The development of complex sentence processing strategies

Children aged 3, 4, and 5 years and adults heard sentences with clauses connected by after, and, or before, saw a picture, and indicated whether or not the picture matched one of the events of the sentence. Response times were taken as a measure of immediate accessibility to the meaning of the clause that the picture was about. Temporal organization of sentence meanings was dominant in 3-year-olds and adults, but not in 4- or 5-year-olds. The 3-year-olds and especially the adults processed and-sentences as implicitly temporal. The results for 4- and 5-year-olds are interpreted as indicating experimentation with alternate strategies for organizing sentences based on the structural/presuppositional properties of clauses.     

Decomposing the reaction time distribution: Pure insertion and selective influence revisited

This paper investigates the consequences of extending the assumptions of pure insertion and selective influence (popular in RT theorizing) to the level of the distribution. In the case of pure insertion and under the additional assumption that the additive random variable is exponentially distributed, a solution is obtained which not only allows estimation of the exponential-rate parameter but also provides a test of the assumptions. The result is shown to be applicable not only when processing is serial but also for certain parallel models. In addition, discrimination between self-terminating and exhaustive search strategies is provided, and in the case of either, both parameter estimation and tests of the model are possible. Extensions to nonexponential models are investigated and a general method of moments solution is outlined. In the case of selective influence a general nonparametric alternative to Sternberg's additive factor method is developed. The problem of empirical estimation and application is then considered. Simulations which place bounds on the type I and II error are reported. Finally the first theorem is provided an illustrative application with data from a memory scanning experiment. The results provide some support for the double assumption of pure insertion and that the additive random variable is distributed exponentially.     

Stress, Rewards, and Change in the Centrality of Women’s Family and Work Roles: Mastery as a Mediator

Although research suggests that stress and rewards experienced in a social role are associated with changes in the centrality (or personal importance) of that role over time, little attention has been given to the mechanisms that account for this relationship. This study was conducted to examine change in role mastery as a mediator in the relationship between changes in role experiences (stress and rewards) and changes in centrality among 195 women who simultaneously occupied the roles of parent care provider, mother, wife, and employee. Regression analyses indicated that increases in parent care, mother, and employee stress eroded mastery in those roles. In addition, increases in rewards were associated with a bolstered sense of mastery in each of the four roles. Mastery was found to be a mediating mechanism in the relationship between stress/rewards and centrality in one of the four roles examined, the employee role. However, changes in womens perceptions of mastery were unrelated to the extent to which women changed the importance of their three family roles. These findings extend prior research by demonstrating that mastery is a mechanism through which stress and rewards are associated with centrality in the employee role.     

Variations in working memory capacity predict individual differences in general learning abilities among genetically diverse mice

Up to 50% of an individuals' performance across a wide variety of distinct cognitive tests can be accounted for by a single factor (i.e., "general intelligence"). Despite its ubiquity, the processes or mechanisms regulating this factor are a matter of considerable debate. Although it has been hypothesized that working memory may impact cognitive performance across various domains, tests have been inconclusive due to the difficulty in isolating working memory from its overlapping operations, such as verbal ability. We address this problem using genetically diverse mice, which exhibit a trait analogous to general intelligence. The general cognitive abilities of CD-1 mice were found to covary with individuals' working memory capacity, but not with variations in long-term retention. These results provide evidence that independent of verbal abilities, variations in working memory are associated with general cognitive abilities, and further, suggest a conservation across species of mechanisms and/or processes that regulate cognitive abilities.     

The perceived vulnerability to disease scale: Cross-cultural measurement invariance and associations with fear of COVID-19 across 16 countries

Using cross-sectional data from N = 4274 young adults across 16 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, we examined the cross-cultural measurement invariance of the perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD) scale and tested the hypothesis that the association between PVD and fear of COVID-19 is stronger under high disease threat [that is, absence of COVID-19 vaccination, living in a country with lower Human Development Index (HDI) or higher COVID-19 mortality]. Results supported a bi-factor Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling model where items loaded on a global PVD factor, and on the sub-factors of Perceived Infectability and Germ Aversion. However, cross-national invariance could only be obtained on the configural level with a reduced version of the PVD scale (PVD-r), suggesting that the concept of PVD may vary across nations. Moreover, higher PVD-r was consistently associated with greater fear of COVID-19 across all levels of disease threat, but this association was especially pronounced among individuals with a COVID-19 vaccine, and in contexts where COVID-19 mortality was high. The present research brought clarity into the dimensionality of the PVD measure, discussed its suitability and limitations for cross-cultural research, and highlighted the pandemic-related conditions under which higher PVD is most likely to go along with psychologically maladaptive outcomes, such as fear of COVID-19.     

The Emperor's Psycholinguistics

We discuss and debunk five common assumptions about the interrelation of semantics, syntax, and frequency during sentence processing. In the course of this, we explore the implications of the view that syntax is assigned as the last stage of comprehension rather than the first: Statistically based perceptual strategies propose an initial semantic representation, which then constrains the assignment of syntactic representations. This view accounts for a variety of facts, as well as suggesting some surprising new ones.     

Visual search without eye movement

Two experiments have been made on the problem of visual search using six patterns which were geometrically simple, and familiar to the subject.

In each case the subject's task was to say where, among the complex of patterns, a particular pattern (the “test object”) appeared when the exposure of the whole display was so brief as to prevent scanning by the eyes. He could be informed visually (in Experiment I) or verbally (in Experiment II) which pattern was to be regarded as the “test object.”

In both experiments it was found that foreknowledge of what was to be the test object gave a significantly higher standard of accuracy than knowledge given later. This suggests that something analogous to visual search can occur without eye movements.     

Binocular masking induced by a moving object

Movement in a part of either of two binocular fields can, under some conditions, produce temporary obliteration of the corresponding part of the other field. This paper is a mainly qualitative study of this rather surprising phenomenon. The effect is found to increase from the fovea to the periphery, to be greatest at a velocity of about 20° visual angle per sec. and to vary with the orientation of the fixation point in the visual field. Some further lines of research designed to elucidate the relation of the effect described here to certain other visual phenomena are suggested.