Retrieval-induced facilitation: initially nontested material can benefit from prior testing of related material

Classroom exams can assess students' knowledge of only a subset of the material taught in a course. What are the implications of this approach for long-term retention? Three experiments (N = 210) examined how taking an initial test affects later memory for prose materials not initially tested. Experiment 1 shows that testing enhanced recall 24 hr later for the initially nontested material. This facilitation was not seen for participants given additional study opportunities without initial testing. Experiment 2 extends this facilitative effect to a within-subjects design. Experiment 3 demonstrates that this facilitation can be modulated by conscious strategies. These results have implications for educational practice and the theoretical developments of the testing effect, associative memory, and retrieval inhibition.     

The classification of violence risk

The Classification of Violence Risk (COVR) is an interactive software program designed to estimate the risk that a person hospitalized for mental disorder will be violent to others. The software leads the evaluator through a chart review and a brief interview with the patient. At the end of this interview, the software generates a report that contains a statistically valid estimate of the patient's violence risk-ranging from a 1% to a 76% likelihood of violence-including the confidence interval for that estimate, and a list of the risk factors that the program took into account to produce the estimate. In this article, the development of the COVR software is described and several issues that arise in its administration are discussed.     

Does expanded retrieval produce benefits over equal-interval spacing? Explorations of spacing effects in healthy aging and early stage Alzheimer's disease

Three experiments explored different schedules of retrieval practice in young adults, older adults, and individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer type. In each experiment, an initial acquisition phase was presented in which participants studied or attempted to retrieve response words to cues, followed by a later cued-recall test. Experiment 1 produced a benefit of expanded retrieval over equal-interval retrieval during acquisition, but this benefit was lost in final cued recall. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants received corrective feedback during acquisition and modified spacing schedules. There was again no evidence of a difference between expanded and equal-interval conditions in final cued recall. Discussion focuses on the potential benefits and costs of expanded retrieval on a theoretical and applied level.     

Withholding inputs in team contexts: member composition, interaction processes, evaluation structure, and social loafing

Social loafing was observed as a naturally occurring process in project teams of students working together for 3-4 months. The authors assessed the contributions that member composition (i.e., relational dissimilarity and knowledge, skills, and abilities; KSAs), perceptions of the team's interaction processes (i.e., dispensability and the fairness of the decision-making procedures), and the team's evaluation structure (i.e., identifiability) make toward understanding loafing behavior. Identifiability moderated the impact of dispensability on loafing but not the impact of fairness on loafing. Perceptions of fairness were negatively related to the extent that participants loafed within their team. Specific aspects of relational dissimilarity were positively associated with perceptions of dispensability and negatively associated with perceptions of fairness, whereas KSAs were negatively associated with perceptions of dispensability.     

Basic personality dispositions, self-esteem, and personal goals: an approach-avoidance analysis

ABSTRACT This research examined the hypothesis that self-esteem negatively predicts avoidance (relative to approach) personal goals, as well as the hypothesis that self-esteem mediates the link between indicators of approach and avoidance temperament and avoidance (relative to approach) personal goals. Study 1 established that self-esteem is indeed negatively related to avoidance (relative to approach) goals, even with social desirability concerns controlled. In Study 2, self-esteem was found to mediate the relation between Neuroticism (conceptualized as an indicator of avoidance temperament) and avoidance (relative to approach) personal goals. In Study 3, self-esteem was documented as a mediator of the relation between BAS and BIS sensitivity (conceptualized as indicators of approach and avoidance temperament, respectively) and avoidance (relative to approach) personal goals in the achievement domain. The implications of these findings for our understanding of basic personality dispositions, self-esteem, and personal goals are discussed.     

Examining the principles in principled conservatism: the role of responsibility stereotypes as cues for deservingness in racial policy decisions

Why do educated conservatives oppose affirmative action? Those in the "principled conservatism" camp say opposition is based on principled judgments of fairness about the policies. Others, however, argue that opposition is based on racism. The present article offers an alternative perspective that may reconcile these contradictory points of view. In 2 studies, the authors show 2 major findings: (a) that conservatives oppose affirmative action more for Blacks than for other groups, in this case women, and (b) that the relationship between conservatism and affirmative action attitudes is mediated best by group-based stereotypes that offer deservingness information and not by other potential mediators like old-fashioned racism or the perceived threat that affirmative action poses to oneself. The authors conclude that educated conservatives are indeed principled in their opposition to affirmative action, but those principles are group based not policy based.     

Hearing a face: cross-modal speaker matching using isolated visible speech

An experiment was performed to test whether cross-modal speaker matches could be made using isolated visible speech movement information. Visible speech movements were isolated using a point-light technique. In five conditions, subjects were asked to match a voice to one of two (unimodal) speaking point-light faces on the basis of speaker identity. Two of these conditions were designed to maintain the idiosyncratic speech dynamics of the speakers, whereas three of the conditions deleted or distorted the dynamics in various ways. Some of these conditions also equated video frames across dynamically correct and distorted movements. The results revealed generally better matching performance in the conditions that maintained the correct speech dynamics than in those conditions that did not, despite containing exactly the same video frames. The results suggest that visible speech movements themselves can support cross-modal speaker matching.     

Taste-aroma interactions in a ternary system: a model of fruitiness perception in sucrose/acid solutions

Cross-modal interactions between aroma, sweetness, and acidity were studied. A series of samples was presented to trained panelists who assessed strawberry flavor intensity using magnitude estimation with a reference modulus. The delivery of aroma stimuli from the different solutions was measured by monitoring exhaled breath using atmospheric pressure chemical ionization-mass spectrometry to determine whether there were any physicochemical effects on volatile release; no significant differences were noted. Three-dimensional predictive models were built to describe perceived strawberry flavor intensity as a function of concentrations of sucrose, acid, and volatiles. Analysis of the data identified two groups of panelists with different responses: For Group 1, increasing sucrose and/or acid levels also increased the perceived flavor intensity. For Group 2, changing sucrose concentrations had little effect, but increasing acid and/or volatile levels did. The results show different effects of organic and inorganic acids on perception, as well as clear interactions between the modalities of taste (sugar and acid) and aroma. The clustering of panelists' responses suggests that this phenomenon may depend on prior associations between the fruity flavor and the tastants.     

Use of binaural cues for sound localization in two species of Phyllostomidae: the Greater spear-nosed bat (Phyllostomus hastatus) and the Short-tailed fruit bat (Carollia perspicillata)

Unlike humans, not all mammals use both of the binaural cues for sound localization. Whether an animal uses these cues can be determined by testing its ability to localize pure tones; specifically, low frequencies are localized using time-difference cues, and high frequencies are localized using intensity-difference cues. We determined the ability to use binaural cues in 2 New World bats, Phyllostomus hastatus, large omnivores, and Carollia perspicillata, small frugivores, by testing their tone-localization ability using a conditioned avoidance procedure. Both species easily localized high-frequency tones, indicating that they could use the interaural intensity-difference cue. However, neither species was able to use the phase-difference cue to localize either low-frequency pure tones or amplitude-modulated tones (which provided an envelope for additional time analysis). We now know of 3 bat species that cannot use binaural time cues and 2 that can. Further exploration of localization in bats may provide insight into the neural analysis of time cues in species that do not hear low frequencies.