Assessing the costs and benefits of production in recognition

The production effect is a memory advantage for items studied aloud over items studied silently. Although it typically is found within subjects, here we also obtained it between subjects in a recognition task—providing new evidence that production can be an effective study strategy. Our experiment, and a set of meta-analyses, also evaluated whether the within effect reflects costs to silent items and/or benefits to aloud items. Contrary to a strong distinctiveness account, we found little evidence that aloud items show an additional within-subjects benefit. Instead, silent items suffered an additional within-subjects cost. Blocking silent and aloud items eliminated this cost, suggesting that the cost was due to mixing silent and aloud items. Our discussion focuses on implications for distinctiveness and strength accounts of the production effect and on how to implement production as an encoding strategy depending on the learner’s goals.     

Infants Anticipate Others' Social Preferences

In the current eye‐tracking study, we explored whether 12‐month‐old infants can predict others' social preferences. We showed infants scenes in which two characters alternately helped or hindered an agent in his goal of climbing a hill. In a control condition, the two characters moved up and down the hill in identical ways to the helper and hinderer but did not make contact with the agent; thus, they did not cause him to reach or not reach his goal. Following six alternating familiarization trials of helping and hindering interactions (help–hinder condition) or up and down interactions (up–down condition), infants were shown one test trial in which they could visually anticipate the agent approaching one of the two characters. As predicted, infants in the help–hinder condition made significantly more visual anticipations toward the helping than hindering character, suggesting that they predicted the agent to approach the helping character. In contrast, infants revealed no difference in visual anticipations between the up and down characters. The up–down condition served to control for low‐level perceptual explanations of the results for the help–hinder condition. Thus, together the results reveal that 12‐month‐old infants make predictions about others' behaviour and social preferences from a third‐party perspective. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Infants use social context to bind actions into a collaborative sequence

Eye tracking was used to show that 18‐month‐old infants are sensitive to social context as a sign that others’ actions are bound together as a collaborative sequence based on a joint goal. Infants observed five identical demonstrations in which Actor 1 moved a block to one location and Actor 2 moved the same block to a new location, creating a sequence of actions that could be considered either individual actions or collaboration. In the test phase, Actor 1 was alone and sitting so that she could reach both locations. The question was whether she would place a new block in the location she had previously (individual goal) or in the location that could be considered the goal of collaboration (joint goal). Importantly, in the Social condition, the actors were socially engaged with each other before and during the demonstration, while in the Non‐Social condition, they were not. Results revealed that infants in the Social condition spontaneously anticipated Actor 1 placing her block in the joint goal location more often than those in the Non‐Social condition. Thus, the social context seems to allow infants to bind actions into a collaborative sequence and anticipate joint rather than individual goals, giving insight into how actions are perceived using top‐down processing early in life.     

Tag, you're it: Tagging as an alternative to yes/no recognition in item method directed forgetting

The current study contrasted a standard yes/no recognition task with a tagging recognition task in the context of an item-method directed forgetting paradigm. During the study phase, a series of words was presented one at a time, each followed by an instruction to remember (R) or forget (F). The retention of R and F study words was tested using either a typical yes/no recognition task or a tagging recognition task in which participants labeled each word as “R”, “F” or “New”. The directed forgetting effect observed in each task was equivalent in magnitude. However, the tagging recognition task afforded an additional analysis of the errors of misattribution that was not possible with the more typical yes/no recognition task. Interestingly, when falsely recognizing a Foil word, participants were more likely to assign an “F” tag than an “R” tag. These errors of misattribution are consistent with existing accounts of directed forgetting that suggest R words are better encoded than F words. We argue for the utility of the tagging procedure, given it does not alter the directed forgetting effect normally seen with yes/no recognition but provides additional information about errors of misattribution.     

Directed forgetting shares mechanisms with attentional withdrawal but not with stop-signal inhibition

To explore the mechanisms underlying the ability to intentionally forget, the present study combined an itemmethod directed forgetting paradigm with tasks that measure stop-signal inhibition (Experiments 1 and 2) and inhibition of return (IOR; Experiment 2). Following each study-phase instruction to remember (R) or forget (F), a target was presented centrally (Experiment 1) or to the left or right in the visual periphery (Experiment 2); the target required a speeded response that was sometimes countermanded by a central stop signal. Although stopsignal reaction times were unaffected by the preceding memory instruction (or relationship with word-target location), F instructions improved stopping and delayed responses. Replicating previous findings in the literature, significant IOR was observed following F instructions but not following R instructions (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that intentional forgetting is an active cognitive process that more likely engages attentional mechanisms related to orienting than those related to stop-signal inhibition.     

Evaluating municipal policy: an analysis of a refuse packaging program

The effect of a municipal enforcement program to improve residents' packaging of refuse was analyzed in a multiple-baseline design across two areas of a city. The enforcement program involved instruction concerning refuse-packaging regulations, collection only of appropriately packaged refuse, and feedback notices to residents concerning the reasons for noncollection of their inadequately packaged refuse. Both the number of violations and the percentage of residences violating each day were markedly reduced during the enforcement program. Furthermore, sanitation workers considered that the packaging of refuse and the safety and efficiency of refuse collection had improved. This study served as a pilot evaluation of a policy change in the city sanitation department, and was functional in determining the direction of that policy.     

Community applications of instructional technology: training low-income proctors

A community education system might be most effectively implemented in low-income communities if it were deliverable by neighborhood residents. A proctor training manual, designed to teach neighborhood residents how to administer standardized learning units to their peers, was analyzed in two experiments. The results of Experiment I showed that the percentage of occurrence of proctor behaviors increased after completion of the manual. Supplementary data suggest that specified proctor behaviors generalize to actual instructional situations. The results of Experiment II showed that the percentage of occurrence of trainee behaviors was higher when instructional packages were administered by trained proctors than when administered by untrained proctors. This study demonstrates an effective procedure for training low-income community residents to serve as proctors for a community education system.