Effects of Offered and Requested Help on Help Seeking and Reactions to Being Helped1

Subjects could receive assistance on a difficult logic problem either by requesting help or by accepting an offer of aid from a helper. Normativeness of help seeking and presence of an incentive for correct completion of the task were also varied. Results of the study indicated that more help was obtained in the offer condition and that subjects liked the helper more when help was offered than when it was requested. The normativeness and incentive variables did not produce the expected effects. Negative consequences of requesting help were interpreted in terms of attribution theory, and the implications of these findings for help-delivery systems were discussed.     

Visual position discrimination: A model relating temporal and spatial factors

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - This paper presents a decision theory model of the perceptual processes by which an observer compares two visual stimuli presented at different points...     

Semantic relations between encoding and retrieval in cued recall

Two experiments were conducted to test the encoding-specificity hypothesis. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented pairs of coordinates to study, followed by a cued-recall test. Semantically weak and strong coordinates (defined by the degree of featural overlap shared with the pairs) served as encoding and retrieval cues. The semantic strength of the retrieval cue proved to be the most important factor in recall, whereas the re-presentation of an unrelated cue previously seen during encoding led to no facilitation of recall. In Experiment 2, three noun coordinates of varied semantic interrelatedness were presented for study and then were cued for recall by novel semantically strong or weak coordinates. Maximum recall was achieved when a strong encoding condition was matched with a strong retrieval cue. Implications of these findings for an encoding-specificity hypothesis were discussed.     

Sentence Comprehension Deficits in Alzheimer''s Disease: A Comparison of Off-Line vs. On-Line Sentence Processing

Two studies explored whether sentence comprehension impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are due to deficits in syntactic processing or memory. Study 1 used a picture-pointing sentence comprehension task to measure the final outcome of comprehension in an off-line fashion. It showed the comprehension of 30 patients with AD to be impaired, but suggested that the deficits could not be attributed solely to syntactic impairments. Study 2 investigated the effects of memory on sentence comprehension by comparing off-line (grammaticality judgment) with on-line (cross-modal naming) language processing in 11 AD and 9 control subjects. The results revealed impaired performance in the off-line task but normal performance in the on-line task using the same sentences. Performance on the off-line task correlated with independent measures of verbal working memory. These data are used to argue that sentence comprehension impairments are related to verbal working memory deficits in AD.     

My life in testing

This autobiographical essay describes my career as a psychodiagnostician, which began at the City College of New York in 1941 and ended in the late 1970s when I became a full-time psychoanalyst in Manhattan. As a green, 20-year-old psychology undergraduate, I was picked by Gardner Murphy to assist David Rapaport at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, who was developing new methods for using psychological tests to diagnose and treat soldiers during World War II. Our findings were presented in the classic, two volume work, Diagnostic Psychological Testing, published in 1945-1946 (Rapaport, Gill, & Schafer, 1945-1946; 1968), to which I added two clinically enriched monographs: The Clinical Application of Psychological Tests, published in 1948 (Schafer, 1948/1995), and Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing (Schafer, 1954), published in 1954. After the Menninger Clinic, I continued to hone my assessment expertise at the Austen Riggs Center and Yale University, but I also sought opportunities to develop psychotherapy skills. I completed psychoanalytic training in 1960 at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and thereafter sought positions that would offer more time for treating patients. A notable highpoint in my testing career was assessing Jack Ruby, killer of Lee Harvey Oswald. I look back fondly at my years as an assessment psychologist, which produced nearly 4 decades of great memories.     

The relationship between judgments of successiveness

The purpose of the present set of experiments was to determine the nature of the relationship between judgments of successiveness and judgments of order. The relationship was examined in terms of models which assume that the perception of successiveness is sufficient for the perception of correct temporal order. It was demonstrated that successiveness and order judgments cannot be jointly explained by perceptual latency models which assume that both judgments are based on the same internal event. This is the case regardless of the form of the perceptual latency distribution, and for either a threshold or a nonthreshold decision process. On the other hand, performance on a successiveness discrimination task, an order discrimination task, and a task requiring both a successiveness and an order judgment on each trial is consistent with the predictions of the attention-switching model.