts focus on the development of instruments specific to the behavioral and situational domains for which behavioral understanding, prediction, and control are sought.     

An inexpensive response-reading head for use with carousel slide projectors and serial anticipation tasks

An inexpensive response-reading head, using a binary code, is described. It can be attached to Carousel projectors and provides for the automatic recording of responses, response latencies, etc. in serial anticipation tasks.     

Apparent changes in the visual threshold as a function of subliminal stimulation: A preliminary report

A methodological difficulty in the traditional perceptual defence experiment is that of trying to use verbal reports as a measure of threshold changes. The following experiment handles this difficulty by using the method of closed loop control. The design involves obtaining from the subject a continuous record of his awareness threshold for light entering the left eye while verbal material, dichotomized regarding emotional value, is presented, below threshold to the right eye. The data from this first stage of the research provide some support for the hypothesis that the threshold of awareness will vary as a function of sub-threshold presentations.     

Right-hemisphere superiority for discriminating memorized from nonmemorized faces: Affective imagery, sex, and perceived emotionality effects

Sixty-four subjects, divided into four groups according to sex and type of memorization instruction, were given a manual RT task requiring discrimination of two memorized from two nonmemorized faces. Two types of memorization were employed, one emphasizing highly negative affective imagery about the faces being memorized (extreme sadness), the other relatively neutral imagery (feeling composed). Females in the affective imagery group were predicted to show left-visual-field superiority (LVFS), while females employing neutral imagery were not. Males were predicted to show LVFS regardless of imagery type because of their presumed strong right-hemispheric dominance for visual-spatial functions. Predictions were accurate for females; neither group of males showed significant LVFS. Post-experimental semantic differential ratings of the emotionality of the memorized faces showed that LVFS existed for faces rated as emotional, but not for faces rated as nonemotional. This effect was common to the sexes. Results indicate that right-hemispheric memory storage of faces can be induced in females through affective imagery and in both sexes via idiosyncratically perceived emotionality in the face stimuli. This effect of affectivity cannot be attributed to visual-spatial dominannce of the right hemisphere.     

An integrated model of meaning and sense activation and disambiguation.

A simulation of meaning and sense selection is presented. In the model, distributed representations are used for both unrelated meanings and related meaning senses; however, related meaning senses are assumed to be correlated. Related meaning senses are assumed to be learned associatively in similarly correlated contexts. Our model is sufficient to account for the contrasting results obtained in priming paradigms by Whitney, McKay, Kellas, and Emerson (1985) and Tabossi (1988).     

Context and homograph meaning resolution.

We describe an activation-based model of word recognition and apply it to the process of resolving the meaning of homographs presented in context. The interpretation of homographs was assessed by asking participants to decide whether a target word was related to the meaning of a sentence containing a homograph. These relatedness decisions varied systematically with the relative frequency of the homograph meanings, delay, and the nature of the sentence context. In the model, it was assumed that orthographic and contextual information combine additively to determine the activation of word meanings, and that the probability of a "related" response is determined by the activation level of the related meaning. The model accurately accounts for all observed effects, as well as their interaction. We conclude that the core process of lexical ambiguity resolution may be quite simple.