Can Accidents be Predicted? An Empirical Test of the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire

Cent cinquante neuf jeunes gens remplirent un questionnaire dans ie but d'évaluer la fréquence de diverses erreurs mentales banales. Les réponses au questionnaire furent alors comparées aux dossiers de chauffeur des sujets. Ceux qui obtenaient le plus d'erreurs mentales, devaient probablement être aussi ceux qui avaient causé des accidents de circulation, mais la corrélation apparut seulement après l'exclusion de ceux des sujets qui avaient des dossiers de chauffeur remarquablement mauvais. Dans un deuxième groupe de cent cinquante deux hommes, les réponses au questionnaire différenciaient également ces sujets qui avaient causé des accidents de ceux qui ne l'avait pas fait.
A total of 159 young men filled out a questionnaire designed to assess the frequency of various common mental slips. Their responses were then compared with the driving records of the respondents. Those subjects reporting more mental slips were also more likely to have caused traffic accidents, but the relationship only emerged following exclusion of those subjects with remarkably bad driving records. In a second group of 152 men, questionnaire responses again differentiated those subjects who had caused accidents from those who had not.     

Impairment of voice and face recognition in patients with hemispheric damage

Voice and face recognition were tested in 21 left- and 9 right-hemisphere-damaged patients. Test materials were photographs and recordings of famous political and entertainment personalities. Pathological face recognition (prosopagnosia) and voice recognition (phonagnosia) were both significantly more prevalent in the right-hemisphere group. Only one instance of prosopagnosia and one of phonagnosia were observed in the left-hemisphere group, all of whom were aphasic. Of the right-hemisphere cases, there were four instances of each agnosia, with three patients showing a dual impairment. These findings are discussed in relation to differential modes of processing by the two cerebral hemispheres.     

Will infants search when ‘no toy’ is hidden? A study of implicit assumptions about the development of object permanence

In the Piagetian tradition, presence or absence of a sense of object permanence is inferred from whether an infant does or does not search when an object is occluded. This line of reasoning entails an implicit assumption, i.e. an infant will not search if no object is seen to disappear. This assumption was evaluated in three studies of 9- and 12-month-old infants' responses to ‘hiding’ toy and ‘no toy’ in different orders in one and two positions. The infants did not search for ‘no toy’ when it preceded toy hiding, but they did search for ‘no toy’ when it followed ‘toy’ under some conditions.