Does medics' social identification increase handicap for mentally retarded patients?

Briefs about mentally retarded people are more negative than briefs about other social categories; professionals, such as medical doctors evaluate them most negatively of all. It was hypothesized (a) that medics' beliefs about mentally retarded people are mediated by psychological salience of their clinical social identification, rather than by personal characteristics that medics happen to share and (b) that such beliefs will bias decisions, rather than enhance accuracy. Forty-five doctors and medical students were randomly assigned to conditions designed to enhance salience of their shared clinical social identification or individual self-perceptions. Subjects completed semantic differentials about mentally retarded people and distinguished between slides of ‘mentally retarded’ and ‘normal’ children. Beliefs of subjects in the medical condition were significantly more negative than those in the personal condition. A signal detection analysis revealed no difference between conditions in subjects' ability to distinguish between children but showed that subjects in the medical condition were significantly more likely to judge a child ‘mentally retarded’ when in doubt. Results were discussed within an information processing framework and supported the idea that a salient clinical social identity can mediate beliefs that are likely to handicap patients.     

Orientation-invariant transfer of training in the identification of rotated natural objects

The effects of stimulus orientation on naming were examined in two experiments in which subjects identified line drawings of natural objects following practice with the objects at the same or different orientations. Half the rotated objects were viewed in the orientation that matched the earlier presentations, and half were viewed at an orientation that mismatched the earlier presentations. Systematic effects of orientation on naming time were found during the early presentations. These effects were reduced during later presentations, and the size of this reduction did not depend on the orientation in which the object had been seen originally. The results are consistent with a dual-systems model of object identification in which initially large effects of disorientation are the result of a normalization process such as mental rotation, and in which attenuation of the effects is due to a shift from the normalization system to a feature/part-based     

Perspectives on the role of the eyewitness expert

Extensive controversy over the appropriate application of expert knowledge regarding issues of eyewitness accuracy led to a conference and a special issue of taw and Human Behavior in 1986. Arguments were presented both in support of and against the eyewitness researcher as expert testifier. The current research explored the views of the general public (N = 50), defense attorneys (N = 14), and prosecutors (N = 10) with regard to the use of eyewitness expertise in each of four roles (court-appointed expert, consultant, researcher, expert tesdfier for the defense). Extensive differences of opinion were found across both samples and expert roles. In general, prosecutors held significantly more negative views of the usefulness of expert witnesses for the defense than did the public or defense attorneys. The role of court-appointed expert was viewed positively by all three groups and may present a useful alternative to the battles of experts that may result from current practices.     

Encoding, repetition, and the mirror effect in recognition memory: Symmetry in motion

Attention/likelihood theory has been used to explain the mirror effect in recognition memory. The theory also predicts that any manipulation that affects the recognition of old items will also affect recognition of the new items—more specifically, that all the underlying distributions will move and that they will move symmetrically on the decision axis. In five experiments, we tested this prediction. The first two experiments used encoding tasks during study to change recognition performance for high- and low-frequency words. The results show symmetrical dispersion of the underlying distributions. The final three experiments used repetition to increase recognition performance. Repetition produced a symmetrical pattern of movement that was different from that produced by encoding task. This pattern is, however, also covered by attention/likelihood theory. A further extension of the theory was used to predict response times.     

A NOTE ON TRANSFER OF STIMULUS CONTROL IN THE DELAYED-CUE PROCEDURE: FACILITATION BY AN OVERT DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSE

This case study describes initially unsuccessful attempts to use the delayed-cue procedure to teach conditional discriminations to an individual with moderate mental retardation. The task was matching printed-word comparison stimuli to dictated-name sample stimuli. In three experiments, the subject typically waited for the delayed cue unless differential responses to the dictated samples (repeating the sample names) were required. Hence, the study provides an example of a way to make the delayed-cue method more effective. The stimulus control bases for the results are discussed.     

The role of attention in the shift from orientation-dependent to orientation-invariant identification of disoriented objects

In two experiments, the naming of rotated line drawings of natural objects was examined after a training phase in which the objects were either attended or ignored. In the training phase of Experiment 1, subjects were presented with objects in a number of orientations over five repeated blocks of trials. In the center of each object, seven letters (Xs and Ts, colored red or blue) were presented in rapid succession. Half the subjects named aloud the rotated object and ignored the changing letter display (object-attend). The other half ignored the object and counted the number of red Ts, and then used this number to perform a simple multiplication (object-ignore). In the test phase, all subjects named the rotated objects. The results showed that in the first block of trials in the training phase, mean naming time in the object-attend condition increased the further an object was rotated from the upright. This effect of orientation for attended objects was much reduced in the later presentations of the test phase. In contrast, there was no such benefit of prior presentation observed for the naming of objects that had previously been ignored. Instead, a substantial orientation effect was shown for the naming of previously ignored objects, which was similar to the orientation effect observed for attended objects named in the first block. Similar results were found in Experiment 2, in which object-attend subjects in training covertly named the objects and then performed a letter count and multiplication task. In both experiments, performance on the letter count and multiplication task varied with the angle of the ignored object. The results suggest that full attentional resources must be allocated in order for orientation-invariant representations to be formed and used in the identification of rotated objects.     

Negative priming by rotated objects

Previous work has found that repeated exposure to ignored rotated objects is insufficient to allow the formation of orientation-invariant representations (Murray, 1995b). In this study, the negative priming paradigm was used to examine whether the identity of ignored rotated objects was encoded. Subjects were briefly presented with a prime followed by a probe display. One of the two overlapping drawings of objects in each display was selected for further processing, and the other was ignored. In one condition, the ignored objects were upright; in another, they were rotated 240°; and in a final condition, subjects repeatedly named the 240° objects prior to experiencing them as ignored objects in the priming task. Naming latency for the attended probe was slower when it was semantically related to the ignored prime in all conditions. The results suggest that unattended rotated objects are processed to a level of representation that is at least categorical.     

Memory impairment and source misattribution in postevent misinformation experiments with short retention intervals

The four experiments reported here provide evidence that (1) misleading postevent suggestions can impair memory for details in a witnessed event and (2) subjects sometimes remember sug-gested details as things seen in the event itself. All four experiments used recall tests in which subjects were warned of the possibility that the postevent information included misleading sug-gestions and were instructed to report both what they witnessed in the event and what was men-tioned in the postevent narrative. Recall of event details was poorer on misled items than on control items, and subjects sometimes misidentified the sources of their recollections. Our re-sults suggest that these findings are not due to guessing or response biases, but rather reflect genuine memory impairment and source monitoring confusions.