Central and peripheral vision in early infancy

The size of the effective visual field during the first weeks of life is found to depend on two factors: It increases with age, but it contracts in the face of competition from ongoing activity such as fixation of a central stimulus or non-nutritive sucking.     

Subjective evaluations of employer attributes by administration students

The paper is an application of the conjoint measurement methodology. An exploratory study was conducted of the trade-off relationships among four organizational attributes—dynamism, societal concern, functional/administrative emphasis, and relative size—as they relate to the selection of an employer by students of administration. Preference ranks of 36 employer concepts obtained from 86 graduate students of business, public, and hospital administration were analyzed according to the additive conjoint measurement model yielding implicit rank-ordering of the four organizational attributes as choice criteria. Irrespective of the program of study, dynamism and societal concern emerged as the most important determinants in employer selection, but differences existed among programs, year of study, and explicitly vs implicitly elicited weights.     

The haptic perception of curvature

Ninety-two subjects, schoolchildren and undergraduate and postgraduate students, took part in a series of experiments on the haptic perception of curvature. A graded series of surfaces was produced using piano-convex lenses masked off to produce curved strips that could be explored without using arm movements. Thresholds were measured using the constant method and a staircase procedure. Experiments 1 and 2 yielded data on the absolute and difference thresholds for curvature. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the effective stimulus for curvature is represented by the overall gradient of a curved surface. Using this measure, it was shown that the present absolute thresholds for curvature are lower than those previously reported. In Experiment 4, absolute thresholds were compared using spherical and cylindrical curves: the results showed that, at least with the narrow strips used, the type of curvature does not exert a significant influence on performance. In Experiment 5, the subjective response to curvature was assessed using a rating procedure. Power functions are reported, although the relationship between stimuli and responses had a strong linear component. This suggests that haptically perceived curvature may be a metathetic rather than a prothetic continuum.     

Is phonological recoding under strategic control?

Two experiments are reported in which subjects were required to name the color in which letter strings were printed. In the first experiment, color-naming latencies were the same when the letter strings were pseudohomophones of color words (e.g., PINC) as when they were color names (e.g., PINK). Both these conditions produced slower responses than control strings matched with the pseudohomophones for visual similarity to the color word (e.g., PINN). Unlike the first experiment, the second included trials in which the ink color was congruent with the color to which the letter string was related. The results with incongruent stimuli paralleled those in the first experiment. With the congruent stimuli, however, responses were faster with color words than with either their pseudohomophones or control strings, which were equally slow. It is proposed that phonological recoding occurs relatively slowly but cannot be suppressed even when it harms performance.     

Additivity of components of prismatic adaptation

Ss pointed with each hand at a light or at the unseen toe and looked in the direction of the unseen toe before, during, and after training one arm to point to a visual target which was progressively displaced to one side by a prism. Results show that a proprioceptive change in the trained arm is a universal component of the adaptation. When a change in the eye-head system occurs, it and the proprioceptive change in the arm sum to the total adaptation and it is accompanied by a predictable degree of intermanual transfer of the adaptation, as a felt-position theory of adaptation would predict. However, when there is no change in the eye-head system, the proprioceptive shift is not always sufficient to account for the total adaptive shift.