Tricks of Memory

Remembering an episode from even the recent past may involve a blend of fiction and fact. We discuss a straight-forward laboratory paradigm that is proving useful in the study of false memories of simple episodes. In this paradigm, subjects study lists of 15 related words ( bed, rest, awake ...) that are all related to a critical word that is not presented ( sleep ). Later, subjects recall and recognize the critical missing word with about the same probability that they remember words from the list. This memory illusion is resistant to people's attempts to avoid it. We argue that similar memory errors are commonplace and are a natural outcome of an intelligent cognitive system, which makes inferences about incoming information. Therefore, memory illusions, like perceptual illusions, are a consequence of normal human information processing and offer a window for examining basic cognitive processes.     

The Iowa Child Welfare Research Station and the 1940 debate on intelligence: Carrying on the legacy of a concerned mother

During the late 1930s and early 1940s the nature-nurture issue regarding intelligence generated considerable controversy. The focus of attention for this debate was the Thirty-Ninth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, published in 1940. The Iowa Child Welfare Research Station played a prominent role in this debate. The Iowa researchers, led by George D. Stoddard and Beth L. Wellman, advocated an environmentalist position which challenged the more established hereditarian position held by Lewis M. Terman and his research associates. The Iowa position was closely related to the institutional context of the Child Welfare Research Station.     

Police perspectives on responding to mentally ill people in crisis: perceptions of program effectiveness

In this study, we sampled sworn police officers from three law enforcement agencies (n=452), each of which had different system responses to mentally ill people in crisis. One department relies on field assistance from a mobile mental health crisis team, a second has a team of officers specially trained in crisis intervention and management of mentally ill people in crisis, and a third has a team of in-house social workers to assist in responding to calls. Calls involving mentally ill people in crisis appear to be frequent and are perceived by most of the officers to pose a significant problem for the department; however, most officers reported feeling well prepared to handle these calls. Generally, officers from the jurisdiction with a specialized team of officers rated their program as being highly effective in meeting the needs of mentally ill people in crisis, keeping mentally ill people out of jail, minimizing the amount of time officers spend on these calls, and maintaining community safety. Officers from departments relying on a mobile crisis unit (MCU) and on police-based social workers both rated their programs as being moderately effective on each of these dimensions except for minimizing officer time on these calls where the MCU had significantly lower ratings. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Modeling Heterogeneous Peer Assortment Effects Using Finite Mixture Exponential Random Graph Models

Psychometrika - This article develops a class of models called sender/receiver finite mixture exponential random graph models (SRFM-ERGMs). This class of models extends the existing exponential...     

Costs and benefits of collaborative remembering

Collaborative inhibition, the poorer memory performance of collaborative groups as compared with nominal (noninteracting) groups was measured in the free recall of categorized lists. In Experiment 1, collaborative inhibition was present in four‐person groups, but not in pairs of two‐person groups, where each was compared with performance in four‐person nominal groups. However, on a final individual free recall test, members of two‐ and four‐person collaborative groups recalled a higher proportion of the list than members of nominal groups. In Experiment 2, recall in three‐person collaborative groups was less than in three‐person nominal groups but only on the first of three successive study‐test trials. On the final individual free recall test, members of collaborative groups recalled more words than members of nominal groups. Despite inhibiting recall and reminiscence, collaboration benefits remembering when collaborators are subsequently tested individually. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Resurgence following differential reinforcement of alternative behavior implemented with and without extinction

In the clinic, differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA) often involves programming extinction for destructive behavior while reinforcing an alternative form of communication (e.g., a functional communication response); however, implementing extinction can be unsafe or impractical under some circumstances. Quantitative theories of resurgence (i.e., Behavioral Momentum Theory and Resurgence as Choice) predict differences in the efficacy of treatments that do and do not involve extinction of target responding when reinforcement conditions maintaining alternative responding worsen. We tested these predictions by examining resurgence following two DRA conditions in which we equated rates of reinforcement. In DRA without extinction, target and alternative behavior produced reinforcement. In DRA with extinction plus noncontingent reinforcement, only alternative behavior produced reinforcement. We conducted this study in a reverse-translation sequence, first with participants who engaged in destructive behavior (Experiment 1) and then in a laboratory setting with rats (Experiment 2). Across both experiments, we observed proportionally lower levels of target responding during and following the DRA condition that arranged extinction for the target response. However, levels of resurgence were similar following both arrangements.     

A novel,short and easy-to-perform method to evaluate newborns’ social olfactory preferences

Animal Cognition - Humans’ early olfactory perception has been studied mainly within the framework of mother–offspring interactions and only a few studies have focused on...