Selection through Rejection: Reconsidering the Invariant Learning Paradigm

Two experiments are reported that investigate the nature of selections in the McGeorge and Burton (1990) invariant learning paradigm. McGeorge and Burton suggest that subjects implicitly acquire abstract knowledge of an invariant feature (usually the presence of the digit '3') in a set of 30 stimuli. McGeorge and Burton's analysis has recently been challenged by Cock, Berry, and Gaffan (1994) and by Wright and Burton (1995). In this paper, we demonstrate that performance is based on knowledge of other aspects of the learning set besides the invariant digit, but that this knowledge is still implicit. Altering the nature of the learning stimuli to highlight these co-varying features enhances the effects and increases the reporting of explicit knowledge. Our results indicate that performance within this paradigm is more easily characterized as rejection of salient negatives than selection of positive instances, but that salience is not based simply on similarity.     

Occupational Endeavor As Life History: Anne Roe

As an exemplar of the fulfilled and integrative life, Harvard Professor Emerita Anne Roe provides a model of both personal and professional achievement. In her adult life the roles of researcher, administrator and teacher have been in dialectical interaction with those of wife and mother defined in the normative terms of the times. Her work, complicated by years of chronic illness, has been concerned with the intellectual functions of normal, aphasic and mentally disordered adults; behavior of newborn infants; status of foster children from different backgrounds; the effects of alcohol; personalities of artists and scientists; the psychology of occupations; behavior and evolution; the psychology of creativity; and the relations between early experiences and career patterns. Professional recognition has taken many forms, including entry in the World Who's Who in Science in which she and her husband George Caylord Simpson, the evolutionist, are separately listed for achievement in distinct fields. Forced curtailment of professional life has led to development in arts and crafts as a new occupational endeavor.     

A Comparison of Suicide and Undetermined Deaths in Psychiatric Patients

ABSTRACT: Those people who had previously been patients of the Department of Mental Health of Missouri who died in the three year period 1972 through 1974 and whose deaths were designated as suicide or “undetermined whether purposely or accidentally inflicted,” were identified by matching statewide death tapes against the DMH data base. The demographic characteristics of the two groups are compared to ascertain if the members of the undetermined group are essentially similar to the suicides, as has frequently been hypothesized. It is found that, in general, the similarities are in areas which would not have had a direct influence on the medical examiner/coroner's verdict, whereas, the differences do highlight areas which could cause an indecisive verdict. The significance of the undetermined deaths is discussed.