The Swedish National Adult Reading Test (NART-SWE): a test of premorbid IQ

The purpose of this study was to construct a Swedish version of the National Adult Reading Test (NART-SWE), a test for assessment of premorbid IQ, and to investigate its validity and reliability on healthy controls and patients with mild Alzheimer's disease. As Swedish pronunciation rules are fixed, NART-SWE was constructed using loan words. NART-SWE has satisfactory psychometric properties: Inter-rater and retest reliability as well as internal consistency are very high. The NART-SWE demonstrates face validity. In addition, high correlation with IQ was obtained. A significant model emerged when using NART-SWE to predict IQ. Furthermore, no significant differences were observed when comparing performance for healthy controls' with that of patients with Alzheimer's disease on NART-SWE. It does appear that reading of irregular words is intact in mild Alzheimer's disease.     

Severity Indices of Personality Problems (SIPP-118): development, factor structure, reliability, and validity

This article describes a series of studies involving 2,730 participants on the development and validity testing of the Severity Indices of Personality Problems (SIPP), a self-report questionnaire covering important core components of (mal)adaptive personality functioning. Results show that the 16 facets constituted homogeneous item clusters (i.e., unidimensional and internally consistent parcels) that fit well into 5 clinically interpretable, higher order domains: self-control, identity integration, relational capacities, social concordance, and responsibility. These domains appeared to have good concurrent validity across various populations, good convergent validity in terms of associations with interview ratings of the severity of personality pathology, and good discriminant validity in terms of associations with trait-based personality disorder dimensions. Furthermore, results suggest that the domain scores are stable over a time interval of 14-21 days in a student sample but are sensitive to change over a 2-year follow-up interval in a treated patient population. Taken together, the final instrument, the SIPP-118, provides a set of 5 reliable, valid, and efficient indices of the core components of (mal)adaptive personality functioning.     

Looking at scenes while searching for numbers: dividing attention multiplies space

Observers tend to remember seeing a greater expanse of a scene than was shown (boundary extension [BE]). Is undivided visual attention necessary for BE? In Experiment 1, 108 observers viewed photographs with superimposed numerals (2s and 5s). Each appeared for 750 msec, followed by a masked interval and a test picture (same, closer up, or wider angled). Test pictures were rated as the same, closer, or wider angled on a 5-point scale. Visual attention was manipulated with a search task: The observers reported the number of 5s (zero, one, or two). The observers performed search only, picture rating only, or both (giving search priority). Search accuracy was unaffected by condition. BE occurred in both conditions but was greater with divided attention. The results were replicated using incidental BE tests (Experiments 2 and 3). We propose that anticipatory representation of layout occurs automatically during scene perception, with focal attention serving to constrain the boundary error.     

Body dissatisfaction and body comparison with media images in males and females

This study examined the role of media body comparison as a mediator of the relationships between psychological factors and sociocultural pressures to be thin and body dissatisfaction in both females and males. Participants were 1,386 females (mean age = 19.37 years) and 1,130 males (mean age = 19.46) from diverse backgrounds who completed a self-report questionnaire. Path analysis was used to test a cross-sectional model in which media body comparison mediated the impact of self-esteem, depressive mood, parent dieting environment, friend dieting, TV exposure, magazine message exposure, weight teasing and body mass index (BMI) on body dissatisfaction. In females, media body comparison partially or fully mediated relationships between self-esteem, depressive mood, friend dieting, magazine message exposure and BMI, and body dissatisfaction. In males, media body comparison was not a significant predictor of body dissatisfaction. This research particularly highlights the need to further examine processes that are involved in the development of body dissatisfaction in males.     

Reading and visual memory: remembering scenes that were never seen.

In Experiment 1 (N = 16), under conditions of high memory load (60 pictures and 50 paragraphs) and a 1-week retention interval, undergraduate subjects reported their memory for photographs of scenes (cued recall and free-recall tasks). Subjects frequently reported memory for photographs that they had actually never seen, but had read about in a brief paragraph. In Experiment 2 (N = 40), the same pattern of results was obtained with immediate testing. Experiment 2 also demonstrated that the likelihood of subjects falsely attributing scene memory (based on reading) to actually having viewed a photograph was reduced when metacognitive awareness of imaging during reading was made salient. Awareness of image creation was induced by requiring subjects to rate the paragraphs with respect to imagery vividness. Although other measures of memory remained the same, subjects in the induced-imagery condition made 50% fewer confusion errors than subjects who read the paragraphs without imagery instructions. The results are discussed in the context of Johnson and Raye's (1981) reality monitoring model.     

The representation of visual scenes

The visual world exists all around us, yet this information must be gleaned through a succession of eye fixations in which high visual acuity is limited to the small foveal region of each retina. In spite of these physiological constraints, we experience a richly detailed and continuous visual world. Research on transsaccadic memory, perception, picture memory and imagination of scenes will be reviewed. Converging evidence suggests that the representation of visual scenes is much more schematic and abstract than our immediate experience would indicate. The visual system may have evolved to maximize comprehension of discrete views at the expense of representing unnecessary detail, but through the action of attention it allows the viewer to access detail when the need arises. This capability helps to maintain the 'illusion' of seeing a rich and detailed visual world at every glance.     

Conceptual masking: the effects of subsequent visual events on memory for pictures

Three experiments studied the effects of voluntary and involuntary focus of attention on recognition memory for pictures. Experiments 1 and 3 tested the conceptual-masking hypothesis, which holds that a visual event will automatically disrupt processing of a previously glimpsed picture if that event is new and meaningful. Memory for 112-ms pictures was tested under conditions where the to-be-ignored 1.5-s interstimulus interval contained a blank field; a repeating picture; a new picture; a new, nonsense picture; or a new, inverted picture each time. The blank field, repeating picture, and new, nonsense picture did not disrupt memory as much as a new, meaningful picture, supporting the conceptual-masking hypothesis. Experiment 2 studied voluntary attentional control of encoding by instructing subjects to focus attention on the brief pictures, all pictures, or the long pictures in a sequence. Recognition memory for pictures of both durations showed a striking ability of observers to process pictures selectively. The possible role of these effects in visual scanning are discussed.     

Illusory conjunctions of forms, objects, and scenes during rapid serial visual search

"Temporal migration" describes a situation in which subjects viewing rapidly presented stimuli (e.g., 9-20 items/s) confidently report a target element as having been presented in the same display as a previous or following stimulus in the sequence. Four experiments tested a short-term buffer model of this phenomenon. Experiments 1 and 4 tested the hypothesis that subjects' errors are due to the demands of the verbal report procedure rather than to perceptual integration. In Experiment 1, 12 color objects were presented at a rate of 9/s. Prior to each sequence, an object was named and subjects responded "yes" or "no" to indicate whether the target element (a black frame) occurred with that object. Consistent with the perceptual hypothesis, the yes/no procedure yielded the same results as the verbal report procedure. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that the direction of migration depends on "frame" detection time. Results showed that reaction time to frame detection was significantly faster in trials in which subjects reported the frame on a preceding rather than a following picture. Experiments 3 and 4 used the standard naming procedure and the yes/no procedure to test temporal migration using more complex, interrelated stimuli (objects and scenes). Implications for the use of the temporal migration effect to study visual integration within eye fixations are discussed.