The making of meaning: comments on Hofstee and Ten Berge

Hofstee and Ten Berge (2004/this issue) outline a method of scale transformation that places scores on a common absolute scale. This contrasts with traditional relative methods of transformation, which involve scaling in relation to a sample mean. Their primary intention seems to be to produce a scale that is intrinsically meaningful. This issue of scale meaning is discussed in some detail, including reference to an alternate approach to absolute scaling offered by Cohen, Cohen, Aiken, and West (1999). Ultimately, neither approach to absolute scaling seems completely satisfactory as a resolution to this problem. It is suggested that the lack of meaning inherent to many psychosocial measures is a natural product of traditional aggregative practices in scale development and may be invulnerable to statistical correction.     

Naming and categorization in young children: II. Listener behavior training

Following pretraining with everyday objects, 1- to 4-year-old children received listener training with three pairs of arbitrary stimuli of differing shapes. For each pair, 9 children were trained to select one stimulus in response to the spoken word /zog/ and the other to the spoken word /vek/. Next, in the look-at-sample category match-to-sample test, none categorized the six stimuli correctly when asked to look at the sample before selecting from five comparisons. Seven of these children failed a subsequent test of corresponding speaker behavior (tact test); following tact training, 5 of them passed either a repeat of the look-at-sample category test (2 subjects) or an alternative category test (3 subjects) in which they were required to tact the sample before selecting comparisons. The remaining 2 failed both category tests. Of the 2 who passed the tact test, 1 passed the tact-sample category test; the other failed to complete category testing. Two children were next given a second stimulus set. One passed the look-at-sample category test and the tact test; the other failed both tests but passed the tact-sample category test after tact training. The results show that 1- to 4-year-old children may learn listener behavior without corresponding speaker behavior. The results also show that common listener behavior is not sufficient to establish arbitrary stimulus classes, and they are consistent with the proposition that naming may be necessary for categorization of such stimuli.     

The hot hand fallacy and the gambler’s fallacy: Two faces of subjective randomness?

The representativeness heuristic has been invoked to explain two opposing expectations--that random sequences will exhibit positive recency (the hot hand fallacy) and that they will exhibit negative recency (the gambler's fallacy). We propose alternative accounts for these two expectations: (1) The hot hand fallacy arises from the experience of characteristic positive recency in serial fluctuations in human performance. (2) The gambler's fallacy results from the experience of characteristic negative recency in sequences of natural events, akin to sampling without replacement. Experiment 1 demonstrates negative recency in subjects' expectations for random binary outcomes from a roulette game, simultaneously with positive recency in expectations for another statistically identical sequence-the successes and failures of their predictions for the random outcomes. These findings fit our proposal but are problematic for the representativeness account. Experiment 2 demonstrates that sequence recency influences attributions that human performance or chance generated the sequence.     

Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: evidence from the Simon task

Previous work has shown that bilingualism is associated with more effective controlled processing in children; the assumption is that the constant management of 2 competing languages enhances executive functions (E. Bialystok, 2001). The present research attempted to determine whether this bilingual advantage persists for adults and whether bilingualism attenuates the negative effects of aging on cognitive control in older adults. Three studies are reported that compared the performance of monolingual and bilingual middle-aged and older adults on the Simon task. Bilingualism was associated with smaller Simon effect costs for both age groups; bilingual participants also responded more rapidly to conditions that placed greater demands on working memory. In all cases the bilingual advantage was greater for older participants. It appears, therefore, that controlled processing is carried out more effectively by bilinguals and that bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses in certain executive processes.     

Enhancing accuracy in observational test scoring: the comprehensive system as a case example

Inaccuracies in administration and scoring can potentially compromise the validity of any standardized psychosocial measure. The threat is particularly pertinent to methods involving behavioral observation, a category that includes many intelligence tests, neuropsychological measures, personality assessment instruments, and diagnostic procedures. Despite evidence and conjecture that errors in testing procedure are common for at least some of these measures and that these errors are often severe enough to influence interpretation, the topic has received relatively little attention. In particular, the absence of any safeguard against inaccurate test use in clinical situations can put the respondent at risk and violates ethical standards for the use of tests. In this article, I review some issues surrounding accuracy in testing procedures, including a discussion of what is known about the problem, an evaluation of several approaches to improving testing practices, and a review of recommendations for the statistical evaluation of rater accuracy. In this article, I use the Rorschach Comprehensive System (Exner, 1993) to demonstrate the concepts discussed.     

A comparison of the PAI and MMPI-2 as predictors of faking bad in college students

Both the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2; Butcher et al., 2001) and Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey, 1991) offer a large set of scales devoted to the identification of response styles. This study directly compared the effectiveness of the 2 inventories as indicators of overreporting. The 2 measures were administered to 52 college students instructed to fake bad under conditions describing either a forensic (n = 24) or psychiatric (n = 28) setting as well as to 432 psychiatric patients. Results indicated that the MMPI-2 F - K index and Fp Scale were the best single indicators of a faking bad response style and that the MMPI-2 scales were the better indicators as a set. However, the PAI scales demonstrated a significant level of incremental validity over the MMPI-2 indicators in every analysis conducted. The findings suggest that either inventory offers an effective approach to the detection of overreporting, and administering both inventories can enhance the accuracy of prediction further.     

Cognition through the lifespan: mechanisms of change

Cognitive abilities rise steeply from infancy to young adulthood and then are either maintained or decline to old age, depending on the specific ability. This pattern suggests corresponding continuities of mechanism and process, but it is striking that the fields of cognitive development and cognitive aging make little contact with each other's methods and theories. In this review we examine reasons for this cultural separation, and show how recent findings from both areas fit a framework couched in terms of cognitive representation and control. These two broad factors have very different lifespan trajectories; consideration of their relative growth and decline makes it clear that cognitive aging is not simply 'development in reverse'. This framework is offered in light of recent interest in finding greater continuity throughout the lifespan and creating a more comprehensive explanation of cognitive function and cognitive change.     

The effects of aging on selectivity and control in short-term recall

The ability to control encoding and retrieval processing strategically is critical for the efficient use of memory. We examined the ability of younger and older adults to selectively remember words on the basis of their arbitrary point values by using a technique developed by Watkins and Bloom (1999). In the first three experiments, younger subjects recalled more words than did older subjects, but an independent index of recall selectivity showed that older subjects were apparently more successful in selecting higher valued words. However, a fourth experiment showed that this superior selectivity on the part of older adults was attributable to their greater proportional reliance on primary memory recall. Overall, the data suggest that although older adults recall fewer words than do younger adults, they exert as much control over some aspects of encoding.     

Cuing interacts with perceptual load in visual search

We tested the strong form of the perceptual-load hypothesis, which posits that the amount of perceptual load is the only factor determining whether attention can be effectively focused. Participants performed a visual search task under conditions of low and high load and with either a 100% valid spatial cue or no spatial cue. With no cue, participants showed evidence of processing to-be-ignored stimuli when perceptual load was low but not when it was high, consistent with the perceptual-load hypothesis. However, with a 100% valid spatial cue, participants showed little evidence of processing to-be-ignored stimuli, even when perceptual load was low. These results suggest that although perceptual load may be an important factor in attentional selectivity, load alone is not sufficient to explain how and when selective attention is effective.