Problem Solvers Adjust Cognitive Offloading Based on Performance Goals

When incorporating the environment into mental processing (cf., cognitive offloading), one creates novel cognitive strategies that have the potential to improve task performance. Improved performance can, for example, mean faster problem solving, more accurate solutions, or even higher grades at university.¹ Although cognitive offloading has frequently been associated with improved performance, it is yet unclear how flexible problem solvers are at matching their offloading habits with their current performance goals (can people improve goal‐related instead of generic performance, e.g., when being in a hurry and aiming for a “quick and dirty” solution?). Here, we asked participants to solve a cognitive task, provided them with different goals—maximizing speed (SPD) or accuracy (ACC), respectively—and measured how frequently (Experiment 1) and how proficiently (Experiment 2) they made use of a novel external resource to support their cognitive processing. Experiment 1 showed that offloading behavior varied with goals: Participants offloaded less in the SPD than in the ACC condition. Experiment 2 showed that this differential offloading behavior was associated with high goal‐related performance: fast answers in the SPD, accurate answers in the ACC condition. Simultaneously, goal‐unrelated performance was sacrificed: inaccurate answers in the SPD, slow answers in the ACC condition. The findings support the notion of humans as canny offloaders who are able to successfully incorporate their environment in pursuit of their current cognitive goals. Future efforts should be focused on the finding's generalizability, for example, to settings without feedback or with high mental workload.     

The Decoding of Emotional Concepts in Patients with Focal Cerebral Lesions

The effects of focal brain lesions on the decoding of emotional concepts in facial expressions were investigated. Facial emotions are hierarchically organized patterns comprising (1) structural surface features, (2) discrete (primary) emotional categories and (3) secondary dimensions, such as valence and arousal.Categoricaldecoding was measured using (1) selection of category labels and selection of the named emotion category; (2) matching one facial expression with two choice expressions.Dimensionaldecoding was assessed by matching one face with two different expressions with regard to valence or arousal. 70 patients with well documented cerebral lesions and 15 matched hospital controls participated in the study. 27 had left brain damage (LBD; 10 frontal, 10 temporal, 7 parietal); 37 had right brain damage (RBD; 15 frontal, 11 temporal, 11 parietal). Six additional patients had lesions involving both frontal lobes. Right temporal and parietal lesioned patients were markedly impaired in the decoding of primary emotions. The same patients also showed a reduced arousal decoding. In contrast to several patients with frontal and left hemisphere lesions, emotional conceptualization and face discrimination was not independent in these groups. No group differences were observed in valence decoding. However, right frontal lesions appeared to interfere with the discrimination of negative valence. Moreover, a distraction by structural features was noted in RBD when facial identities were varied across stimulus and response pictures in matching tasks with differing conceptual load. Our results suggest that focal brain lesions differentially affect the comprehension of emotional meaning in faces depending on the level of conceptual load and interference of structural surface features.     

Determinants of Differential Acculturation of Developmental Timetables among Adolescent Immigrants to Germany

The acculturation of developmental timetables for autonomy was studied in a sample of 220 ethnic German immigrants from Romania, Poland, and countries of the former Soviet Union. A distinction was made between the timing of autonomy from parental supervision and autonomy in social relationships. Four waves of semi-annual asessments were conducted for two groups, newcomers (0–18 months of residence in Germany) and experienced immigrants (more than 18–36 months). From these assessments a gradual acculturation of timetables was observed, resulting, as expected, in considerably earlier ages at which the two facets of autonomy were accomplished. The rate of acculturation was predicted to be related to prior interindividual differences in parent-adolescent interaction and frequency of adolescents' activities outside the home. As expected, higher levels of conflict and permissiveness reported by parents, and lower levels of monitoring and more frequent out-of-home activities, corresponded to a more accelerated acculturation to earlier timetables concerning autonomy from parental supervision—especially among the newcomers. With regard to autonomy in social relationships, the results were less clear, presumably due to the fact that prior interpersonal experiences were less associated with this facet of autonomy. Higher levels of the family variables studied encourage “escape” from the constraints of the newcomers' provisional homes, and thus provide opportunities to make contacts and adopt the lifestyle of adolescents from the general German population. In general, prediction was not possible concerning adolescents whose residence in Germany was longer than 18 months. For this group of immigrants, such escapes no longer serve the expected purpose because they have access to other opportunities, which were not measured in this study.     

Room to Grow: How Divergent Approaches to Counselling Can Enrich One Another

The ideas of Freud and Rogers have been significant in the development of two seemingly opposing views of therapy. In this paper, some of the basic premises underlying the two approaches are discussed, with the aims of establishing areas of similarity and difference, and exploring how each might be enriched by the other and by some of the innovatory ideas of Robert Langs.     

The comprehension and recall of similes as a function of context and cue

Participants read 56 sentence pairs and attempted to judge if the context sentence of each pair was related to the figurative message of the following simile. Reaction times and error rates both indicated that (a) participants could judge subject-related contexts more easily that predicate-related contexts, (b) they could judge irrelevant contexts more easily than misleading ones, and (c) these two effects were relatively independent of one another. The cued recall of similes previously paired with relevant or misleading contexts was affected by both a context effect (contexts containing a simile's predicate led to better recall than those containing its subject) and, even more strongly, a cuing effect (the simile's predicate was a better cue than its subject), whereas the cued recall of similes previously paired with irrelevant contexts was affected only by the context effect. In no case was there evidence of an interaction that would have indicated that a cue would be more potent if it referred to the same simile term as had the context.     

Person perception as a function of occupation and sex

The purpose of this study was to assess perception of stimulus persons in sex-appropriate, sex-inappropriate, and neutral occupations, using the sexual dimension of the occupations, the sex of the person-in-occupation, and the sex of the perceiver as independent variables. Male and female Ss rated two stimulus persons (one female and one male) in each of 12 selected occupations (4 masculine, 4 feminine, and 4 neutral occupations) on 20 bipolar rating scales. The scales represented the following factors: Leadership, Interpersonal Adjustment and Likability, Professional and Intellectual Competence, Personal Adjustment, Social Sensitivity, Activity, Happiness in Home Life, Physical Attractiveness, and Liberalism and Individualism. Results indicated that sexual dimension of the occupation and the sex-appropriateness/inappropriateness of the occupation have strong effects on person perception.This study is based on part of a doctoral dissertation in psychology at the Ohio State University, under the direction of Samuel H. Osipow. Partial results were presented at the Western Psychological Association convention, April 1976. Thanks are extended to David Shinar for consultation and statistical analysis of the data.     

The influence of decision task and deliberation style on the verdict of the juries

The influence of decision task and deliberation style on the verdict of the juries. In the Kameda's Deliberation Style Model the emission of verdicts of responsibility when the deliberation style of the juries (elemental/compound) and the type of decision task (disjunctive/conjunctive) are jointly manipulated, is favoured in certain conditions. Given the consequences that these approaches could have in real judicial processes, this model is analyzed using a manslaughter crime under the Spanish judicial context conditions (nine members juries and seven or five members majorities emitting a verdict of guilty or not guilty, respectively). The obtained results indicated a better operation of the model when a conjunctive decision task was demanded.     

Schizotypy and verbal memory in the adolescent general population

The following study examines the relationship between verbal memory deficits and schizotypal traits measured psychometrically from a non- clinical adolescent population. In this transversal analytical study participated 139 subjects. They were secondary school students, with ages ranging from 13 to 16 years old (mean= 14, 35; Sta.Dev.= 0, 548). After administrating the scales O-LIFE (psychometrical schizotypy), CVLT (verbal memory), and Letters and Numbers subtest of WAIS-III (working memory), data was analyzed utilizing Pearson correlations and mean comparison test. Results showed lack of relations between schizotypy measures and working memory. Nonetheless, some of the O-LIFE dimensions correlated with verbal memory. These findings support partly the literature reviewed. Yet, more work focused on schizotypy and cognitive deficits as risk factors are suggested.     

Negative bodily self in suicide attempters

In the present study we investigated the relationship between suicidal behavior and aspects of bodily perception and parental care. Measures of bodily perception included measures of tactile sensitivity, body attitudes, and body experiences. Measures of parental care included parental bonding, negative and positive touch, and early maltreatment. One hundred and two adolescents (suicidal and nonsuicidal inpatients, and a control group) participated in the study. It was hypothesized that suicidal adolescents would (1) have higher tactile sensation thresholds, and more negative body attitudes and experiences; and (2) report less parental care, lower positive and higher negative parental touch, and higher parental maltreatment. It was also hypothesized that bodily sensitivity would mediate the relationship between suicidal tendencies and perceived negative early care. These hypotheses were confirmed. The role of a negative bodily self in suicidal behavior is proposed and discussed.     

Age of acquisition effects in picture naming: evidence for a lexical-semantic competition hypothesis

In many tasks the effects of frequency and age of acquisition (AoA) on reaction latencies are similar in size. However, in picture naming the AoA-effect is often significantly larger than expected on the basis of the frequency-effect. Previous explanations of this frequency-independent AoA-effect have attributed it to the organisation of the semantic system or to the way phonological word forms are stored in the mental lexicon. Using a semantic blocking paradigm, we show that semantic context effects on naming latencies are more pronounced for late-acquired than for early-acquired words. This interaction between AoA and naming context is likely to arise during lexical-semantic encoding, which we put forward as the locus for the frequency-independent AoA-effect.