Correlations for organizational,nonorganizational, and intrinsic religiosity with social support among intercollegiate athletes

The present study was a preliminary examination of the correlations among organizational, nonorganizational, and intrinsic religiosity and social support as measured by the Duke Religion Index and the Nonsupport scale of the Personality Assessment Inventory for 105 intercollegiate athletes (51 women). Scores among these measures were not correlated (-.05 to -.14).     

The dynamics of intention retrieval and coordination of action in event-based prospective memory

Event-based prospective memory requires responding to cues in the environment that are associated with a previously established intention. Some researchers believe that intentions reside in memory with an above baseline level of activation, a phenomenon called the intention superiority effect. The authors of this study predicted that intention superiority would be masked by additional cognitive processes associated with successful event-based prospective memory. These additional processes include noticing the cue, retrieving the intention, and coordinating intention execution with the ongoing activity. In 3 experiments, intention superiority was demonstrated by faster latencies to the ongoing activity on failed prospective trials and the existence of the additional processes was demonstrated by slower latencies on successful trials. This study demonstrates the importance of investigating the microstructure of the cognitive components involved with processing and responding to an event-based prospective memory cue.     

Action-based and vision-based selection of input: Two sources of control

In the first part of this paper we review evidence suggesting that there exists a mechanism that selects input on the basis of its similarity to the required action. This response-based input selection differs from the more established space- and object-based input selection in that it is not constrained by the structure of the input. Our evidence suggests that the two-choice Stroop effect is caused by this response-based selection mechanism. By contrast, it is known that the flanker effect is determined by the space- and object- based selection mechanisms. We explore whether the conflict resolution of the Stroop and flanker tasks is different as well by embedding these two tasks in a PRP (Psychological Refractory Period) paradigm. We show that the Stroop and the PRP effects are additive whereas the flanker and the PRP effects are underadditive, suggesting that the processes in charge of the conflict resolution in the Stroop and the flanker tasks are indeed different. We discuss possible reasons for this difference, and discuss possible ways in which the response-based mechanism can be implemented in information processing models.     

Overt and covert object-based attention

To examine the role of perceptual object representations in the control of eye movements and attention, a pair of experiments adapted the object-cuing paradigm of Egly, Driver, and Rafal (1994) to require eye movements. Displays were pairs of adjacent rectangles, each containing two characters. Observers were asked to make a speeded judgment of a target character’s orientation, and a cue was provided prior to target/distractor onset to indicate the target’s likely location. Gaze-contingent presentation of target and distractors was used to demand overt scanning of displays. Eye movements during task performance evinced two forms of object-based effects. First, saccades following fixation on an invalidly cued item were more likely to be made within the cued rectangle than between rectangles. Second, saccades within the cued rectangle were preceded by shorter dwell times than saccades between rectangles. Extrafoveal processing of stimuli within the cued rectangle, however, was not facilitated, suggesting that covert attention was not allocated more densely within the cued than within the uncued object.     

The demands of an ongoing activity influence the success of event-based prospective memory

Four experiments were conducted to evaluate whether event-based prospective memory would be sensitive to the concurrent demands of the ongoing activity in which intention-related cues were embedded. In Experiments 1 and 2, random alternation between two judgments in the ongoing task reduced prospective memory as compared with having a single task throughout. In Experiment 3, participants' making two binary judgments on every trial resulted in worse prospective memory than did their making single four-alternative judgments. In Experiment 4, participants' making two related judgments resulted in better prospective memory than did their making two unrelated judgments. The results are consistent in spirit with a production rule account of the processing resources that are available when intention-related cues are encountered. Therefore, event-based prospective memory can inversely covary with the cognitive demands of the ongoing activity.     

Postmodernism Versus Modernism: Rethinking Theoretical Tensions in Social Gerontology

The interconnection of social theory to social aspects of aging has grown in recent years. The theoretical movement entitled structured dependency, couched in social class analysis, has tended to ignore an understanding of aging identity, the body, cultural representations of aging, and positive images of aging, all of which are central features of an emerging postmodern paradigm in gerontological theory. This article argues that the concept of gender can form a useful bridge, a continuity, between structured dependency and postmodernism in theoretical gerontology. Unfortunately, the compartmentalization of these two conceptual approaches has made their links difficult to forge. This article attempts to take a first step in this direction by highlighting the way postmodern ideas can be used to understand a modernist issue—gender in a gerontological context. Also, focusing on the aging body as a primary form of analysis generates some novel insights into the importance of both the theoretical understanding and cultural representations of the body.     

Win-shift and win-stay learning in the short-beaked echidna (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Tachyglossus aculeatus</Emphasis>)

Numerous previous investigators have explained species differences in spatial memory performance in terms of differences in foraging ecology. In three experiments we attempted to extend these findings by examining the extent to which the spatial memory performance of echidnas (or "spiny anteaters") can be understood in terms of the spatio-temporal distribution of their prey (ants and termites). This is a species and a foraging situation that have not been examined in this way before. Echidnas were better able to learn to avoid a previously rewarding location (to "win-shift") than to learn to return to a previously rewarding location (to "win-stay"), at short retention intervals, but were unable to learn either of these strategies at retention intervals of 90 min. The short retention interval results support the ecological hypothesis, but the long retention interval results do not. Electronic Publication     

Word Frequency Effects on the Processing of Subject–Verb Number Agreement

This paper examines the role of word frequency in the computation of subject–verb number agreement. Previous research in both production and comprehension has demonstrated that processing difficulties can arise in sentence structures containing a singular subject noun followed by a plural distractor noun, as in The key to the cabinets.¨ A whole sentence reading task was employed to determine whether the relative frequency with which the distractor noun appears in its singular or plural form would affect the degree of processing difficulty experienced by readers. Results suggest that the agreement process is, indeed, sensitive to this factor and this finding is compatible with activation-based accounts of the implementation of number agreement.     

Key Word Index Volume 4

Other Index

Key Word Index Volume 4     

A shift of attention may be necessary, but it is not sufficient, for the generation of the Simon effect

The Simon effect is the performance advantage for spatially corresponding, compared to non-corresponding, target-response ensembles when the location of the target is task irrelevant. In four experiments, we tested the predictions of the attention-shift account of the Simon effect. In all experiments, subjects made choice responses with respect to the identity of a central target that followed a spatially non-informative peripheral precue. The first experiment showed a Simon effect away from the precue when the precue was a go/no-go signal: responses to spatially non-corresponding precue-response pairs were faster than responses to spatially corresponding precue-response pairs. The results of the second experiment suggested that this “reverse” Simon effect was not due to inhibition. In the third experiment, a secondary working memory task required the encoding, and later recall, of “oddball” precues. Although the Simon effect was absent, larger Simon effects towards the precue (i.e., responses were faster to spatially corresponding, compared to non-corresponding, precue-response ensembles) were correlated with poorer performance on the memory task. In the last experiment, the identity of completely non-informative precues was congruent, incongruent, or unrelated to the identity of the target. With precues that were unrelated to the identity of the target, there was a Simon effect towards the precues. Conversely, the Simon effect occurred away from the precue when the identity of the precue was related to that of the target. The findings suggest that a shift of attention alone is not sufficient to produce the Simon effect. Rather, the shift of attention must originate from an intentionally defined object. The results are discussed within a framework that integrates the attention-shift and referential-coding hypotheses. Received: 2 December 1999 / Accepted: 23 March 2000