The co-ordination of codes in short-term retention

The present experiments explored ways in which information encoded along different dimensions might be co-ordinated to determine memory performance. First, can an acoustic similarity decrement be offset by additional semantic encoding? Experiment I offers evidence for this compensatory interaction of codes. Second, does trade-off occur such that more information held in one code means less in another code? Third, are codes additive? Experiment II offers no support for the notion of a trade-off between encoding systems. However, when two codes were made available in the second study, recall was increased over the level achieved by either code alone.     

An Examination of Moderators of the Effects of Customers' Evaluation of Employee Courtesy on Attitude Toward the Service Firm1

Employee courtesy is recognized as an important dimension of customer service. This paper presents and tests a model suggesting that employee courtesy affects attitudes toward a service firm. Employee courtesy, the physical environment, and locus of causality are three important elements of a service experience that might affect attitude toward a service firm. The paper reports results of two experiments that found there was an interaction effect between employee courtesy and the physical environment on attitude toward the service firm. That is, the effect of employee courtesy on attitudes is more positive when the environment is evaluated favorably than when it is evaluated unfavorably. However, there were no interaction effects of locus of causality and courtesy on attitude toward the service firm. In the second study, there was a main effect from locus of causality on attitude toward the firm in that experiment. That is, participants with an internal locus of causality had a more favorable attitude toward the service firm than did participants with an external locus of causality.     

Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Explaining the Differences

A number of writers have tackled the task of characterizing the differences between analytic and Continental philosophy. I suggest that these attempts have indeed captured the most important divergences between the two styles but have left the explanation of the differences mysterious. I argue that analytic philosophy is usefully seen as philosophy conducted within a paradigm, in Kuhn's sense of the word, whereas Continental philosophy assumes much less in the way of shared presuppositions, problems, methods and approaches. This important opposition accounts for all those features that have rightly been held to constitute the difference between the two traditions. I finish with some reflections on the relative superiority of each tradition and by highlighting the characteristic deficiencies of each.     

A quantitative review of overjustification effects in persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities

The overjustification hypothesis suggests that extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic rewards are common in strengthening behavior in persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities; we examined overjustification effects in this context. A literature search yielded 65 data sets permitting comparison of responding during an initial no‐reinforcement phase to a subsequent no‐reinforcement phase, separated by a reinforcement phase. We used effect sizes to compare response levels in these two no‐reinforcement phases. Overall, the mean effect size did not differ from zero; levels in the second no‐reinforcement phase were equally likely to be higher or lower than in the first. However, in contrast to the overjustification hypothesis, levels were higher in the second no‐reinforcement phase when comparing the single no‐reinforcement sessions immediately before and after reinforcement. Outcomes consistent with the overjustification hypothesis were somewhat more likely when the target behavior occurred at relatively higher levels prior to reinforcement.     

Category-based grouping in working memory and multiple object tracking

Two prominent cognitive capacity limitations are the maximal number of objects we can place in working memory (WM) and the maximal number of objects we can track in a display. Both are believed to have a numeric value of 3 or 4, which has led to the proposal that we have a general cognitive capacity, and that this capacity is most likely linked to limitations of how many objects we can attend simultaneously. Based on previous results showing that we can memorize more objects if they come from different categories than if they come from the same category (e.g., Feigenson & Halberda, 2008; Wong, Peterson, & Thompson, 2008; Wood, 2008), we compare how category-based grouping affects performance for WM and multiple object tracking (MOT). We present participants with either “pure” displays of either cars or faces, or with “mixed” displays of cars and faces. Overall, the effects of category are weak. In some analyses but not others, we replicate the mixed advantage for WM, albeit with a small effect size. In contrast, we observe a weak pure advantage for MOT tasks, at least in a meta-analysis of five experiments, but not in all experiments. Accordingly, WM and MOT tasks differed significantly in their sensitivity to category membership. We also find that WM is slightly better for faces than for cars, but that no such difference exists for MOT. We tentatively suggest that cognitive capacity limitations in different domains are at least partially due to the limitations of distinct mechanisms.     

Cognitive and neural consequences of memory suppression in major depressive disorder

Negative biases in cognition have been documented consistently in major depressive disorder (MDD), including difficulties in the ability to control the processing of negative material. Although negative information-processing biases have been studied using both behavioral and neuroimaging paradigms, relatively little research has been conducted examining the difficulties of depressed persons with inhibiting the retrieval of negative information from long-term memory. In this study, we used the think/no-think paradigm and functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the cognitive and neural consequences of memory suppression in individuals diagnosed with depression and in healthy controls. The participants showed typical behavioral forgetting effects, but contrary to our hypotheses, there were no differences between the depressed and nondepressed participants or between neutral and negative memories. Relative to controls, depressed individuals exhibited greater activity in right middle frontal gyrus during memory suppression, regardless of the valence of the suppressed stimuli, and differential activity in the amygdala and hippocampus during memory suppression involving negatively valenced stimuli. These findings indicate that depressed individuals are characterized by neural anomalies during the suppression of long-term memories, increasing our understanding of the brain bases of negative cognitive biases in MDD.