Carving nature at its joints: Paul Meehl's development of taxometrics

This article presents a brief summary of Paul Meehl's development of taxometrics. Of special concern is the question, Why did Paul Meehl develop taxometrics? It is shown that taxometrics played an integral role in Meehl's broader research program on the genetics of schizotaxia.     

Egocentric and nonegocentric coding in memory for spatial layout: Evidence from scene recognition

Much contemporary research has suggested that memories for spatial layout are stored with a preferred orientation. The present research examined whether spatial memories are also stored with a preferred viewpoint position. Participants viewed images of an arrangement of objects taken from a single viewpoint and subsequently were tested on their ability to recognize the arrangement from novel viewpoints that had been translated in either the lateral or the depth dimension. Lateral and forward displacements of the viewpoint resulted in increasing response latencies and errors. Backward displacement showed no such effect, nor did lateral translation that resulted in a centered "canonical" view of the arrangement. These results further constrain the specificity of spatial memory, while also providing some evidence that nonegocentric spatial information is coded in memory.     

Perceptions of intergenerational communication across cultures: an Italian case

406 Anglo-American, Italian-American, and Italian (Northern and Southern Italy) students were asked to evaluate past conversations with same-age peers, i.e., 17 to 30 years, and older adults, i.e., 65 years and older. While according older adults more deference, all cultural groups perceived older adults as more rigid and nonaccommodating than younger adults. Exchanges with older adults were reported as having more negative affect than were those with other young adults, and were also more likely to he avoided.     

Orientation specificity and spatial updating of memories for layouts

This article examines the degree to which knowledge about the body's orientation affects transformations in spatial memory and whether memories are accessed with a preferred orientation. Participants learned large paths from a single viewpoint and were later asked to make judgments of relative directions from imagined positions on the path. Experiments 1 and 2 contribute to the emerging consensus that memories for large layouts are orientation specific, suggesting that prior findings to the contrary may not have fully accounted for latencies. Experiments 2 and 3 show that knowledge of one's orientation can create a preferred direction in spatial memory that is different from the learned orientation. Results further suggest that spatial updating may not be as automatic as previously thought.