Book reviews

Early Behavior: Comparative and Developmental Approaches. Edited by H. W. Stevenson, E. H. Hess, and H. L. Rheingold. London and New York: Wiley. 1967. Pp. xii + 303 75s.

Current Research in Motivation. Edited by Ralph Norman Haber. London and New York: HOlt, Rinehart and Winston. Pp. xii + 800. £5

Language and Thought. Edited by Donald C. Hildum. London: Van Nostrand, Insight Book No. 37. 1967. Pp. vi + 2 00. $1.95. 16s.

Hormones and Behavior. Edited by Richard E. Whelan. London: Van Nostrand. Insight Book No. 39. I967. Pp. vi + 266. $2.95. 24s.     

Recognition and recall as measures of long-term retention

Acquisition and retention of a list of paired associates were measured either by cued recall or by multiple-choice recognition. The method of testing used during original learning was combined factorially with the type of test administered after a 1-week interval. Speed of learning to criterion under the two procedures was comparable. Long-term recognition was substantially higher than recall. This difference did not interact significantly with the method of learning. Recall benefited substantially from a prior test of recognition, but there was little effect when the order of tests was reversed. It is concluded that (a) both occurrence and retrieval information were stored under each condition of learning, and (b) occurrence information is less subject to forgetting than retrieval information.     

Prism adaptation with simultaneous receipt of normal input

A 20-diopter vertically-displacing prism was worn on one eye in conjunction with plane glass on the other. Five groups ofSs differed in the density of a neutral filter worn over one eye. No aftereffect could be measured in either eye in any condition where the luminance of the “normal” field was equal to or greater than that of the prism field. As the luminance of the “normal” field is decreased below that of the prism field, the magnitude of aftereffect increases and is measurable in each eye.     

Peripheral and central components in variants of the Mueller-Lyer illusion

Illusion decrement with prolonged inspection was used as a technique to assess the relative amount of central component in seven variants of the Mueller-Lyer illusion. Results indicate that all of the variant forms share a common, central component, while the peripheral components, such as lateral inhibition, vary as a function of the presence of converging lines in the illusion configurations.     

Dichotic Perception of Mandarin Tones by Chinese and American Listeners

The dichotic perception of Mandarin tones by native and nonnative listeners was examined in order to investigate the lateralization of lexical tone. Twenty American listeners with no tone language background and 20 Chinese listeners were asked to identify dichotically presented tone pairs by identifying which tone they heard in each ear. For the Chinese listeners, 57% of the total errors occurred via the left ear, indicating a significant right ear advantage. However, the American listeners revealed no significant ear preference, with 48% of the errors attributable to the left ear. These results indicated that Mandarin tones are predominantly processed in the left hemisphere by native Mandarin speakers, whereas they are bilaterally processed by American English speakers with no prior tone experience. The results also suggest that the left hemisphere superiority for native Mandarin tone processing is similar to native processing of other tone languages.     

Stress exposure and stress generation in child and adolescent depression: a latent trait-state-error approach to longitudinal analyses

In 2 longitudinal studies of negative life events and depressive symptoms in adolescents (N = 708) and in children (N = 508), latent trait-state-error structural equation models tested both the stress generation hypothesis and the stress exposure hypothesis. Results strongly suggested that self-reports of depressive symptoms reflect the influence of a perfectly stable trait factor as well as a less stable state factor. Support emerged for both the stress generation model and the stress exposure model. When the state depression factor was modeled as predicting stress, support for the stress generation model appeared to increase with age. When the trait depression factor was modeled as the predictor of stress, support for the stress generation model did not vary with the child's age. In both models, support for the stress exposure remained relatively constant across age.     

Categorization of sounds

The authors conducted 4 experiments to test the decision-bound, prototype, and distribution theories for the categorization of sounds. They used as stimuli sounds varying in either resonance frequency or duration. They created different experimental conditions by varying the variance and overlap of 2 stimulus distributions used in a training phase and varying the size of the stimulus continuum used in the subsequent test phase. When resonance frequency was the stimulus dimension, the pattern of categorization-function slopes was in accordance with the decision-bound theory. When duration was the stimulus dimension, however, the slope pattern gave partial support for the decision-bound and distribution theories. The authors introduce a new categorization model combining aspects of decision-bound and distribution theories that gives a superior account of the slope patterns across the 2 stimulus dimensions.