Selective attention and rehearsal in the auditory short-term memory task performance of poor and normal readers

The performance of poor and normal sixth-grade readers was compared on an auditory short-term memory task in two studies. In the first study, the effects of distraction, list length, and speed of stimulus presentation were investigated to test the hypothesis that the performance of the poor readers is affected by deficits in selective attention. Group differences in performance, however, were obtained for both distraction and no-distraction conditions. The second experiment examined the hypothesis that group differences may reflect differences in the use of rehearsal. In the second experiment, half the reading-disabled children and half the controls were provided with rehearsal training prior to completing the same short-term memory task a second time. Rehearsal training resulted in improved performance relative to children who were not trained; however, there was no rehearsal training x reading group interaction. The poor readers continued to show deficits in performance relative to the performance of control children. The results of these two studies suggest that deficits observed for poor readers on short-term memory tasks may reflect processing difficulties in some area that precedes rehearsal and affects performance under both distraction and no-distraction conditions.The authors wish to express their thanks to the Sachem School District and Betty Gould, Nicholas Opinanate, and Guy Barber for their unlimited cooperation, and to John Neale for very helpful discussions of a number of issues in this paper.     

Childhood aggression and social adjustment as antecedents of delinquency

A sample of 2,453 grade school children were followed into young adulthood through record sources. Teacher interviews provided information about low-peer-status children that was assessed in relation to subsequent delinquency for both sexes and young adult criminality for males. A multivariate design evaluated the joint effects of social class, a measure of family disturbance, and childhood problem behavior factors as antecedents of delinquency. Childhood aggression emerged as the most prominent antecedent factor for males but not for females. Social class and family disturbance were associated with aggression but did not have significant direct effects on delinquency. Aggression was related to severity of delinquency. Dispositional status, reflecting severity, was the best indicator of which delinquent males would have adult criminal records. A causal model is presented.The study was supported by a grant from the Scottish Rite Schizophrenia Research Program, N.M.J., U.S.A. Portions of the study were presented at the Life History Research conference in Monterey, California, 1981. The authors wish to thank June White, Cindy Hanson, and Ned Worell for their help in conducting this research. Data for this research was originally gathered by Merrill Roff. Follow-up data were contributed by Ronald Peek, Donald Bamber, Charles Watson, Shiela Makie, William S. Ward, Edward S. Posey, Chris Hemlabs, and Harriet Barnes.     

The hierarchy of consistency: A review and model of longitudinal findings on adult individual differences in intelligence,personality and self-opinion

When viewed in the aggregate, studies of the longitudinal consistency of intelligence, personality traits and self-opinion (self-esteem, life satisfaction etc.) show a hierarchy of consistency. Uncorrected retest coefficients over periods of 6 months to 50 yr are analyzed as the product of period-free reliability (R) and the true stability of the construct (sⁿ, where s is the coefficient of annual stability and n the number of years of the retest interval). The annual stabilities of intelligence, personality traits and self-opinions are estimated as 0.99, 0.98 and 0.94, respectively. While intelligence and personality may be regarded as relatively stable characteristics over the length of the adult lifespan, self-opinion has little stability over periods of more than 10 yr. The hierarchy of consistency should be taken into account in causal models of human development. Although self-opinion is not a longitudinally-stable characteristics, it may still be predicted over long periods of time by higher-order constructs such as personality traits and intelligence.     

Development of differences in response latencies to right and left visual fields

Robust lateralization developed in right-handed adults who were asked to judge letter pairs as "same" or "different" during 4608 trials. By the end of the first two blocks (768 trials) "same" responses were favored when presented in the RVF (transmitted directly to the left hemisphere) and "different" responses were favored when presented in the LVF (transmitted direction to the right hemisphere). This gradually reversed over sessions with "same" responses becoming faster for letters presented in the LVF, and "different" responses becoming faster for stimuli presented in the RVF. The laterality acquired under these conditions was cumulative and reproducible, appeared in all 16 subjects, and was preserved between sessions a week apart. The data suggest that laterality is a flexible and reversible characteristic of the human brain even when stimulus and task remain constant.     

Representation of linear orders

Two binary classification tasks were used to explore the associative structure of linear orders. In Experiment 1, college students classified English letters as targets or nontargets, the targets being consecutive letters of the alphabet. The time to reject nontargets was a decreasing function of the distance from the target set, suggesting response interference mediated by automatic associations from the target to the nontarget letters. The way in which this interference effect depended on the placement of the boundaries between the target and nontarget sets revealed the relative strengths of individual interletter associations. In Experiment 2, students were assigned novel linear orders composed of letterlike symbols and asked to classify pairs of symbols as being adjacent or nonadjacent in the assigned sequence. Reaction time was found to be a joint function of the distance between any pair of symbols and the relative positions of those symbols within the sequence. The effects of both distance and position decreased systematically over 6 days of practice with a particular order, beginning at a level typical of unfamiliar orders and converging on a level characteristic of familiar orders such as letters and digits. These results provide an empirical unification of two previously disparate sets of findings in the literature on linear orders, those concerning familiar and unfamiliar orders, and the systematic transition between the two patterns of results suggests the gradual integration of a new associative structure.     

The effects of recency and story content on children's moral judgments

Sixteen stories were read to children at ages 4, 7, and 11 years and to college freshmen (n = 24 per age level) to investigate the effects of recency and specific story content on the development of moral reasoning. The stories consisted of either positive or negative intention and either positive or negative consequence in one of four situations: rule breaking, property damage, property damage with peer interaction, or injury to a person. At each age level, half of the subjects heard the stories with the intention first and the consequence second, and half heard them in the reverse order. Analyses confirmed that in general younger children judged on consequence, whereas older children utilized intention, and that on stories containing intentional injury to a person, the younger child took intention into account. Recency effects were evidenced for both the 4- and 7-year-olds. In the 4-year-old group, however, the recency effects failed to override the salience of negative consequence in contexts of positive intention and negative consequence. This suggests that preschool children may respond primarily to the negative aspect of the story, whether intention or consequence.     

Cognitive dysfunction in compulsive checkers: Further explorations

Recent evidence suggests a relationship between certain memory deficits and compulsive-checking behavior. The present study explores this relationship in the context of several additional memory capacities not yet investigated. Using the Maudsley Obsessional-Compulsive Inventory and the Everyday Checking Behavior Scale four groups of Ss were identified: (1) frequent checkers, (2) occasional checkers, (3) infrequent checkers and (4) noncheckers. Consistent with previous research, a memory-for-actions task indicated a deficit among compulsive checkers. Furthermore, checking status was found to be negatively related to memory functioning as measured by the Wechsler Memory Scale (WMS) and the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ). This memory deficit was most pronounced on the Logical Memory subtest of the WMS. Checkers appear to have difficulty recalling details of meaningfully linked sequences, either presented in narrative form or engaged in personally. Although the reasons for these checking-related deficits are not clear, a complete understanding of checking phenomena will involve an appreciation of the role played by memory deficits.     

Physiological and psychological effects of acute intentional hyperventilation

Research is reviewed which suggests that hyperventilation syndrome is an underdiagnosed disorder for the presentation of many patients experiencing apparent anxiety states. In a test of this hypothesis, 21 normal individuals (9 female) underwent a 2 min period of intentional hyperventilation following a 10 min baseline phase. Hyperventilation was accompanied by increased subjective anxiety and tachycardia, and indications of peripheral vasoconstriction. Following hyperventilation, Ss experienced increased levels of state anxiety and perceived autonomic arousal, as indexed by self-report instruments. These results support the hypothesis that undiagnosed hyperventilatory phenomena may be etiologically implicated in states of pathologic anxiety.     

CO-WORKER SOCIAL SUPPORT IN A WORKSITE SMOKING CONTROL PROGRAM

We evaluated the effects of adding a social support component to a worksite controlled smoking treatment program. Twenty-four participants were randomly assigned to either a controlled smoking or a controlled smoking plus partner support condition. Within a multiple baseline across behaviors design, smokers in both conditions made efforts to achieve sequential 50% reductions in: (a) nicotine content of brand smoked, (b) number of cigarettes smoked per day, and (c) percentage of each cigarette smoked. Self-monitoring records, laboratory analyses of spent cigarette butts, and carbon monoxide determinations indicated that both conditions were effective in producing significant reductions in each of the three target behaviors and in carbon monoxide levels. All participants who quit smoking during the program maintained their abstinence at a 6-month follow-up, and those who did not quit were smoking less at follow-up than they had at pretest on all dependent variables. However, few differences were observed between controlled smoking and controlled smoking plus partner support conditions either during treatment or at the 6-month follow-up. Results are discussed with regard to previous worksite studies, future directions for research on social support, and variables that may have mediated treatment outcome.