Pupil Personnel Services in the Elementary School

Student personnel services for the elementary school utilizing counselor, social worker, and psychologist are discussed with respect to their overlapping and unique skills. As a solution to the manpower shortage, a program for multidisciplinary training of paraprofessionals is suggested.     

College Major Choice and Personal Adjustment

This investigation focused on the differences in reported personal adjustment problems between freshmen students who made a congruent college major choice and students who made an incongruent choice. Personal adjustment was defined operationally with the Mooney Problem Checklist. Congruent and incongruent college major choice groups were defined operationally using the Vocational Preference Inventory. In the analysis of variance of the adjustment scores, the interaction term involving congruence of major choice and sex and the test for the main effect of sex were not significant. The test for the main effect of congruence was found to be significant. Subjects who had made a congruent college major choice reported fewer personal adjustment problems when compared to subjects in the incongruent group.     

Reaction time as a function of the intensity and probability of occurrence of vibrotactile signals

Three Ss made judgments of the presence or absence of a burst of 60-cps vibration onthe index fingertip.The probability of S’s reporting the presence of a signal was found to be influenced by signal probability and signal intensity. Mean reaction time for reporting the presence of a signal decreased as a function of signal intensity and signal probability whereas mean reaction time for reporting the absence of a signal increased as a function of signal intensity and signal probability. On trials where no signal was presented mean R T for reporting a signal decreased with increases in the signal probability whereas mean RT for reporting the absence of a signal increased with increases in signal probability. The results were interpreted as support for the hypothesis that S’s decision time was longer the closer on the sensory continuum a particular observation was to his criterion.     

Prismatic displacement and the remembered location of targets

Following adaptation, only the trained limb misreaches to the remembered location of targets. This suggests a change in the feit position of the trained limb, but conflicts with recent reports, and with the hypothesis that when a limb changes, the remembered location of targets encountered only by that limb undergo some change too. It suggests that information is stored independently of the mode of acquisition.     

Similarity judgments of line length

Nine Ss judged similarity of pairs of lines on a scale from 0 to 100, and 14 Ss made magnitude estimations of similarity of pairs of lines. The two scales of similarity were linearly related. Scale values for subjective length were obtained in one dimension using a nonmetric multidimensional analysis. Subjective length was found to be logarithmically related to objective length, and similarity was found to be an exponential     

The relationship between cognitive,motor-kinesthetic,and oculomotor adaptation

The literature concerning adaptation to prism indicates that several adaptive mechanisms may be important. The particular mechanism or mechanisms involved depends (at least in part) upon the type of adaptive exposure. In the present study. three adaptive mechanisms (cognitive. oculomotor, and motor-kinesthetic) were investigated. Ss were asked to point in the dark at an illuminated target. The target was seen displaced from its veridical position due to a wedge prism placed before S’s right eye. The left eye was occluded. Ss then viewed their visual target pointing errors through the displacing prism without seeing any part of their bodies. One group of Ss was instructed to ignore these prism-induced errors and to continue pointing at the target’s visual position. A second group of Ss was instructed to compensate fully for their errors and to at tempt to eliminate them on all future trials. For the latter group errors were completely eliminated, while for Ss instructed to ignore their errors, relatively small improvement in visual target settings occurred. This improvement was called cognitive adaptation, since it depended on the S’s conscious control. In addition. for both conditions. evidence was found that allowing Ss to view their prism-induced pointing errors resulted in some form of motor-kinesthetic adaptation. This adaptation was hypothesized to represent a change in the judged position of the pointing hand relative to its felt position. It was concluded that this motor-kinesthetic adaptation was dependent, in part, upon cognitive information concerning the effects of the prism and that it serves to reduce conflict between cognitive and visual cues, i.e., between what S believes and what he sees.     

The use of correlated stimulus information in card sorting

Subjects were required to sort three packs of cards into six piles. On the cards of one pack were a number (one to six) of xs. In the second pack the cards had a single digit (1 to 6). On the third pack the two kinds of information were perfectly correlated, i.e., there were three 3s, four 4s, etc. This pack was sorted more quickly than either of the other two. It is provisionally concluded that the Ss were processing information in parallel rather than serially, and that evidence from two sensory analyzers was being combined rather than the outcome from two decision mechanisms. This conclusion is tempered by the observation that only a detailed study of the reaction times to individual stimuli can provide us with an unqualifled verdict.     

Individual half-judgment brightness functions

Nine Ss made half-judgments of each of nine brightness standards. Individual half-judgment brightness functions were constructed, one for each of the two threshold forms of the power law. The ω-Law (translation on the psychological axis) provided a better fit to the half-judgment data than did the ?-Law (translation on the intensity axis). A test of scale consistency for the fractionation method was confounded with the power law hypothesis, but the data are interpreted as providing fair support for the method independent of the form of the power law. The effect of Standard on exponent estimates was significant for both forms of the law, and the effect of Standard on threshold estimates was significant for the ?-Law but not for the ω-Law. Both forms of the law contain a so-called threshold parameter, but the interpretation of this parameter as a threshold was rejected for the ?-Law and accepted for the ω-Law.