Comparison of Black and White Boys' Performance in Self-paced and Reactive Sports Activities

This study provided support for Worthy and Markle's thesis that whites excel at self-paced and blacks at reactive sports activities, by assessing the performance of 55 white and 122 black fourth-grade boys playing a modified soccer game. The research also explored the relationships between several dimensions of socialization (e.g., father presence-absence) and relative performance on the self-paced-reactive dimension. Two significant correlations emerged: Regardless of their own racial identity, boys who excelled at the self-paced activity tended to have several younger siblings and to attend schools with a sizeable representation of white students. Subsequent interviews revealed that black and white boys did not differ in their preference for self-paced and reactive sports activities.     

Effects of association and repetition in memory for temporal order

Temporal order recognition memory has been examined previously with tasks involving a recency judgment between a pair of items in a preceding string. Recency judgments are impaired when the earlier item is repeated. The present study employed the comparative recency judgment paradigm, with the lists composed of words. The effect of the inclusion in the list of a high associate of the earlier test item was examined and compared to the effect of repetition. Associative interference was observed, but not in all conditions. Direction of association was a significant factor. The results were interpreted in terms of a model of word recognition proposed by Morton.     

Desensitization to portrayals of real-life aggression as a function of exposure to television violence.

In two separate experiments, the hypothesis that exposure to violence in the context of television drama decreases subjects' emotional responsivity to portrayals of real-life aggression was tested. Subjects were shown either an excerpt from a violent police drama or a segment of an exciting but nonviolent volley-ball game before watching a videotaped scene of real aggression. Emotionality was measured by changes in skin resistance which was measured continuously throughout the session. In Experiment 1, subjects were 8- to 10-year-old children and the real aggression was a film of an argument and fight between two preschoolers. In Experiment 2, college students participated and reactions to real aggression were measured while subjects watched scenes from news films of the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. With the exception of adult females, subjects who previously had viewed the aggression drama were less aroused by the scenes of real aggression than were subjects who had seen the control film. Further support for the hypothesis was provided by the finding that for most groups of subjects, the amount of television violence normally viewed was negatively related to responsivity while viewing aggression.     

Classes and collections: Principles of organization in the learning of hierarchical relations

This study demonstrates that children tend to distort class inclusion relations (e.g., the relation of oaks to trees) into the part-whole structure of collections (e.g., the relations of oaks to a forest). Children aged 6 to 17 were taught novel class inclusion hierarchies, analogous to the relation between oaks, pines, and trees. In one condition, the class inclusion relations were taught by ostensive definition alone, e.g., stating “These are trees” while pointing to trees and, “These are oaks” while pointing to oaks. in the second condition, children were additionally told what would be analogous to “Oaks and pines are two kinds of trees”. With this additional information to constrain their interpretation, even the youngest children correctly interpreted the relation as class inclusion. In contrast, with limited information, children as old as 14 erroneously imposed a collection structure on the inclusion hierarchies. They would deny, for example, that any single tree was a tree (as they should of they thought “tree” meant “forest”), and would pick up several trees despite being asked for a tree. The results indicated that the part-whole structure of collections is simpler to establish and maintain than the structure of inclusion.     

Emotional ties that bind: the roles of valence and consistency of group emotion in inferences of cohesiveness and common fate

In three studies, observers based inferences about the cohesiveness and common fate of groups on the emotions expressed by group members. The valence of expressions affected cohesiveness inferences, whereas the consistency of expressions affected inferences of whether members have common fate. These emotion composition effects were stronger than those due to the race or sex composition of the group. Furthermore, the authors show that emotion valence and consistency are differentially involved in judgments about the degree to which the group as a whole was responsible for group performance. Finally, it is demonstrated that valence-cohesiveness effects are mediated by inferences of interpersonal liking and that consistency-common fate effects are mediated by inferences of psychological similarity. These findings have implications for the literature on entitativity and regarding the function of emotions in social contexts.     

Automatic retrieval in directed forgetting

In two experiments, we investigated the role of automatic retrieval in directed forgetting, using a stem completion test. In each experiment, we compared the performance of an implicit group, a process dissociation procedure (PDP) group, and a group given a speeded response task. The response times of the speeded response group on the stem completion task replicated earlier data in suggesting that this group adopted a purely automatic retrieval strategy. Experiment 1 revealed a directed-forgetting effect on automatic retrieval with the item method, but Experiment 2 revealed no directed-forgetting effect on automatic retrieval with the list method, consistent with the lack of implicit effects with the list method throughout the literature. Both experiments showed lower automatic estimates for the PDP group than for the implicit and speeded response groups, which did not differ. The data are consistent with either a selective rehearsal or an inhibition account of directed forgetting with the list method. The comparison of methods for assessing automatic retrieval is consistent with earlier evidence suggesting that subjects may adopt a generate/recognize strategy when given direct retrieval instructions.     

The impact of memory demands on audience design during language production

Speakers often tailor their utterances to the needs of particular addressees--a process called audience design. We argue that important aspects of audience design can be understood as emergent features of ordinary memory processes. This perspective contrasts with earlier views that presume special processes or representations. To support our account, we present a study in which Directors engaged in a referential communication task with two independent Matchers. Over several rounds, the Directors instructed the Matchers how to arrange a set of picture cards. For half the triads, the Directors' card categories were initially distributed orthogonally by Matcher (e.g. Directors described birds and dogs with one Matcher and fish and frogs with the other). For the other triads, the Directors' card categories initially overlapped across Matchers (e.g. Directors described two members of each category with each Matcher). We predicted that the orthogonal configuration would more readily allow Directors to encode associations between particular cards and particular Matchers--and thus allow those Directors to provide more evidence for audience design. Content analyses of Directors' utterances from two final rounds supported our prediction. We suggest that audience design depends on the memory representations to which speakers have ready access given the time constraints of routine conversation.