Recalling more childhood events leads to judgments of poorer memory: Implications for the recovered/false memory debate

Dissociative disorders that are believed to develop from childhood sexual abuse are often considered to include amnesia for childhood events, particularly the events that involve the abuse itself. One unresolved issue is the extent to which memory recovery attempts can contribute to claims of having amnestic symptoms. Experiments with undergraduate subjects reveal that requiring more reports of childhood events will increase judgments of having poorer memory of one’s childhood. The results are consistent with the use of heuristics when one is reasoning under conditions of uncertainty, as experienced difficulty in remembering more experiences is attributed to the incompleteness of childhood memory. The findings challenge the validity of reports of childhood amnesia that follow memory recovery attempts.     

Fixation point offsets facilitate endogenous saccades

Subjects produced saccades to continuously visible targets that were signaled by the pitch, not the location, of an auditory signal. Such endogenous saccades were initiated more quickly when the visual fixation point disappeared 200 msec before the signal (thus producing a “gap”), even though the alerting benefits of such a warning were eliminated by an earlier warning tone. The presence of the gap effect under these circumstances shows that the effect is more general than was previously believed: Visual fixation point offsets facilitate saccades by affecting oculomotor processes related to both visually elicited (exogenous) and centrally produced (endogenous) saccades. In addition, the magnitude of the gap effect for endogenous saccades was significantly smaller than that for exogenous saccades, suggesting that at least some of the effect arises in relatively early processes, such as those involved in the processing of sensory signals, and not exclusively in later processes, such as those involved in the preparation and production of saccades.     

Was the Soviet Union Totalitarian? The View of Soviet Dissidents and the Reformers of the Gorbachev Era

The article explains why Soviet dissidents and the reformers of the Gorbachev era chose to characterize the Soviet system as totalitarian. The dissidents and the reformers strongly disagreed among themselves about the origins of Soviet totalitarianism. But both groups stressed the effects of totalitarianism on the individual personality; in doing so, they revealed themselves to be the heirs of the tsarist intelligentsia. Although the concept of totalitarianism probably obscures more than it clarifies when it is applied to regimes like the Nazi and the Soviet, the decision of the dissidents and the reformers to use the term enabled them to clarify their own values and the reasons they felt compelled to criticize the Soviet Union and to call for its radical reform.     

Discriminability in length of lines in the Müller-Lyer figure

Receiver-operating characteristics for the discriminability in the length of the lines of the Müller-Lyer figure were obtained by the rating method of detection theory. Six observers judged the shaft length of the lines of the figure with reference to the same standard line. Maximum-likelihood estimates of the index of (discriminability,d’, were a linear function of the difference in the length of the lines, but the functions did not pass through the origin because of a constant error of judgment. Because discriminability was determined by ROC analysis, the constant error could not be attributed solely to changes in criterion placement; instead, it showed that the Müller-Lyer figure induced a change in the discriminability of the lines.     

Temporal and spatial features in detecting one- and two-dimensional constraints in complementary visual displays

Spatial complements of visual displays of one- and two-dimensional Markov spatial constraints were successively presented for discrimination. Although each complement alone was sufficient for discrimination, spatial complements interfere when presented successively in time. Substantial changes in performance are observed for temporal separations as short as 10 msec and for spatial separations as short as 1 min in visual angle. Complete processing appears to take place in the interval between successive displays: thresholds are constant for a constant sum of display duration plus the interfield interval. Implications of complementary interference for a general theory of visual masking are briefly discussed.     

Patterns of interprofessional conflict resolution on school child study teams

This study proposes to investigate perceived and desired methods of conflict resolution by school psychologists, social workers, and learning disability specialists. Data were based on responses to a questionnaire which requested information on how decisions were reached or should have been reached when their child study teams were required to classify a child and there were conflicting opinions between professional groups. While majority vote and resolution by the psychologist accounted for the methods most often used in actual resolutions, there were great disagreements between professions as to how resolutions should have been made. Analysis indicates that the school psychologists are generally satisfied because they are the single group most often making final decisions, but they are generating feelings of discontent among other the other groups which suggst that team functioning and decision making, especially during voting, may be overly affected by interprofessional rivalry rather than objective data.