Current-events knowledge in adults: an investigation of age, intelligence, and nonability determinants.

This study expanded the scope of knowledge typically included in intellectual assessment to incorporate domains of current-events knowledge from the 1930s to the 1990s across the areas of art/humanities, politics/economics, popular culture, and nature/science/technology. Results indicated that age of participants was significantly and positively related to knowledge about current events. Moreover, fluid intelligence was a less effective predictor of knowledge levels than was crystallized intelligence. Personality (i.e. Openness to Experience) and self-concept were also positively related to current-events knowledge. The results are consistent with an investment theory of adult intellect, which views development as an ongoing outcome of the combined influences of intelligence-as-process, personality, and interests, leading to intelligence-as-knowledge (P. L. Ackerman, 1996b).     

Divine Contracts: Chinese New Religions and Shamanic Movements in Contemporary Malaysia

This paper concerns modern Chinese shamanic movements that encounter economic and bureaucratic rationalisation. The production of religious ideologies and the negotiation of ethnic identities will be examined through a case study of a Chinese religious movement in Malaysia, the Goddess of Mercy Devotional Society, which addresses itself to both the popular religious tradition and cosmopolitan influences. This movement exemplifies the attempt on the part of modern shamans to establish communications with the realm of the divine and to present a meaningful world-image within a rational conceptual framework that satisfies both the Chinese quest for ethnic identity and mystical experiences. Comparison of this movement with two other Chinese movements suggests that their emergence and popularity in the Malaysian Chinese community signal a transformation in the organisation of Chinese folk religion. The appearance of these three movements has given Chinese shamanism new meanings in terms of cultic syncretism within the context of resinification in an ethnically divided society.     

The relation between item identification difficulty and elaborative conceptual processing for children and adults

The four experiments concerned the relation between the difficulty of item identification processes, elaborative conceptual processing, and developmental differences in cued recall. Elaborative conceptual processing was manipulated by asking related ("How many are related?"), category ("How many are vehicles?"), and analytic ("How many usually carry freight?") orienting questions about four-word stimuli in which the words were categorically related (Bus-Airplane-Car-Train). The measures of elaborative processing were the speed and accuracy of question answers. Cued recall for the targets (Train) was assessed for one-word (Bus) or two-word (Bus-Airplane) cues, which were varied to determine if elaborative processing affected cue discriminability or constructability, or both. The difficulty of item identification was varied in several ways. In Experiment 1, the graphemic information was degraded in the acquisition stimuli, or the retrieval cues, or the stimulus words were intact. In Experiments 2 and 3, acquisition presentation time was varied and the stimuli were read by the experimenter or the subject. Experiment 4 featured pictures to determine generalizability. The results showed that elaborative conceptual processing facilitates recall. Most important, item identification processes limit elaborative conceptual processing for both words and pictures, and more for children than for college students.     

Storage and processing constraints on integrating story information in children and adults

In two experiments, this study examined the effects of integration complexity on the ability of child and adult listeners to integrate information from different sentences in a story. First and third graders and college adults were read stories containing incongruent event information and succeeding resolution information that explained the incongruency, and asked questions that probed incongruency recognition and resolution. Information storage complexity was manipulated by separating the event and resolution information and foregrounding or backgrounding the focal story characters. Processing complexity was manipulated by varying the inferential complexity of relating the resolution to the incongruent information, and the coreferential cues linking the event and resolution information. The results showed that increases in complexity adversely affected resolution integration, and more for the children than for the adults. The children's integration performance, in particular, was affected by theme discontinuity and coreferential complexity.     

Developmental differences in the use of retrieval cues to describe episodic information in memory

In four experiments, this study examined some reasons why second and fourth grade children use cues relatively ineffectively to retrieve episodic information in memory. Retrieval success was conceptualized as using a cue to describe episodic information in memory. The experiments manipulated factors hypothesized to affect the discriminability and constructability of compatible encodings of context cue information at retrieval. In general, the effects were accomplished by varying the specificity of cue-target information at acquisition, and similar or different samplings of cue information alone at retrieval by means of orienting questions. Experiment 1 varied the encoding of item specific or categorical information. Experiment 2 varied the encoding of supercategorical or subcategorical information. Experiment 3 used two acquisition trials, crossing Categorical × Item Specific encoding and repeating identical encoding experiences. Experiment 4 varied Separate and Interactive Imagery encoding instructions. The results showed that problems of both discriminability and constructability contribute to developmental differences in the use of retrieval cues.     

Effects of high and low dosages of methylphenidate in children with strong and sensitive nervous systems

This investigation was undertaken to explore the possible causes and consequences of the finding that attention- and learning-disordered children with sensitive (weak) nervous systems were titrated at higher dosages of methylphenidate than those with strong nervous systems. Pretreatment parent and teacher ratings of hyperkineticassociated behavior were no different for children typed as having strong or sensitive nervous systems or for those subsequently prescribed higher or lower dosages by a child psychiatrist “blind” to their type as well as condition (drug or placebo). However, those titrated at lower dosages, regardless of whether strong or sensitive, were rated as more improved than those given higher dosages. Pretreatment reaction time (RT) data suggested that sensitive types prescribed low dosages had less of a problem sustaining attention, and placebo RT data suggested that strong types titrated at low dosages had more of a problem sustaining attention. A contrast of placebo and drug RTs showed that strong types titrated at lower dosages improved more than strong types given higher dosages, whereas sensitive types given higher dosages improved more than sensitive types given lower dosages. The latter finding is thought to add support to the theory of Gray (1964), who suggested that, paradoxically, the weak nervous system needs a more intense stimulus than the strong to reach the concentration threshold.