Selective attention by children and adults to pictures specified by color

Four conditions were used to investigate developmental trends in the ability to establish and use a color set to direct the selective processing of pictures. In three conditions, 6-year-old, 9-year-old, and adult subjects viewed a series of pairs of pictures, with one red and one black line drawing in each pair. Subjects were asked to look either at the red pictures only, the black pictures only, or both pictures. In a fourth condition, subjects viewed a series of singly presented red and black pictures. Pictures of both colors were included in a subsequent recognition memory test. At all ages recognition memory was comparable for pictures of each color in the both and single conditions but was higher for pictures of the specified color in the selective red and selective black conditions. There was no evidence at any age that memory for pictures of the specified color was decreased by the presence of the second picture. These results, showing roughly comparable selectivity at all ages, were discussed in relation to findings of developmental trends in selective attention on more “traditional” central-incidental learning tasks.     

Occupation,Competence, and Role Overload as Evaluation Determinants of Successful Women1

In order to determine what variables contribute to or detract from the inter- personal attraction of a successful career woman, 80 male and 80 female introductory psychology students at a large western state university viewed one of eight different videotapes of a female stimulus person discussing aspects of her career and homelife. Two levels of occupation (traditional vs. nontraditional), two levels of competcnce (high vs. low), and two levels of role overload (high vs. low) were factorially varied for each videotape. The Attitudes toward Women Scale (AWS) was used as a covariate, thereby equalizing attitudes between the sexes. A multivariate analysis of covariance was performed on the data. Results indicated that all main effects-competence, role overload, occupation, and sex of subjects-were significant. Also significant was a sex of subject by occupation interaction and two three-way interactions. These results were discussed in the context of how they increase our understanding of college students' perceptions of successful career women.     

Encoding specificity and modality effects in episodic memory

Summary A modified Brown-Peterson paradigm was employed to determine the extent to which proactive interference effects of a sensory nature would influence the occurrence of sensory encoding specificity effects in episodic memory. Subjects presented with an auditory or a visual study list of five to-be-remembered (TBR) words engaged in either an auditory or a visual arithmetic distractor task for 30 s, and then received the first word in the study list as an auditory or visual intralist retrieval cue or received no cue. Presentation of the intralist retrieval cue in the modality of the study list enhanced the effectiveness of the retrieval cue, whereas presentation of the retrieval cue in the modality of the distractor task decreased the effectiveness of the retrieval cue. Sensory encoding specificity effects were largest when the distractor task occurred in the modality opposite to the modality in which both the study list and the retrieval cue were presented.     

Some articulatory correlates of perceptual isochrony

Given sequences of digits with temporally equidistant acoustic onsets, listeners do not perceive them as isochronous (Morton, Marcus, & Frankish, 1976). In order for the sequences to be perceptually isochronous, systematic departures from acoustic isochrony must be introduced. These acoustic departures are precisely those that talkers generate when asked to produce an isochronous sequence (Fowler, 1979), suggesting that listeners judge isochrony based on acoustic information about articulatory timing. The present experiment was an attempt to test directly whether perceptually isochronous sequences have isochronous articulatory correlates. Electromyographic potentials were recorded from the orbicularis oris muscle when speakers produced sequences of monosyllables “as if speaking in time to a metronome.” Sequences were devised so that lip-muscle activity was related to the syllable-initial consonant, the stressed vowel, or the stressed vowel and final consonant. Results indicate that isochronous muscular activity accompanies both isochronous and anisochronous acoustic signals produced under instructions to generate isochronous sequences. These results support an interpretation of the perceptual phenomenon reported by Morton et al. to the effect that listeners judge isochrony of the talker’s articulations as they are reflected in the acoustic signal.     

The availability explanation of excessive plausibility assessments

The assessment of hypotheses in hypothesis generation involves a comparison between those hypotheses that have been generated (specified) and those that are not generated (unspecified). Experiment 1 was an investigation of an “availability explanation” for subjects' overconfidence in the probability of specified hypotheses. The conjecture is that subjects have difficulty retrieving unspecified hypotheses from memory. Therefore, the underpopulated set of unspecified hypotheses is assessed as less probable then it actually is and the specified set is assessed as more probable. Two manipulations to increase the availability of unspecified hypotheses were investigated. One involved explicitly requesting subjects to populate the unspecified set; the other was a computer presentation of candidate unspecified hypotheses. Results of experiment 1 were that assessment overconfidence for both experimental groups was reduced. The results support the conjecture that the availability heuristic is at least partially responsible for subjects' overconfidence. The main result of experiment 2 was that the overconfidence bias persisted with different assessment methods for both subject-generated and experimenter-supplied hypotheses.     

A challenge to vocational psychology: How important are aspirations in determining male career development?

Nationally representative longitudinal data on 1394 employed white men aged 15 to 24 in 1966 were used to assess whether job opportunities or vocational aspirations are the more important determinants of later job held. Support was found for two hypotheses: (a) men more often achieve congruence between their aspiration and their field of employment by changing aspirations to match the job rather than vice versa; and (b) aspirations for field of work generally are not as useful as actual job field for predicting the field of jobs held 1 to 5 years later. Contrary to expectation, middle-class young men were no more able to attain their aspirations either for field of employment or for status level of occupation than were lower-class male youths. These results suggest that although aspirations have some predictive power, the opportunity structure—which both conditions aspirations to narrow ranges early in life and affects the direction of early career development—is too often neglected by vocational psychology. One suggestion for counseling practice is that interest and maturity assessments be used as sources of information to both client and counselor about past influences. Attempts to actually counteract those influences should be clearly specified as such and separated from the assessment process.     

Performance of dyslexic children on speech perception tests

Several researchers who have compared the performance of dyslexic and normal-reading children on a variety of different tasks have suggested that dyslexic children may have subtle deficits in the phonemic analysis of spoken as well as written language. Thus it is of interest to know how children who have extraordinary difficulty learning to read can perform explicity auditory-phonetic tasks. Seventeen dyslexic children (10 years of age) and a group of 17 controls were administered tests of identification and discrimination of synthesized voiced stop consonants differing in place of articulation. These were tests of the type used to study categorical perception in adults, adapted for use with young children. Significant differences between dyslexics and controls were found in both kinds of tasks; the pattern of identification and discrimination differences suggests an inconsistency in the dyslexics' phonetic classification of auditory cues. A significant relationship was found between reading level and speech discrimination.     

Does echoic memory develop?

A series of experiments is reported on the stimulus suffix effect with the primary variables being age of the subject (7 and 11 years), rate of presentation, and list length. While the suffix effect was larger for younger subjects at a slow rate of presentation, the effect was nearly identical across age groups with a fast presentation rate. It was concluded that when the contaminating effects of more central processes are reduced, there is no developmental change in the capacity of echoic memory. An interesting effect of rate of presentation is reported with younger subjects performing better at faster rates of presentation and adults performing better at slower rates.     

Infant emotion and the vocal affect lexicon

The role of the vocal channel of emotion expression in infancy has been neglected in developmental theory. The present review describes the ontogenetic course of vocal emotional expression as exhibited by human and infrahuman primate young and considers its dynamic relationship to the facial and bodily components of expression. The infant's encoding of negative and positive emotion expression is discussed within a developmental framework. In addition, this review assesses the impact of early social influences. It is concluded that early patterns of infant vocal emotional expression are probably biogenetically determined and that there may be certain universal vocal signals. However, data derived from studies of dyadic interaction indicate that the transition from raw affect expression in early infancy to a more modulated pattern later on is a product not only of neuromuscular maturation but of maternal coaching in affective expression as well.