Saccade latency and warning signals: Effects of auditory and visual stimulus onset and offset

Previous studies have found that a nonspecific visual event occurring at the fovea 50–150 msec after the onset of a peripheral target delayed the initiation of the saccade to that target. The present studies replicated and extended this finding by studying the effects of both visual and auditory warning signals, by examining the effects of onset and offset warning on manual response latency, and by investigating the effects of presenting the warning events in the periphery of the visual field. The results indicated that the interfering effects occur with visual but not auditory stimuli, with saccades but not motor responses, and when the visual warning event occurs either foveally or in the subject’s periphery. Implications for the processes involved are discussed.     

Exposure to pornography,permissive and nonpermissive cues,and male aggression toward females

The present study examined the role of permissive and nonpermissive cues in mediating the relationship between exposure to erotica and aggression. Male subjects viewed either neutral slides with a silent female or erotic slides with a female who made permissive, nonpermissive, or no comments about the slides. The males rated the slides and subsequently rated the female confederate. Male subjects were then given an opportunity to administer their choice of several intensities of shock to the female in a competitive reaction-time task. Subjects in the permissive cues condition rated the erotic slides as more arousing, saw the female as more reasonable and accepting, and selected more intense shocks for the female than did subjects in the other conditions. One explanation of these results is that permissive cues in the presence of erotica led the male to believe that other normally inappropriate behaviors would be tolerated.     

Spacing judgments as an index of integration from context-induced relational processing: Implications for the free recall of ambiguous prose passages

The effect of information integration on the recall of ambiguous prose passages was investigated. In Experiment 1, subjects read ambiguous passages that were difficult to comprehend without titles. In judging the relative positions in the passages of pairs of test sentences, subjects performed better when they read passages headed by a suitable title than when they read untitled passages or received a title at the time of testing. In Experiment 2, subjects provided with a title at encoding also better discriminated complete old sentences from foils composed of fragments of two different old sentences than did subjects provided with no titles or with titles at the time of testing. These two tests index the degree of inter- and intrasentence information integration, respectively. Two findings indicated that integration affected free recall of an ambiguous passage. First, when the degree of integration of the passage's propositions was controlled, free recall of the passage was no different for subjects who did or did not know the passage's title at encoding. Second, inducing subjects to comprehend the passage's sentences individually, without relating them to one another, reduced free recall of the passage.     

Word repetitions in sentence recognition

When some items on a list are strengthened by extra study time or repetitions, recognition of other, unrelated, list items is not harmed (Ratcliff, Clark, & Shiffrin, 1990). Shiffrin, Ratcliff, and Clark (1990) accounted for this list-strength finding with a model assuming that different items are stored separately in memory, but that repetitions are accumulated together into a single stronger memory trace. Repeating words in the context of different sentences might cause separate storage of the repetitions of a given word, because either word or sentence traces are stored separately. Separate storage would, in effect, convert a list-strength manipulation into a list-length manipulation and thereby induce a positive list-strength effect. In Experiment 1, this result was produced for single-word recognition and for two types of sentence recognition. In Experiment 2, both words and sentences were repeated together, which should have caused repetitions to be stored in a single, stronger, trace. As expected, the list-strength effect was eliminated. A sentence trace model was fit to the data, supporting the account of Shiffrin et al. (1990) and supporting an account of word and sentence recognition in which activation is summed for representations of all list items. The results from the two studies are inconsistent with most current models of memory (as shown by the theoretical analyses of Shiffrin et al., 1990) and pose an additional challenge for theory.     

Rater information acquisition processes: Tracing the effects of prior knowledge, performance level, search constraint, and memory demand

Research on performance ratings has tended to neglect factors affecting raters' acquisition of ratee performance information. The present research examined the dynamic effects of this rater information acquisition process. Study 1 examined the effects of prior ratee knowledge (familiarity) and ratee performance level on subsequent acquisition of ratee performance information under varying levels of constraint. After exposure to prior ratee information, raters acquired additional information concerning a set of ratees using a computer controlled information board procedure. The results indicated significant effects on the amount of search for prior knowledge, search constraint, and the interaction between prior knowledge and performance level. Study 2 extended the research by including a memory component (time delay) between the exposure to prior information and subsequent search. Results were congruent with Study 1. They indicated significant main effects on the amount of search for prior knowledge, ratee performance level, search constraint, and on the interaction between prior knowledge and performance level. In addition, the results indicated a significant interaction between memory demand and prior knowledge. Implications of these results, limitations, and extensions of this research approach are discussed.     

Direct and continuous measurement of relational learning in human pavlovian conditioning

Three experiments were conducted employing a continuous measure of conditional stimulus/unconditional stimulus (CS/US) contingencies as perceived by the subject (i.e., subjective contingency or SC). It is argued that direct measurement of relational learning, as indexed by SC, can lead to a better understanding of Pavlovian conditioning processes. The first two experiments applied this approach to a methodologic controversy, raising the debate from a procedure-based argument to testing what the subject actually learns about CS/US relationships. While the issue was not resolved, testable hypotheses for future research were generated from the data. The third experiment contrasted the contingency stimulus-stimulus (S-S) account of Pavlovian conditioning with an earlier stimulus-response (S-R) continguity-reinforcement account. In this experiment, both SC and skin resistance were measured. Evidence for the existence of both cognitive-propositional and response-learning processes in conditioning was obtained.     

Authoritarian personalities in the natural and social sciences

This research is an extension of a previous finding, that authoritarian personalities are predisposed to the social sciences and nonauthoritarians to the natural sciences. Two hypotheses were tested: (1) Within the social sciences, more authoritarian personalities enter economics and geography than psychology, social work, or sociology; and (2) between the first and last years in college, in “authoritarian departments” there is an increase, while in “nonauthoritarian departments” there is a decrease in the students' authoritarianism.