Working memory capacity and the antisaccade task: individual differences in voluntary saccade control

Performance on antisaccade trials requires the inhibition of a prepotent response (i.e., don't look at the flashing cue) and the generation and execution of a correct saccade in the opposite direction. The authors attempted to further specify the role of working memory (WM) span differences in the antisaccade task. They tested high- and low-span individuals on variants of prosaccade and antisaccade trials in which an eye movement is the sole requirement. In 3 experiments, they demonstrated the importance of WM span differences in both suppression of a reflexive saccade and generation of a volitional eye movement. The results support the contention that individual differences in WM span are not exclusively due to differences in inhibition but also reflect differences in directing the focus of attention.     

Dissociating size representation for action and for conscious judgment: Grasping visual illusions without apparent obstacles

Visual illusions provide important evidence for the co-existence of unconscious and conscious representations. Objects surrounded by other figures (e.g., a disc surrounded by smaller or larger rings, Ebbinghaus/Titchener illusion) are consciously perceived as different in size, while the visuo-motor system supposedly uses an unconscious representation of the discs' true size for grip size scaling. Recent evidence suggests other factors than represented size, e.g., surrounding rings conceived as obstacles, affect grip size. Use of the diagonal illusion avoids visual obstacles in the path of the reaching hand. Results support the dual representation theory. Grip size scaling follows actual size independent of illusory effects, which clearly bias conscious perception in direct comparisons of lengths (Experiment 1) and in finger-thumb span indications of perceived length (Experiment 2).     

Misinformation and unexpected change: Testing the development of epistemic-state attribution

Summary Children's ability to infer a person's ignorance and false belief was tested in two stories which differed as to the relative ease for making these inferences. In the Unexpected Change story ignorance could be directly inferred from the emphasized fact that the target character had not witnessed the change, while false belief required the additional inference that the character would assume that things would stay as they had been initially. In the Misinformation Story false belief was made directly accessible by the content of a false message, while ignorance was not directly indicated by absence of information. It needed to be inferred from the fact that the available information was misleading. Results from 3- and 4-year-old Austrian and English children showed that manipulation of inferential difficulty did not affect their ability to make epistemic state attribution. In both stories children found it easier to attribute ignorance than false belief. To integrate this finding in the larger developmental context we suggest that children younger than 4 years find it difficult to distinguish between knowledge and ignorance because they do not understand the role of informational access in the formation of knowledge and they fail in false-belief attribution because they do not understand that incompatible truth values can be assigned to propositions.     

Early pavlovian studies on the effects of starvation

This communication is based on the pioneering studies performed by I. P. Pavlov’s associates, Yu. P. Frolov (in 1918) and I. S. Rozental’ (in 1918/1919) at the Institute of Experimental Medicine, in Petrograd. The changes in the “independent variable”—the dogs’ diet—were not planned but were the consequences of severe shortages of food for man and beast. The principal generalization concerns the order in which different forms of “complex nervous activity” were impaired: the order is opposite to the order in which they emerge in the process of ontogenesis. First to suffer was “internal inhibition,” as documented by the failure of stimulus differentiation. This was followed by the decrease in the magnitude of well-established conditional responses (CRs). As a result of a more severe impairment of the excitatory processes, it became difficult or impossible to establish new CRs. In time, previously established CRs to artificial stimuli, visual and acoustic, disappeared totally. The CRs to natural conditional stimuli (CSs) were maintained fairly well but, eventually, they too decreased markedly. In the terminal phase of starvation, the unconditional salivary reflexes continued to function, although their magnitude was depressed.     

Abstracting Psychological Literature,Especially Non-English,in the 1990s

The cessation of non-English materials in Psychological Abstracts in 1988 resulted in a crisis, yet to be resolved, in the international exchange of information. As a long-term solution we favour founding International Psychological Abstracts, with the responsibility for preparation of the abstracts to be shared by the international psychological community. It is hoped that the compact-disc versions of the databases will become affordable to institutions around the world. In this communication, in addition to the abstract system of the American Psychological Association, attention will be given to other abstract journals in English as well as in French, German, and Russian.     

The Effect of Research with Teenage Mothers on the Development of Their Infants1

Mother-infant interaction of 14 teenage mothers and 12 women 20 years or older was observed and recorded in the laboratory or the home when the infants were 16, 20, 24, and 52 weeks of age. In order to assess the possible effect of the research intervention on the maternal behavior and on the infants' development, a control group of teenage mothers and their infants was seen only at the end of the study when the infant was 52 weeks old. At 12 months the Home Observation Measure of the Environment Inventory (HOME) was administered and infants were assessed with the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (motor and mental scales) and the Ainsworth Strange Situation procedure. On all measures the observation groups scored significantly higher than the control group. The significant aspects of the research intervention are discussed.     

Syntely: Paradigm for an inductive psychology of memory,perception, and thinking

Two experiments investigated the effects of stimulus structure and human memory on human expectancy and concept formation. Sequences of binary events, Xs and Os, were given for inductive prediction and continuation under conditions of discrete (Experiment 1) and continuous (Experiment 2) presentation. The results of both experiments supported an interpretation that people base their predictions on a specific kind of structure found in binary sequences calledsyntely: the proportion of all earlier subsequences that match the end subsequences and also support the continuation of the terminal run of a binary sequence. An analysis of the concept formation process in terms of inductive cues and evidence is provided