The height + width = area of a rectangle rule in five-year-olds: effects of stimulus distribution and graduation of the response scale.

This study attempts to account for disparities between the Anderson and Cuneo (1978), Leon (1982), and Lautrey, Mullet, and Paques (1989) studies in regard to children's area judgment. Two task variables were manipulated: stimulus distribution (biased/unbiased) and the type of response scale (graduated/ungraduated). Three age groups (5, 6, and 7 year olds) were tested. The mean integration pattern for 5-year-olds presented a negatively biased stimulus distribution, and an ungraduated response scale was highly convergent and suggested the use of a centration rule (replication of the Lautrey et al. results). When 5-year-olds were presented with an unbiased stimulus distribution and a graduated scale, the integration pattern was only slightly convergent (as in Leon). The effects of two factors (age and graduation) were significant and combined additively: The older the child, the more graduated the response scale and the more the integration pattern tended to form three ascending parallel lines (the Anderson & Cuneo results).     

Employment And Family As Determinants Of Anticipated Life Satisfaction: Contrasting European And Maghrebi People’s Viewpoints

The present study examined the relationship between life satisfaction, personal employment, spouse employment, and family responsibilities as perceived by lay people and, more specifically, studied the extent to which the additive threshold model evidenced by Macri and Mullet American Journal of Psychology 116, pp. 581–611 (2003) and Bouazzoui and Mullet Journal of Happiness Studies 3, pp. 129–159 (2002) on Greek and French samples can be generalized to a Maghrebi sample. One hundred young French adults of Maghrebi origin were presented with several vignettes depicting family conditions in terms of the three variables. Their task was to rate each vignette in terms of anticipated life satisfaction. The rule that best accounted for anticipated satisfaction was the hypothesized additive threshold rule: Anticipated Satisfaction=Proximity to optimal personal employment level + Proximity to spouse optimal employment level + Proximity to optimal family size, as far as acceptable personal and spouse employment levels are considered. When unacceptable personal or spouse employment levels were present, the level of satisfaction with life that was derived from the other sources was strongly reduced.     

Information integration in an area judgment task: effect of aids on children's perceptual judgments

This study was designed to examine the cognitive processes involved in perceptual judgments of area with the methodology and concepts of Anderson's (1981) information integration theory. The Area = Height + Width rule, which Anderson and Cuneo (1978) showed to be operant in children's judgments, can in fact cover two different processes. Children may make a height judgment and then a length judgment and apply an additive integration operation to both. Alternatively, children may base themselves on the figure outline and estimate total length directly as a function of the distance scanned. Similarly, the multiplicatory integration pattern can result either from applying a multiplicatory operation to separate estimates or from visual exploration of the area bounded by the figure. In the present experiment, the characteristics of the areas of the test figures were modified (perimeter marking, rows of Xs covering the area, etc.) to elicit additive or multiplicatory integration patterns as a function of condition. The findings demonstrate that the second interpretation of both rules is more likely.     

Judgments of quantity and conservation of quantity: the area of a rectangle

This study examines the relationships between perceptive judgment of quantity and conservation judgment of quantity with regard to the concept of area. Twenty children who passed an area conservation task (mean age = 8) and 20 children who failed it (mean age = 6, 7) were administered an area judgment task. This task was a replication of Anderson and Cuneo's study (1978, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 107, 335-378). The conserving children generally appeared to apply an additive rule (the height and width rule) observed by Anderson and Cuneo in 5 year olds. The nonconserving children in contrast generally presented patterns suggesting centration on one of the two dimensions. The implications for Anderson's and Piaget's conceptions of conservation development are discussed.     

EXTENSION TEMPORELLE DES PROJETS PERSONNELS AU COURS DE LA VIEILLESSE*

The future time perspective (FTP) of 361 elderly persons was studied. Personal projects (goal objects or concrete motivations) were collected by means of the sentence completion technique and were classified in temporal categories. The future extension index (ratio between short- and long-term projects) shows that the FTP of both sexes is similar. Concerning the relation between FTP and age, we observed that the number of subjects with a long FTP is reduced as the age increases. On the other hand, when we consider all the data, 17% of the answers are classified in the near future (less than one year) whereas 52% are related to distant future. The future is far from disappearing during the old age. The FTP is in relation with socio-economic status and schooling, but the ‘effects’ of these variables on the FTP are interwoven. The results were not inconsistent with the idea that subjects with high socio-economic status (who also have more years of schooling) are characterized by a longer FTP. From the results, we suggest implications for research and for professional practice with the elderly.     

Recent study,but not retrieval,of knowledge protects against learning errors

Surprisingly, people incorporate errors into their knowledge bases even when they have the correct knowledge stored in memory (e.g., Fazio, Barber, Rajaram, Ornstein, & Marsh, 2013). We examined whether heightening the accessibility of correct knowledge would protect people from later reproducing misleading information that they encountered in fictional stories. In Experiment 1, participants studied a series of target general knowledge questions and their correct answers either a few minutes (high accessibility of knowledge) or 1 week (low accessibility of knowledge) before exposure to misleading story references. In Experiments 2a and 2b, participants instead retrieved the answers to the target general knowledge questions either a few minutes or 1 week before the rest of the experiment. Reading the relevant knowledge directly before the story-reading phase protected against reproduction of the misleading story answers on a later general knowledge test, but retrieving that same correct information did not. Retrieving stored knowledge from memory might actually enhance the encoding of relevant misinformation.     

Suggestibility From Stories: Can Production Difficulties and Source Monitoring Explain a Developmental Reversal?

Children's memories improve throughout childhood, and this improvement is often accompanied by a reduction in suggestibility. In this context, it is surprising that older children learn and reproduce more factual errors from stories than do younger children (Fazio & Marsh, 2008 Fazio , L. K. , & Marsh , E. J. ( 2008 ). Older, not younger, children learn more false facts from stories . Cognition , 106 , 1081 – 1089 .[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The present study examined whether this developmental reversal is limited to production tests, or whether younger children are still less suggestible when the final test (multiple-choice) asks them to recognize the answer. A second goal was to explore the role of source monitoring in children's suggestibility by examining children's awareness of learning within, versus before, the experiment. Five-year-olds and 7-year-olds listened to stories containing correct, neutral, and misleading references and later took either a multiple-choice or short-answer general knowledge test. In addition, they judged whether each answer had appeared in the stories and whether they had known it before the experiment. Critically, a developmental reversal in suggestibility was observed on both tests; younger children were less suggestible even when faced with the story errors at test. Although older children showed superior source discriminability for whether their answers had appeared in the stories, they showed an illusion of prior knowledge, believing they had known their misinformation answers all along. To this effect, older children's increased suggestibility may be due not only to their superior memory capacity for specific story errors, but also to their ability and tendency to integrate story information into their knowledge base.     

Players' quality of play and overall interest of the game in dyadic competition

These experiments examined the cognitive processes involved in judging the quality of play of a player competing against another player and the overall interest of a competitive game as a function of the players' respective ability and motivation levels. For the quality of play of one player, a very simple information integration rule was found. Quality of play was judged almost exclusively as an additive function of the ability and motivation levels of the player. For the interest of the game, an apparently complex but fundamentally simple integration rule was found. For a game to be very interesting, players had to be both highly able and highly motivated; for a game to be somewhat interesting, each player had to be at least either highly able or highly motivated; and all other configurations corresponded to lower expected levels of interest.