Recollection and familiarity in recognition memory: adult age differences and neuropsychological test correlates

Dual process theories account for age-related changes in memory by proposing that old age is associated with deficits in recollection together with invariance in familiarity. The authors evaluated this proposal in recognition by examining recollection and familiarity estimates in young and older adults across 3 process estimation methods: inclusion/exclusion, remember/know, and receiver operating characteristics (ROC). Consistent with a previous literature review (Light, Prull, LaVoie, & Healy, 2000), the authors found age invariance in familiarity when process estimates were derived from the inclusion/exclusion method, but the authors found age differences favoring the young when familiarity estimates were derived from the remember/know and ROC methods. Recollection estimates were lower for older adults in all 3 methods. Recollection and familiarity had variable relationships with frontal- and temporal-lobe measures of neuropsychological functioning in older adults, depending on which method was used to generate process estimates. These data suggest that although recollection deficits appear to be the rule in aging, not all estimates of familiarity show age invariance.     

Self-esteem and the effects of success and failure feedback n performance

High and low self-esteem subjects received success or failure feedback regarding their performance on a task described as measuring their sensitivity to other people. Presumably as part of another study, changes in their self-perceptions regarding sensitivity to others were assessed, as well as changes in their performance on a different task Changes in self-perception were greater when the feedback was consistent with subjects' overall level of self-evaluation Task performance following failure was poorer than that following success HSE subjects performed better following success feedback, and LSE subjects performed more poorly following failure There were no significant performance changes for the HSE-failure and LSE-success subjects. The degree of change in self-perception of sensitivity to others was highly correlated with the magnitude of performance changes     

Evaluation of fee collection policy changes in an alcohol halfway house

This study used an ABAB design and 1-year retrospective baseline to evaluate the impact of a contingency management and feedback policy on payment of fees by clients in a halfway house for substance abusers. The results indicated no consistent effect of the intervention on halfway house income, but some clients did appear to increase their saving and decrease their spending behavior while making sufficient fee payments to avoid the policy contingencies.     

Treating connectionism properly: Reflections on Smolensky

Summary In this essay, I undertake to examine the principal theses of Paul Smolensky's 1988Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article, On the proper treatment of connectionism, from the point of view of the methodology and epistemology of science, that is, the philosophical theory of theories in general. After exploring the instrumentalist and realist views of the relationships between micro- and macrotheories on their home ground in the natural sciences, the procedures by which a phenomenally described cognitive task is prepared for symbolic or subsymbolic modeling, and the contrast between the deliberate conscious reasoning processes of a novice and intuitive behavior of an expert in solving a given family of cognitive problems, I argue that although Smolensky is right about what it would take for connectionist subsymbolic models to relate to symbolic models as micro- to macrotheories, he is wrong in concluding that they do. On the contrary, it would be something of a miracle if the idealized nomological structure of the behavior of stochastic patterns of activity over large numbers of subsymbolic units in a connectionist machine corresponded even approximately to the nomological structure of the conceptual level behavior of a Von Neumann computer running off a program whose syntax had been explicitly designed to structurally operationalize a determinate fragment of intentional semantics — unless, of course, the connectionist machine had been deliberately constructed to implement the symbol processor in the first place.I conclude that the proper treatment of connectionism is to be found among the blandly ecumenical proposals for irenic cooperation and division of labor that Smolensky considers and rejects.     

Grammatical class effects in relation to normal and aphasic sentence processing

Agrammatic, Broca's aphasic patients, Wernicke's aphasic patients, and neurologically intact control subjects were asked to detect target letters in prose passages and in a scrambled word passage. The targets were embedded, in some instances, in content words (open-class vocabulary items), and in other instances, in function words (closed-class vocabulary items). With respect to the prose passages, both the control subjects and Wernicke's aphasic patients were more apt to notice target letters when they appeared in the open-class items than when in closed-class items; by contrast, the agrammatic Broca's patients showed no vocabulary class detection difference. The Wernicke's patients were not entirely normal, however: Whereas the normal subjects showed a much smaller vocabulary class effect for letter detection in the scrambled condition, the Wernicke's maintained the pattern they had shown in the prose condition. These and other findings obtained on the letter cancellation task are discussed in relation to lexical access mechanisms geared to sentence parsing.     

Individual prediction of dyslexia by single versus multiple deficit models

The overall goals of this study were to test single versus multiple cognitive deficit models of dyslexia (reading disability) at the level of individual cases and to determine the clinical utility of these models for prediction and diagnosis of dyslexia. To accomplish these goals, we tested five cognitive models of dyslexia--two single-deficit models, two multiple-deficit models, and one hybrid model--in two large population-based samples, one cross-sectional (Colorado Learning Disability Research Center) and one longitudinal (International longitudinal Twin Study). The cognitive deficits included in these cognitive models were in phonological awareness, language skill, and processing speed and/or naming speed. To determine whether an individual case fit one of these models, we used two methods: 1) the presence or absence of the predicted cognitive deficits, and 2) whether the individual's level of reading skill best fit the regression equation with the relevant cognitive predictors (i.e., whether their reading skill was proportional to those cognitive predictors.) We found that roughly equal proportions of cases met both tests of model fit for the multiple deficit models (30-36%) and single deficit models (24-28%); hence, the hybrid model provided the best overall fit to the data. The remaining roughly 40% of cases in each sample lacked the deficit or deficits that corresponded with their best-fitting regression model. We discuss the clinical implications of these results for both diagnosis of school-age children and preschool prediction of children at risk for dyslexia.