The time course of phonological, semantic, and orthographic coding in reading: Evidence from the fast-priming technique

The present experiment employed the fast-priming paradigm in reading (Sereno & Rayner, 1992), in which sentences are silently read while eye-movement-contingent changes are made on a specified target region. In this paradigm, when readers fixate on a specified target word region, a prime word is encountered for a brief duration at the beginning of the fixation and then it is replaced by a target word. Three types of primes were employed:homophones, semantically related, andorthographically similar, and five prime durations were employed: 29, 32, 35, 38, and 41 msec. The primary finding was that significant homophone priming was obtained at prime durations ranging from 29 to 35 msec, whereas significant semantic priming occurred only at the 32-msec prime duration. In contrast, significant orthographic priming occurred at all prime durations. These findings indicate that phonological codes are activated during an eye fixation at least as rapidly as semantic codes. An explanation for the pattern of events is suggested using the framework of an activation-verification model.     

Can Students Work Together Equitably? An Analysis of Task Effects in Collaborative Group Work

Past research has shown that ethnic minority students and females tend to participate less in collaborative groups because of their perceived lower status. This study examined the mediating effects that the task type (single-answer versus variable-answer) has on the relationship between diffuse status characteristics of participants (race – Black and White, and gender) and group members' interpersonal perceptions and participation within collaborative groups. Eight groups of four middle school students (Black female, Black male, White female, and White male) completed two tasks (variable-answer and single-answer) while being videotaped. The study found main effects of race and gender for participation and perceptions as well as task by gender effects for giving explanations and perceived quality of ideas. This article presents these findings in terms of gender-specific task characteristics and discusses implications of these results for educators and future research.     

Memory for action events in the bottlenosed dolphin

We investigated whether a bottlenosed dolphin’s ability to recall and repeat actions on command would immediately generalize to actions performed with specified objects. The dolphin was tested on her ability to repeat 18 novel behaviors performed with potentially interchangeable objects specified using an artificial gestural language. Such “action events” were correctly repeated at above chance levels, indicating that the dolphin had access to memories of those events. Performance levels were, however, lower than in previous tests. The dolphin appeared to have difficulty recalling which object an action was performed with. Previous research has demonstrated that animals can recall features of their environment and features of their actions independently of one another. The results of this study demonstrate (1) that the dolphin’s concept of repeating extends beyond simply accessing memories of movement patterns, and (2) that dolphins’ memories of past events incorporate representations of both self-performed acts and objects, locations, or gestural instructions. Received:10 October 1998 / Accepted after revision: 22 December 1998     

Socrates questions Gorgias: The rhetorical vector of Plato's “Gorgias”

This essay argues that Plato's Gorgias, a dialogue lauding dialectic over rhetoric, uses a question-and-answer format as a heuristic of argument. Specific observations are advanced to explain the implications of Plato's techniques and to provide a more sensitive understanding of the process by which sought to gain the adherence of his readers.     

Human genome research in an interdependent world.

This has been the year of agenda-setting conferences for the ambitious ELSI (ethical, legal and social issues) program of the Human Genome Project (HGP). But of the dozen or more major meetings of this sort held across the country, the one held at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD, June 2-4, 1991, was distinctive in several respects. As its name implies, "Human Genome Research in an Interdependent World" was a global look at the issues raised by gene mapping and sequencing. Unlike previous conferences, however, this meeting looked beyond a comparative analysis of clinical and domestic legal issues, and concentrated on topics that may require responses on a truly international level if they are to be successfully resolved....[Capron served as general chairman of the conference]     

Social categorization and person memory: The pervasiveness of race as an organizing principle

Two studies investigated the pervasiveness of race as a social categorization and whether the organization of information around racial categories is sensitive to contextual factors. Both studies measured accentuation effects (more intra- than inter-race errors) and own-group bias (fewer confusions between own- than other-group members) in person memory, using the paradigm developed by Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff and Ruderman (1978). Experiment 1 studies the generalization of these effects across ethnic group membership (black/white) and topic (categorization-relevant/irrelevant) in a 2 × 2 [× 4] between-subject design, with type of error as a repeated measure. There was a highly significant accentuation effect, which was not affected by either topic or group membership. Experiment 2, using white subjects only, manipulated anticipated future interaction/no interaction, which affected overall accuracy/error rate, but not the strong accentuation effect. Neither study found any support for an own-group bias. Results are discussed in terms of the automaticity of race as a basis for social categorization.     

Home environmental consequences of commute travel impedance

The physical and perceptual dimensions of commuting travel impedance were again found to have stressful consequences in a study of 99 employees of two companies. This quasi-experimental replication study, which focuses here on home environment consequences, investigated the effects of physical impedance and subjective impedance on multivariate measures of residential satisfaction and personal affect in the home. Both sets of residential outcome measures were significantly related to the two impedance dimensions. As predicted, gender was a significant moderator of physical impedance effects. Women commuting on high physical impedance routes were most negatively affected. Previously found subjective impedance effects on negative home mood, regardless of gender, were strongly replicated with several methods and were buttressed by convergent results with objective indices. The theoretical conjecture that subjective impedance mediates the stress effects of physical impedance was supported by the personal affect cluster but only for one variable in the residential satisfaction cluster. Traffic congestion has increased in metropolitan areas nationwide, and commuters, families, and organizations are absorbing associated hidden costs. The results are reviewed in terms of our ecological model, and the moderating effects of gender are discussed in terms of choice and role constraints.     

Facilitation of both “same” and “different” judgments of letter strings by familiarity of letter sequence

Three experiments employing simultaneous matching were performed to extend recent findings that three kinds of familiarity—familiarity of letter sequences, familiarity of display configuration, and familiarity of letter orientation—facilitate the matching of letter strings for “same” responses and sometimes for “different” responses. It was found that letter sequence familiarity facilitated “same” responses even when the letter strings were in an unfamiliar orientation or configuration and also facilitated “different” responses whenever the task required that a substantial portion of the display be processed before a response could be initiated. A three-stage model of the simultaneous letter-string matching task was developed. This model, which assumes that the same processes account for both “same” and “different” responses, was consistent with findings obtained when there were small differences between string pairs. Discrepant findings obtained when there were large differences between string pairs may have been produced by the premature initiation of responses.     

Tests of the generality of the principle of encoding specificity

Two empirical tests of the principle of encoding specificity are reported. In Experiment I, the normative strength of the cues presented on the input and on the recall trial was varied factorially. To lessen the emphasis on strictly associative learning, only half the items were cued in each phase of the study-recall cycle. Recall was higher when the cues remained the same than when they changed. However, regardless of the condition of input cuing, strong output cues were substantially more effective than weak ones. In Experiment II, the to-be-remembered words were shown in the presence of weak cues on the input trial. Recognition in the context of strong extralist cues was compared with recall to the original input cues. On the test of cued recognition, the target words were either generated by the subjects as free associates or presented to them as items on a test constructed by the experimenter. Contrary to previous findings, recall was not found to be superior to recognition. The phenomena of cue-dependent forgetting that have been interpreted as evidence for the principle of encoding specificity appear to have limited generality.