Proportionality,linearity, and parameter constancy: Messick and Sentis reconsidered

Messick and Sentis found greater support for weak proportionality in subjects' outcome allocations (suggesting that subjects wish to maintain a constant ratio between outcomes across situations when inputs are held constant) than for constant differences between outcomes. They claimed that their data thus provided stronger support for Adams' ratio definition of equity than for Harris' linear formula. A dialogue between the two sets of authors establishes that (1) so far as their specification of fair outcomes is concerned, Adams' formula is a special case of the linear formula; (2) weak proportionality does not necessarily follow from Adams' formula and can be derived from the linear formula; (3) Adams' formula applied to subjective (rather than experimenter-defined) inputs nevertheless provides a more natural base from which to derive weak proportionality than does the linear formula in its general form; (4) excellent fits to several sets of data, including much better fit to Messick and Sentis' data than that provided by weak proportionality, are obtained if we assume that subjects use allocations which are a weighted average of those implied by Adams' formula, the Equality principle, and Komorita and Kravitz' Equal Excess Norm; and (5) a fit to Messick and Sentis' data that is almost as good as that provided by the weighted solutions model is obtained by assuming that subjects apply Adams' formula to subjective inputs and subjective outcomes that are different from the corresponding experimenter-defined values. It is agreed that the delineation of the relationships among observable properties of outcome distributions, alternative equity formulae, and different psychological processes is as important as it can be devious.     

The air gap phenomenon in children's landscape drawings

The “air gap” phenomenon was found to be very common in the free landscape drawings of middle and later childhood. Three experiments are reported in which the contextual cues for such drawings were systematically manipulated. When subjects were supplied with drawing sheets constructed to imply the absence of the air gap, the phenomenon was eliminated in most of their drawings. When supplied with sheets constructed to imply its presence, most subjects produced air gap drawings using contextually provided reference lines. There were no consistent transfer effects across different cuing orders. The susceptibility of the air gap phenomenon to modification by task manipulation suggests that it results from problems of production rather than from defects in the child's internal representation of the world.     

Design and implementation of a microcomputer-based adaptive testing system

Adaptive testing is a relatively new form of test administration in which a test is tailored to the individual taking it by choosing items most informative about that person. Methods for determining which items are most appropriate take on a variety of forms, some requiring extensive computation, and almost all requiring administration by a computer. The increasing availability of inexpensive microcomputer systems has made adaptive testing possible when access to larger computer systems is impractical. To make implementation of a variety of adaptive testing methods feasible on a microcomputer, a system efficient from both the examinee’s and the test constructor’s perspectives is necessary. This paper begins by briefly outlining the strategies of adaptive testing developed to date and showing how, structurally, they can be grouped into three general categories. Considerations in design of a test-specification subsystem are then discussed as they relate to this categorization. Finally, a specific implementation of a subsystem for use under the CP/M microcomputer operating system is described. Techniques used to make the extensive computations required by adaptive testing feasible on a microcomputer are presented.     

Developing a laboratory course using PASCAL on the Apple II

Several resources are available to the person seeking to develop a laboratory course that utilizes microprocessors. Several roles for such equipment are envisioned, and some of the issues regarding types of equipment and programming languages are addressed.     

Effects of target monitoring on understanding fluent speech

Phoneme monitoring and word monitoring are two experimental tasks that have frequently been used to assess the processing of fluent speech. Each task is purported to provide an “online” measure of the comprehension process, and each requires listeners to pay conscious attention to some aspect or property of the sound structure of the speech signal. The present study is primarily a methodological one directed at the following question: Does the allocation of processing resources for conscious analysis of the sound structure of the speech signal affect ongoing comprehension processes or the ultimate level of understanding achieved for the content of the linguistic message? Our subjects listened to spoken stories. Then, to measure their comprehension, they answered multiple-choice questions about each story. During some stories, they were required to detect a specific phoneme; during other stories, they were required to detect a specific word; during still other stories, they were not required to monitor the utterance for any target. The monitoring results replicated earlier findings showing longer detection latencies for phoneme monitoring than for word monitoring. Somewhat surprisingly, the ancillary phoneme- and word-monitoring tasks did not adversely affect overall comprehension performance. This result undermines the specific criticism that on-line monitoring paradigms of this kind should not be used to study spoken language understanding because these tasks interfere with normal comprehension.     

Subjective contours can facilitate performance in a reaction-time task

Subjective contours were compared with objective contours in their ability to facilitate performance in speeded tasks that required judging the position of a dot or the slope of a line segment relative to the contour. Subjective contours were found to reduce both reaction times and error rates for dot localization but not for the more difficult slope discrimination task. These results add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that subjective contours have functional properties similar to those of objective contours.     

Validation of the Differential Emotions Scale in 613 mothers

Mothers (N=613) with infants who took the Differential Emotions Scale (DES) were compared in a cross-validation study by factor analysis to 957 high school and college students. Despite differences in factor-analytic technique, similarities in factor structure suggested that the DES discriminates the majority of fundamental emotions as posited by Izard.Robert Emde is supported by Research Scientists Award No. 5 KO5 MH 36808 and NIMH Project Grant No. 2 RO1 MH 22803. The authors wish to acknowledge the critical support of the Developmental Psychobiology Research Group, Department of Psychiatry, University of Colorado Medical School, and wish to express their gratitude to Carroll Izard for allowing us to publish his factor-analytic results.     

Crawling-onset age predicts visual cliff avoidance in infants

Two experiments are reported that tested the effects of crawling-onset age, the amount of crawling experience, and testing age on avoidance of the deep side of a visual cliff apparatus by human infants. In Experiment 1, 49 infants ranging in age from 7 to 13 mo. were tested on the visual cliff after 1 or 2 mo. of crawling experience. Discriminant analysis revealed that crawling-onset age, and not crawling experience, discriminated between those infants who crossed and those infants who avoided the apparent drop-off. Infants who crossed the deep side were infants with an early crawling-onset age. In Experiment 2, 40 infants were tested on a visual cliff apparatus, half at 9 and half at 12 mo. of age. Discriminant analysis again found that crawling-onset age discriminated between infants who crossed the infants who would not cross the deep side, whereas testing age alone did not. These results call into question the idea that experience crawling is critical in inducing visually guided avoidance behavior in infants. It is argued that the crawling-onset age effect occurs because crawling during the tactile phase of infancy interferes with later visual control of locomotion.     

Exercise, changes in aerobic capacity, and changes in self-perceptions: An experimental investigation

Subjects in an exercise training condition participated in a 10-week aerobic exercise class, whereas subjects in waiting-list control and independent control conditions did not. The results indicated that subjects in the training condition evidenced reliably greater improvements in physical fitness (aerobic capacity) and reported reliably greater improvements in their abilities and confidence in both the physical area (e.g., ability to run distances) and nonphysical area (e.g., frustration tolerance) than did subjects in the control conditions. On the other hand, improvements in physical fitness were not related to reported improvements in abilities and confidence. These findings are of interest because they indicate that some of the important personal changes that are associated with physical fitness training are not due to changes in fitness, but appear to be due to other factors (e.g., group participation and expectancies).