Inhibiting children's memory of an interactive event: the effectiveness of a cover‐up

Children are generally more susceptible than adults to suggestive interview techniques. Children's memories of an event can be altered and added to by presenting post‐event information (PEI). What is not known is whether embedding silence about a particular scene within the PEI makes that scene less likely to be reported. Children aged 5–6 years made cakes with an agent ‘Mrs Flour’. The following day they received PEI in which a target scene from the original event was omitted, resulting in children reporting the target scene significantly less often than did controls (control= 57% and omit= 23% correct responses). There was direct evidence from the children's language that the omission led to a detriment in memory for the original scene itself. Allowing children to draw during the interview did not reduce the effect. Implications are discussed in terms of child victims and witnesses particularly regarding child sexual abuse. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A genetic two-factor model of the covariation among a subset of Multidimensional Aptitude Battery and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Revised subtests

The phenotypic and genetic factor structure of performance on five Multidimensional Aptitude Battery (MAB) subtests and one Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Revised (WAIS-R) subtest was explored in 390 adolescent twin pairs (184 monozygotic [MZ]; 206 dizygotic (DZ)). The temporal stability of these measures was derived from a subsample of 49 twin pairs, with test–retest correlations ranging from .67 to .85. A phenotypic factor model, in which performance and verbal factors were correlated, provided a good fit to the data. Genetic modeling was based on the phenotypic factor structure, but also took into account the additive genetic (A), common environmental (C), and unique environmental (E) parameters derived from a fully saturated ACE model. The best fitting model was characterized by a genetic correlated two-factor structure with specific effects, a general common environmental factor, and overlapping unique environmental effects. Results are compared to multivariate genetic models reported in children and adults, with the most notable difference being the growing importance of common genes influencing diverse abilities in adolescence.     

Inter‐racial contact and the own‐race bias for face recognition in South Africa and England

Own‐race bias, where people are more accurate recognizing faces of people from their own race than other races, can lead to misidentification and, in some cases, innocent people being convicted. This bias was explored in South Africa and England, using Black and White participants. People were shown several photographs of Black and White faces and were later asked if they had seen these faces (and several fillers). In addition, participants were given a questionnaire about inter‐racial contact. Cross‐race identification accuracy for Black participants was positively correlated with self‐reported inter‐racial contact. The confidence–accuracy relationship was strongest when making own‐race judgements. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Terrorism as Collective Communication: The Collective Communication Model of Terrorism (CCMT)

This paper proposes that the psychological and behavioral effects of terrorist threat can be understood as a collective communication process that occurs between terrorists and their potential victims. Based on classic communication theory, terrorists are regarded as the senders of a specific collective message (such as ‘stop oppressing our culture’); a terrorist incident as the collective message itself (through its performance, modality and targets); and the potential victims as its collective receivers (who interpret the intention of the attack as a function of their pre-existing attributes, such as traits or salient social identities). The perception of terrorism as a dynamic and interactive process between collective senders, messages and receivers opens new theoretical perspectives regarding whether (a) terrorism can be successful in reaching its collective aim; (b) if it is interpreted as rational or irrational; and (c) how to counteract the vicious, cyclical relationship between terrorism and counter-terrorism. Previous findings on the psychology of terrorism can be organized within this theoretical framework, and the psychological impact of varying attributes of the perpetrators (senders), incident (message), and the reactions of the potential victims (receivers) systematically investigated. A series of self-conducted studies are also reviewed and found to provide direct support for the collective communication model of terrorism.     

Cognitive Performance as a Function of Sex and Handedness: An Evaluation of the Levy Hypothesis

Investigated incidence of left-handedness and non-right-handedness in a sample of 9th-grade students (n=313). In comparison, incidence among undergraduates is underestimated. Gitld were not significantly more right-handed than boys in the 9th grade sample but were significantly (p<01) more right-handed than boys in a sample of math students, grades 9-11 (n = 1097). Handedness did not affect math achievement (Test of Academic Progress), verbal (Quick Word Test) or spatial (Space Relations Test of the Differential Aptitude Test) performance in the 9th (n = 108) or 10th (n = 75) grade students, for 11th grade students (n = 98) a significant sex-by-handedness-by-measures (verbal-spatial) interaction was found (p<05). Results did not support the hypothesis of Levy's that left-handedness decreases spatial performance and benefits verbal performance, nor did the results support the further hypothesis that the cognitive pattern of higher verbal than spatial performance often considered characteristic of females can be attributed to more bilateral cerebral verbal function in females as in left-handers.     

Auditory and visual serial position functions obey different laws

Rhesus monkeys were tested in serial probe recognition tasks with either travel slide pictures or natural sounds. Tests with four-item lists produced serial position functions that were essentially opposite in shape for the two modalities and changed in opposite ways with retention interval. For visual memory, the primacy effect grew and the recency effect dissipated with retention interval. Capuchin monkeys, humans, and pigeons showed similar results. For auditory memory with rhesus monkeys, the recency effect grew and the primacy effect dissipated with retention interval. These results taken together, along with results from rehearsal tests of monkeys and humans, implicate two passive memory processes with different time courses. Interference among items within auditory lists was manipulated by varying the time between items and categories of items. Interference across lists was manipulated by varying the item pool size and, hence, item repetitions. Changes in the auditory serial position functions indicated that proactive and retroactive interference may have been instrumental in these dynamically changing serial position functions. Implications for theories and models of memory are discussed.