Stimulus factors and listening strategies in auditory memory: A theoretical analysis

A theory for the temporal course of perceptual coding during auditory short-term memory tasks is described. A low-level “sensor” and a high-level “identifier” process item and order information from stimulus word-strings. Both word durations and interword pauses are needed for this processing, and if adequate processing time is unavailable, perceptual delays will lead to degraded recall performance. Stimulus parameters and subject strategies interact to determine the quality and the order in which stimulus items are coded. These hypotheses are supported both by experiments using grammatical sentences and those using lists of unrelated words.     

Effect of prior body experience on adaptation to visual displacement

The effect of proprioceptive adaptation to visual displacement is to produce a violation of the normal constraints on the relative position of body parts. In order to investigate the effect of this violation of constraints on the adaptation, the relative position of body parts for a group of dancers and a group of nondancers was determined after 5 and 15 min of adaptation. Empirical and theoretical support were provided for the propositions that (1) there is a tendency to resist the violation of constraints, and (2) the nature of the adaptation process is such as to minimize the amount of violation of constraints.     

A note on cross-modality matching

”Stevens' law”, that the psychophysical law is a power function, is often taken to be confirmed by results of cross-modality matching experiments, for it predicts both the fact that cross-modality matching experiments yield power functions, and the exponents of these power functions. Both these predictions, however, follow from a more general form of the psychophysical law, of which Fechner's law is a special case. In view of this, an interpretation of cross-modality matching based on stimulus discriminability rather than sensation magnitude is proposed.     

Perception and immediate recall of normal and “compressed” auditory sequences

For a fixed presentation rate, the ratio of speech-to-pause time was varied in three experiments. Ss recalled seven-digit sequences or monitored for item or order information in addition to recall. Removing 33% of the speech and substituting pause time improved recall accuracy and monitoring reaction times. The data suggest that loss of order information in recall may result from cumulative perceptual delays when adequate pause time is unavailable.     

A common auditory-visual space” Evidence for its reality

This experiment compares two hypotheses concerning the relation between auditory anti, visual direction. The first, the “common space” hypothesis, is that both auditory and visual direction are represented on a single underlying direction dimension, so that comparisons between auditory and visual direction may be made directly. The second, the “disjunct space” hypothesis, is that there are two distinct internal dimensions, one for auditory direction and one for visual direction, and that comparison between auditory and visual direction involves a translation between these two dimensions. Both these hypotheses are explicated, using a signal detection theory framework, and evidence is provided for the common space hypothesis.     

Peer-mediated social-skills training and generalization in group homes

A multiple baseline across subjects design was used to evaluate generalization effects of a peer-tutoring procedure to teach social skills for individuals with developmental disabilities. Three residents with poor social skills living in community-based group homes served as participants in this study. Generalization data were collected during four conditions: (i) baseline (ii) social-skills training by therapist (iii) social-skills training by peer-tutor, and (iv) follow-up. Results demonstrated that participants did not generalize trained social skills to untrained settings (i.e., living room of a group home and community bowling alley) until the first participant was trained as a peer-tutor to train two other participants. These results were maintained 6 months after training was withdrawn. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Longitudinal Pathways to Reading Achievement at Age 7 Years: Child and Environmental Influences

Using a bioecological perspective, this longitudinal study examined the contribution of child and environmental factors to the prediction of reading achievement at age 7. Participants were 99 boys and their parents. Child factors included 24-month temperament (reactivity and self-regulation), 36-month language level, and 7-year ADHD symptoms; environmental factors included quality of the home environment (54 months), maternal education, and learning disability (LD) in the family. There were direct and indirect pathways to reading achievement. Direct pathways included language skills, home environment, ADHD symptoms, and LD in the family. Unexpectedly, the direct pathway from self-regulation was negative. Indirect pathways included self-regulation, maternal education, and reactivity. Given the stability of the trajectory of reading skills and academic performance from first grade onward, the early identification of those children most at risk for reading difficulties has implications for the type of intervention most appropriate for individual children.