Cognitive processes in well-defined and ill-defined problem solving

We investigated the relationship between two kinds of problem solving using Kitchener's model of hierarchical cognitive processing. We predicted that performance on well-defined problems (i. e. those with a single, guaranteed solution) would be independent of ill-defined problems (i. e. those with multiple, non-guaranteed solutions). We also predicted that self-reported epistemic beliefs (i. e. assumptions about the nature and acquisition of knowledge) would be related to ill-defined, but not well-defined, solutions. Results confirmed these predictions. We concluded that well-defined and ill-defined problems require separate cognitive processes and that epistemic beliefs play an important role in ill-defined problem solving. These findings supported Kitchener's three-level model of problem solving.     

Contrasting Approaches in Marital Counseling

My Aim in this paper is to look at the therapist-marital couple relationship as a social system, and from this perspective to outline some aspects of the difference between treating a husband or wife as an individual patient and treating them together as a marital couple.
I will try to differentiate individual treatment and treatment of the marital pair on two dimensions: their respective use as sources of data about the marital relationship, for both therapy and research, and their potentialities for changing the marital interaction.     

Variations in blink rate during non-visual tasks

A total of fifty-five subjects were tested in three experimental situations. Blinking was recorded electrically, and related to various features of the three non-visual tasks. A new type of suction electrode was developed for this purpose.

It was found that blink rate fell below the normal resting rate during the learning of a stylus maze, and during a special audio-tracking task. During pauses between each trial, blink rate was above the resting rate.

There was a significant tendency for those subjects who showed the greatest difference in blink rate during the trials and the pauses between each trial to make the fewest errors per run of the stylus maze.

In the audio-tracking task the subjects followed a changing note with a second oscillator. Blink rate was found to be inversely related to the rate of change of the course tone.     

Evoked potentials and stages of information processing: Methods of analysis

The use of principal components analysis (PCA) for the study of evoked-response data may be complicated by variations from one trial to another in the latency of underlying brain events. Such variation can come from either random intra-and intersubject variability or from the effects of independent variables that are manipulated between conditions. The effect of such variability is investigated by simulation of these latency-varying events and by analysis of evoked responses in a behavioral task, the Sternberg memory search task, which is well known to generate variation in the latency of brain events. The results of PCA of within-subjects differences in these two situations are plausibly related to underlying stages of information processing, and the technique may augment reaction time data by providing information on the time of occurrence as well as the duration of stages of information processing.     

Reactive effects of concurrent verbalization in person perception tasks

The reactive effects of concurrent verbalization (CV) on task performance in impression formation research have not been investigated, despite increasing use of this process tracing method. Since many person perception tasks involve multiple trials, assessment of reactivity should focus on carry-over and reactive-practice effects, as well as changes in task performance concurrent with thinking aloud. An experimental method for assessing these three forms of reactivity was demonstrated in an information-request impression formation task. Concurrent reactive effects were found for both continuous and intermittent CV. For the former, task processing was mildly slowed but altered in a manner suggestive of more efficient learning of, and memory for cues requested early in task performance. The substantial slowing of task processing during trial 1 intermittent CV largely disappeared by trial 2, indicating that subjects may require more practice for this method to be used effectively. The results for continuous CV are in line with recent findings which are inconsistent with certain predictions from the predominant theory of verbal protocol generation (Ericsson and Simon, 1984). Investigators using CV are urged to incorporate empirical checks for reactivity into their experimental designs.     

Parallel parsing: Evidence from reactivation in garden-path sentences

An all-visual, on-line, lexical priming technique was used to investigate whether the human sentence processor computes syntactic representations serially or in parallel. Structurally ambiguous garden-path sentences such as the following were studied: “The psychologist told the wife that the man bumpedthat her car was stolen.” Despite the strong preference for the sentential-complement reading of the ambiguous region (italicized), a reactivation effect for the head of the relative clause (wife) was observed immediately following the presentation of the embedded verb (bumped), suggesting that the relative clause analysis is also computed. This finding is taken as evidence for parallel parsing since both possible analyses were shown to have a processing reflection simultaneously: Computation of the sentential-complement analysis was demonstrated by the fact that readers garden-path when that analysis turns out to be incorrect, and computation of the relative clause analysis was demonstrated by the reactivation effect.     

The Influence of Self-Monitoring on Inflation of Grade-Point Averages for Research and Selection Purposes1

The present study investigated the tendency to inflate self-reports of GPAs on application forms and research surveys. The major purpose of the research was to examine the consistency of inflation behavior across situations and determine whether self-monitoring moderates this consistency. Two hundred and twenty-six graduating seniors reported their GPAs on application forms used at a university's placement office and 1 month later reported their GPAs on a research survey in a classroom setting. Respondents’ self-monitoring and attitude toward inflation were also measured on the survey. Results indicated that inflation was more prevalent on the research survey than on application forms and low GPA respondents exhibited greater inflation than did high GPA respondents. Furthermore, inflation across situations was more consistent and could be better predicted by inflation attitudes for low self-monitors than for high self-monitors. Implications for impression management and self-reports in employment contexts are discussed.