Recalibration of phonetic categories by lipread speech versus lexical information

Listeners hearing an ambiguous phoneme flexibly adjust their phonetic categories in accordance with information telling what the phoneme should be (i.e., recalibration). Here the authors compared recalibration induced by lipread versus lexical information. Listeners were exposed to an ambiguous phoneme halfway between /t/ and /p/ dubbed onto a face articulating /t/ or /p/ or embedded in a Dutch word ending in /t/ (e.g., groot [big]) or /p/ (knoop [button]). In a posttest, participants then categorized auditory tokens as /t/ or /p/. Lipread and lexical aftereffects were comparable in size (Experiment 1), dissipated about equally fast (Experiment 2), were enhanced by exposure to a contrast phoneme (Experiment 3), and were not affected by a 3-min silence interval (Experiment 4). Exposing participants to 1 instead of both phoneme categories did not make the phenomenon more robust (Experiment 5). Despite the difference in nature (bottom-up vs. top-down information), lipread and lexical information thus appear to serve a similar role in phonetic adjustments.     

Influences on the efficiency of prospective memory in younger and older adults.

The influence of 4 factors on age-related declines in prospective memory (PM) was considered in 2 experiments. The results of the experiments reveal that age-related differences in PM were not moderated by the degree of match between the nature of processing required in the ongoing activity and the defining features of the PM cue. Age-related differences in the accuracy of PM responses were primarily attributable to an increase in the number of omission errors committed by older adults. Age-related differences in PM were somewhat independent of the ability to recall the PM cues and intentions following task performance and were mediated by the cognitive resources of processing speed, inhibitory control, and working memory.     

Minority dissent and team innovation: the importance of participation in decision making.

This study integrates research on minority dissent and individual creativity, as well as team diversity and the quality of group decision making, with research on team participation in decision making. From these lines of research, it was proposed that minority dissent would predict innovation in teams but only when teams have high levels of participation in decision making. This hypothesis was tested in 2 studies, 1 involving a homogeneous sample of self-managed teams and 1 involving a heterogeneous sample of cross-functional teams. Study 1 suggested that a newly developed scale to measure minority dissent has discriminant validity. Both Study 1 and Study 2 showed more innovations under high rather than low levels of minority dissent but only when there was a high degree of participation in team decision making. It is concluded that minority dissent stimulates creativity and divergent thought, which, through participation, manifest as innovation.     

Beyond medical risk: investigating the psychological factors underlying women's perceptions of susceptibility to breast cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis.

The relationships of epidemiological (objective) risk indices, perceived disease characteristics, and cognitive heuristics to women's perceived susceptibility to breast cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis in a community sample of 312 women ages 40-86 were examined. Epidemiological indices accounted for a small to moderate proportion of the variance in perceived susceptibility. Psychological factors (perceived similarity to women who contract the target disease and perceived disease prevalence) predicted perceived susceptibility above and beyond medical risk factors. Opposite to actual risk, age correlated negatively with perceived susceptibility to all 3 diseases. Exploratory analyses suggested that perceived similarity, perceived prevalence, and absent/exempt beliefs might mediate this relationship. Confirmatory factor analyses verified that measures of absolute and direct comparative risk assess the same underlying construct of perceived susceptibility.     

Robust effects of syntactic structure on visual word processing

A series of experiments explored the effect of the syntactic structure of a sentence fragment on the processing of a subsequent target word. In both a naming and a lexical decision task, modal verb contexts followed by main verb targets and preposition contexts followed by noun targets produced faster response times than did the opposite pairings (i.e., modal/noun and preposition/ verb). This syntactic context effect occurred across several different variations in the method of context presentation. Also, unlike some previous findings on syntactic priming, the present effects did not disappear when a naming task was employed. The magnitude of the syntactic priming effect was similar in the naming and lexical decision tasks when the response times were slow, but was larger in the lexical decision task when the response times were faster. The implications of these results for recent discussions of the relationship between task structure and the locus of observed contextual effects are discussed.     

Linking empirically based theory and evaluation: The family bereavement program

Conclusion We have illustrated how our small theory (Lipsey, 1990) of bereavement guided the development and evaluation of a preventive intervention for bereaved children. Our small theory, based on prior empirical research, enabled us to identify family processes that appeared to mediate the effects of parental death on child mental health. Our intervention was designed to attempt to change these processes. The evaluation of our experimental trial of the intervention assessed changes on these processes as well as the more distal mental health outcomes. The experimental trial showed some-what encouraging results, in terms of the program's ability to modify the warmth of the parent–child relationship and to decrease symptomatology in the adolescent children. We also obtained further empirical support for our underlying theoretical model. Finally, implications for redesign of the program were derived from assessing the adequacy of the program components to change each of the mediators in the theoretical model.Support for this research was provided by NIMH grant P5OMH39246 which is gratefully acknowledged. David R. Pillow is now at Western Psychiatric Institute, Pittsburgh; Fred Rogosch is at the University of Rochester; Janette Beals is now at University of Colorado Health Sciences Center; Kim D. Reynolds is now at the University of Alabama, Birmingham; Carl Kallgren is now at the Pennsylvania State University, at Erie; and Rafael Ramirez is now at the University of Puerto Rico.     

Daily-life difficulties in person recognition reported by young and elderly subjects

Elderly people frequently complain spontaneously about their inability to remember people and their names. Naturalistic methods such as diaries, checklists, etc. provide useful means to study and make more explicit the nature of such memory difficulties among the elderly, as well as to better understand normal memory functioning. We developed a checklist (inspired by a study by Young, Hay and Ellis, 1985) to explore normal young and elderly people's difficulties in person recognition. The checklist is composed of four parts, each one corresponding to a particular context in which the difficulty took place. Each part has the same structure and consists of precise questions about the type of incident, the circumstances, the persons involved, and the way the incident ended. Three groups of normal subjects kept records of their difficulties and errors in recognizing people for 1 month: young subjects with a bad memory for faces, young subjects without particular problems of face memory, and a group of elderly subjects. A total of 299 records were collected. They were classified with respect to the functional components presumably implied in the process breakdown. The elderly subjects experienced difficulties with retrieving names, first names, or nicknames (Name Codes), while the young subjects with a bad memory for faces reported overall the greatest number of incidents and were particularly impaired in access to Face Recognition Units. A characterization of these two kinds of difficulties is proposed. Young subjects without problems of face memory presented equal numbers of difficulties at all stages of person recognition. These patterns of results will be discussed in terms of current cognitive models of person recognition.     

Experimental Personality Designs: Analyzing Categorical by Continuous Variable Interactions

Theories hypothesizing interactions between a categorical and one or more continuous variables are common in personality research. Traditionally, such hypotheses have been tested using nonoptimal adaptations of analysis of variance (ANOVA). This article describes an alternative multiple regression-based approach that has greater power and protects against spurious conclusions concerning the impact of individual predictors on the outcome in the presence of interactions. We discuss the structuring of the regression equation, the selection of a coding system for the categorical variable, and the importance of centering the continuous variable. We present in detail the interpretation of the effects of both individual predictors and their interactions as a function of the coding system selected for the categorical variable. We illustrate two- and three-dimensional graphical displays of the results and present methods for conducting post hoc tests following a significant interaction. The application of multiple regression techniques is illustrated through the analysis of two data sets. We show how multiple regression can produce all of the information provided by traditional but less optimal ANOVA procedures.     

The Investigation of Personality Structure: Statistical Models

This article provides an introduction to a number of statistical techniques for investigating the structure of measures of personality. Each of these techniques is illustrated through its application to a set of 12 items from Snyder's (1974) self-monitoring scale. Approaches are presented for both continuous and dichotomous observed measures and for underlying constructs that are assumed to be continuous as well as those that are assumed to be discrete classes. Our emphasis is on techniques which permit tests of hypothesized structures (with a special focus on confirmatory factor analysis); however, exploratory approaches are also considered. We identify the critical assumptions, limitations, and areas of application of these techniques with an aim toward fostering their critical and appropriate usage.