Vocalization-at-presentation and immediate recall, with varying presentation-rates

An experiment is reported in which the subject read visually presented lists with four different degrees of vocalization; immediately after reading each list he was required to reproduce it either aloud or in writing. Each list consisted of eight consonants and presentation rates were varied between I and 4 letters per sec. For any given series of lists, the subject was asked either to read the letters silently, or to mouth them silently, or to whisper them, or to say them aloud while reading.

At the fastest presentation-rate immediate recall improved monotonically with the degree of vocalization during reading of the lists; at slower rates this generalization held less well, especially for the lower degrees of vocalization. Vocalization was most helpful at the highest presentation-rate.

The overall amount correctly recalled was better for more slowly presented lists and for written as opposed to spoken recall. Analysis of the errors suggested that acoustic confusions were affected by the conditions of presentation; and that serial order intrusions were independent of presentation-or recall-conditions. An apparent variation of transpositions with voicing-and-recall-method failed to reach statistical significance. Theoretical implications of the experiment are discussed, including reference to Broadbent's theory of short-term memory (1958).     

BIOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Abstract. The sciences may be conceptualized as a hierarchy ranked by level of organization (e.g., many-body physics ranks above particle physics). Each science serves as an antidiscipline for the science above it; that is, between each pair, tense but creative interplay is inevitable. Biology has advanced through such tension between its subdisciplines and now can serve as an antidiscipline for the social sciences—for anthropology, for example, by examining the connection between cultural and biological evolution; for psychology, by addressing the nature of learning and the structure of the unconscious; for economics, by examining economically irrational behavior and by comparing economic activity in humans and other species. Sociology, concerned mainly with advanced literate societies, is relatively remote from the genetic basis of human social behavior. However, moving between biological and social levels of organization generates richness and points to new and unexpected principles.     

Reflections on uncomplemented philosophies,integrated curriculums and words that bind and separate in counseling and clinical psychology

Should counseling psychology remain a distinct specialty or should it merge with clinical psychology? Recently, a growing amount of attention has been directed toward the increasing similarities between the counseling and clinical specialties, and musings about integrating them into a generic training model have emerged. This position paper considers some problems with the current divisions existing between counseling and clinical psychology. Three basic points are examined: (a) the effects of language systems on the counseling and clinical specialties; (b) the normal-abnormal dimension of behavior as a weak justification for distinct specialties; and (c) the fostering of distorted views of human behavior through counseling and clinical training programs.     

PIGEONS ARE SENSITIVE TO THE SPATIAL ORGANIZATION OF COMPLEX VISUAL STIMULI

Abstract— Two experiments investigated the role of spatial organisation in the discrimination and generalization of complex visual stimuli by pigeons. In Experiment 1, after pigeons had been trained to discriminate line drawings of four objects, they were tested with novel pictures in which the same component parts of the objects were spatially rearranged. The spatially scrambled pictures led to a dramatic drop in recognition accuracy, hut responding remained above chance. In Experiment 2, pigeons reached a high level of discriminative performance when required to choose among four different spatial arrangements of the same object parts. These results confirm Cerella's (1980) conclusion that pigeons discriminate the component parts of complex visual stimuli, but. unless it is assumed that the scrambling deleted or created emergent features, the results disconfirm his conclusion that spatial organization plays no role in pigeons' picture perception.     

Person-centered theory and the contemporary practice of psychological testing

This paper examines the effects of person-centered theory on contemporary psychological testing. Seven basic ideas or assumptions, which are integral to and guide the testing process, are identified and briefly discussed. Each idea is considered to have been affected either directly or indirectly by person-centered philosophy. Some of the ways in which these ideas are reflected in contemporary testing practice are indicated.     

Arguing about definitions

What are the implications of taking seriously Chaïm Perelman's proposition that “definitions are rhetorical”? Efforts to find Real Definitions are dysfunctional to the extent they direct argumentation toward pseudo “is” claims and away from explicit “ought” claims about how words are to be used. Addressing definitional disputes explicitly as propositions ofought rather thanis could put on the agenda the pragmatic concerns of definitional choice that might otherwise remain tacit.     

Twenty-five basic theorems in situation and world theory

Conclusion The foregoing set of theorems forms an effective foundation for the theory of situations and worlds. All twenty-five theorems seem to be basic, reasonable principles that structure the domains of properties, relations, states of affairs, situations, and worlds in true and philosophically interesting ways. They resolve 15 of the 19 choice points defined in Barwise (1989) (see Notes 22, 27, 31, 32, 35, 36, 39, 43, and 45). Moreover, important axioms and principles stipulated by situation theorists are derived (see Notes 33, 37, and 38). This is convincing evidence that the foregoing constitutes a theory of situations. Note that worlds are just a special kind of situation, and that the basic theorems of world theory, which were derived in previous work, can still be derived in this situation-theoretic setting. So there seems to be no fundamental incompatibility between situations and worlds — they may peacably coexist in the foundations of metaphysics. The theory may therefore reconcile two research programs that appeared to be heading off in different directions. And we must remind the reader that the general metaphysical principles underlying our theory were not designed with the application to situation theory in mind. This suggests that the general theory and the underlying distinction have explanatory power, for they seem to relate and systematize apparently unrelated phenomena.This research was conducted at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). I would like to thank John Perry for generously supporting my research both at CSLI and in the Philosophy Department at Stanford. I would also like to thank Bernard Linsky, Chris Menzel, Harry Deutsch and Tony Anderson for many worthwhile and interesting suggestions for improving the paper. An earlier version of the paper, more narrowly focused on situation theory, has appeared in Zalta (1991).     

Orientation-invariant transfer of training in the identification of rotated natural objects

The effects of stimulus orientation on naming were examined in two experiments in which subjects identified line drawings of natural objects following practice with the objects at the same or different orientations. Half the rotated objects were viewed in the orientation that matched the earlier presentations, and half were viewed at an orientation that mismatched the earlier presentations. Systematic effects of orientation on naming time were found during the early presentations. These effects were reduced during later presentations, and the size of this reduction did not depend on the orientation in which the object had been seen originally. The results are consistent with a dual-systems model of object identification in which initially large effects of disorientation are the result of a normalization process such as mental rotation, and in which attenuation of the effects is due to a shift from the normalization system to a feature/part-based