Contribution of figural proportion, figural memory, figure-ground perception and severity of hearing loss to performance on spatial tests

348 adolescents, 176 male and 172 female, were administered six different spatial tests. Awareness of figural proportion, figural memory, and figure-ground perception contributed significantly to performance on spatial visualization tests but not to performance on spatial orientation tests. Similarly, severity of hearing loss was correlated with scores on visualization tests but not on spatial-orientation tests.     

The completeness of S

The subsystem S of Parry's AI [10] (obtained by omitting modus ponens for the material conditional) is axiomatized and shown to be strongly complete for a class of three valued Kripke style models. It is proved that S is weakly complete for the class of consistent models, and therefore that Ackermann's rule is admissible in S. It also happens that S is decidable and contains the Lewis system S4 on translation — though these results are not presented here. S is arguably the most relevant relevant logic known at this time to be decidable.I wish to thank Jill Pipher and Professora Nuel D. Belnap, Jr. and David Kaplan for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Social class and help-seeking behavior

Using Bernstein's theory of childhood socialization and Kohn's research on adult occupational experiences as the theoretical base, research was undertaken to study the relationship between social class (as measured by occupation and education) and help-seeking behavior. Intensive interviews (n = 42) and surveys (n = 838) were used as data. No evidence of an age or race effect was found. A sex-by-class effect was found. It was found that the lower the social class, the more likely were high values of conformity and the use of didactic help-seeking behavior for both males and females. The higher the respondent's social class, the more likely he or she valued autonomy and had had experiences using a negotiating help-seeking style if the respondent was a female. Males overwhelmingly employed a didactic style regardless of class.This study was supported by grants from the Administration on Aging, #90-A-644, and from the National Institute on Aging, NIA 5-POI-AG 00123. An enormous debt is owed to Joyce Asser for her encouragement and feedback during the development of this paper.     

The processing of structured and unstructured tonal sequences

The recall of hierarchically organized tonal sequences was investigated in two experiments. An adaptation of the technique of melodic dictation was employed, in which musically trained listeners notated each sequence after it was presented. Strong effects of sequence structure were obtained. Sequences whose tonal structure could be parsimoniously encoded in hierarchical fashion were recalled with a high level of accuracy. Sequences that could not be parsimoniously encoded produced substantially more errors in recall. Temporal segmentation was found to have a substantial effect on performance, which reflected grouping by temporal proximity regardless of tonal structure. The results provide evidence for the hypothesis that we encode tonal materials by inferring sequence structures and alphabets at different hierarchical levels, together with their rules of combination.     

What causes residual dual-task interference after practice?

Practice can dramatically reduce dual-task interference, but typically does not eliminate interference entirely. Residual interference after practice is especially large with certain non-preferred modality pairings (e.g., auditory–manual and visual–vocal). Does this residual interference imply the existence of a persistent central-processing bottleneck? To address this question, we transferred participants with previous dual-task practice to a psychological refractory period design. Although we observed residual dual-task costs in all four experiments, there was no evidence for a bottleneck, even with non-preferred modality pairings. We conclude that practice can eliminate the bottleneck limitation, but performance is still subject to other sources of interference, such as competition between central codes of the two tasks.     

Who I am, who we are, and why: links between emotions and causal attributions for self- and group discrepancies

Discrepancies between people's ought selves and their actual selves and their ideal selves and actual selves predict the emotions that individuals experience. The authors predicted that internal versus external causal attributions for self-discrepancies should moderate the relationship between self-discrepancies and emotions, resulting in more refined predictions for both agitation- and dejection-related emotions and for two additional types of emotion, namely, anger-related and discontent-related emotions. Results of two studies generally supported the predictions that agitation-related emotions and dejection-related emotions were positively associated with actual-ought discrepancies and actual-ideal discrepancies, respectively, only when causal attributions for the discrepancies were internally based. Anger-related emotions and emotions of discontent were positively associated with actual-ought and actual-ideal discrepancies, respectively, primarily when causal attributions were externally based. Study 2, which addressed group discrepancies and group-based emotions, generally replicated the findings when group identification was high, yielding a more complex model of the link between discrepancies and emotions.