Restoring the associability of a pre-exposed CS by a surprising event

Three experiments are reported which use rats and the conditioned suppression technique. The first two confirmed a previous finding that prior exposure to a stimulus predicting a weak shock retards further learning when this same stimulus is subsequently used to signal a stronger shock. They further showed that this loss of stimulus associability could be attenuated by inserting trials on which the stimulus was presented alone in the absence of shock before the phase of training with the stronger shock. Experiment III demonstrated that, for animals given prior exposure to two stimuli, the insertion of nonreinforced trials with one of the stimuli will restore the associability only of that stimulus. These results are taken to show that a surprising event (the omission of an expected shock) can restore the associability of a pre-exposed conditioned stimulus.     

Dissociable lexical and phonological influences on serial recognition and serial recall

The impact of the lexicality of memory items on memory performance was compared in two paradigms, serial recall and serial recognition. Experiments 1 to 3 tested 7- and 8-year-old children. Memory accuracy was only mildly impaired in lists containing nonwords compared with words in a serial recognition task involving judgements of whether the items in two sequences were in the same order (Experiment 1), although a substantial advantage for word over nonword items from the same stimulus pool was found in serial recall (Experiment 2). A stronger influence of lexicality on serial recall than serial recognition was further demonstrated in Experiments 3A and 3B, and in 4A and 4B using adult participants. These experiments also established comparable degrees of sensitivity to the phonological similarity of the memory sequences in the two paradigms. The phonological similarity effect in serial recall was found to arise from increased phoneme order errors, whereas the lexicality effect was due principally to the greater frequency of phoneme identity errors for nonwords. It is proposed that the lexicality effect originates in the redintegration of item information just prior to recall, and that this process is largely bypassed in serial recognition.     

Book reviews

PASSINCHAM, R. E. The Human Primate. Oxford and San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. 1982. Pp. xii + 390. ISBN 0 7167 1356 X, £14.95 (hardback); 0 7167 1357 8, £7.50 (paperback).

MACPHAIL, E. M. Brain and Intelligence in Vertebrates. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1982. Pp. 423. £20. ISBN 0 19 854550 9.

KATSUKI, Y. Receptive Mechanisms of Sound in the Ear. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1982. Pp. 155. ISBN 0 521 24346 7. £20.00.     

A REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN TEXTBOOKS: FOCUS ON THE AFRO-AMERICAN WOMAN

A review was conducted of 28 psychology of women textbooks selected from university libraries and utilizing a psychological approach. The question of whether authors of psychology of women books in their treatment of Afro-American women had replicated the errors of authors of introductory psychology books in their treatment of women was raised. Of the 28 books reviewed, 18 offered either token or no references to Afro-American women. It is concluded that race and class biases underlie the exclusion, limited inclusion, and biased treatment of Afro-American women in these works.