The sources of visual recency: Movement and language in serial recall

Four experiments examine the importance of movement—the sequential ordering of stimulus features—in producing recency in the ordered serial recall of visual lists. The written recall of handsigns produced more recency when they were seen moving than still (Experiment I). Number lists presented as moving bar figures showed more recency than numbers which were displayed in the normal way with all features displayed simultaneously (Experiment II). The order in which features of abstract shapes are displayed can, itself, determine recency (Experiment III). However, a final experiment showed that still lip pictures of speech sounds generate more recency than letters representing those speech sounds. Therefore movement of stimulus features need not account for the extensive recency advantage in remembering lipread lists. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Reasoning in depression: Impairment on a concept discrimination learning task

Abstract

This study compared depressed and nondepressed undergraduates identified by the Beck Depression Inventory on concept discrimination learning problems. In two experiments, both groups generally performed at ceiling when solving simpler 1- and 2-dimensional problems, but the depressed subjects showed significant impairment on 4-dimensional problems. The first experiment investigated the role of storage in task performance. The second experiment was designed to focus attention at critical stages, and also manipulated storage demands. The depressed subjects in each experiment solved fewer problems correctly and made significantly more errors when listing hypotheses; there was little evidence that the experimental manipulations differentially facilitated their performance. The findings are considered in relation to current models of cognitive function in depression.     

Drift in children's categories: when experienced distributions conflict with prior learning

Psychological intuitions about natural category structure do not always correspond to the true structure of the world. The current study explores young children's responses to conflict between intuitive structure and authoritative feedback using a semi‐supervised learning (Zhu et al., 2007) paradigm. In three experiments, 160 children between the ages of 4 and 8 learned a one‐dimensional decision criterion for distinguishing yummy and yucky ‘alien fruits’. They then categorized a large number of new fruits without corrective feedback. The distribution of the new fruits was manipulated such that the natural boundary in the stimuli did not always correspond to the learned boundary. Children changed their decision criteria to reflect the structure of the new stimuli, effectively unlearning the original boundary. Younger children were especially swayed by the distributional information, being relatively insensitive to feedback that the original non‐natural boundary was, in fact, still correct. Results are discussed in terms of children's ability to selectively attend to specific information (i.e. feedback vs. distribution), and their interests in forming generally useful representations of experience.     

Freud as Philosopher and Metaphysician: The Case of Dora

The Dora case is examined, for its use of psychoanalytic constructs and concomitant reliance on neurological terminology. Boothby and Robertson are cited as commentators, and it is concluded that both Dora and The Interpretation of Dreams point us in the direction of an intriguing, not-quite-materialistic philosophy of mind.