Perceptual reactance and task performance.

57 female subjects participated in a study in which perceptual reactance was assessed by the kinesthetic figural aftereffects test. Subjects identified as augmenters were quicker than reducers on a disjunctive reaction time task and a significant interactive effect was found on a paired-associate task. Augmenters performed better on a similar list while reducers were more effective on a dissimilar list.     

Pupillary attributions of college students to happy and angry faces.

As evidence for an hypothesis that pupil size plays an important role in nonverbal communication, Hess (1975) has reported that adults draw in appropriately sized pupils on his happy and angry faces task. However, he did not report a statistical test of his data. In this study, we replicated Hess' research and found congruent with his hypothesis that college students (n = 223) draw in significantly larger pupils on the happy face.     

Field-dependence/field-independence and labeling of facial affect.

56 high school students were administered the Group Embedded Figures Test and the Pictures of Facial Affect. A low Pearson product-moment correlation of .02 was obtained between the measures. Data indicated that field-dependent and field-independent individuals were not signficantly different in their skills of labeling pictures of facial affect.     

Bilateral writing ability, cerebral organization, and hand posture

Among a group of 12 persons selected for the ability to write with ease with either hand, none were found to write using a hooked hand posture with either the right or left hand. Tests of verbal and manipulospatial ability indicated a normal balance of these two types of abilities, usually associated with the left and right hemispheres. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for cerebral organization and hand position in writing.     

Axiomatic and numerical conjoint measurement: An evaluation of diagnostic efficacy

Synthetic data are used to examine how well axiomatic and numerical conjoint measurement methods, individually and comparatively, recover simple polynomial generators in three dimensions. The study illustrates extensions of numerical conjoint measurement (NCM) to identify and model distributive and dual-distributive, in addition to the usual additive, data structures. It was found that while minimum STRESS was the criterion of fit, another statistic, predictive capability, provided a better diagnosis of the known generating model. That NCM methods were able to better identify generating models conflicts with Krantz and Tversky's assertion that, in general, the direct axiom tests provide a more powerful diagnostic test between alternative composition rules than does evaluation of numerical correspondence. For all methods, dual-distributive models are most difficult to recover, while consistent with past studies, the additive model is the most robust of the fitted models.Douglas Emery is now at the Krannert Graduate School of Management, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, on leave from the University of Calgary.     

Models for within-proposition representation tested by cued recall

A model is presented to account for the data from incremental cuing experiments that have been carried out to identify the representation of propositions in memory. In such experiments subjects first learn a list of sentences and are afterward cued for recall with words from the learned sentences. The model proposed distinguishes between a memory structure and stimulus and response processes. The all-or-none tendency in the data is captured by a Gestalt-like memory code. The model is compared with the stochastic theory of Anderson and Bower and the fragmentation hypothesis of Jones.     

Semantic categorization in a linear order problem

The present investigation was conducted to determine whether subjects could use categorical codes based on semantic memory information (gender of names) to make rapid decisions about the order of names in a linear series. Subjects were taught linear order problems in which 12 names (six male and six female) were either randomly ordered or blocked by sex. The results support a dual-process model which proposes that subjects use both categorical information (discrete linguistic codes) and serial position information when asked to make mental comparisons of arbitrarily ordered items. Furthermore, the data indicate that both the ordinal distance between the terms in the test pair (step size) and the serial position of the test terms in the linear order affect the reaction time to a particular test comparison.