The predictive validity of teacher nominations: A five-year followup of at-risk youth

The purpose of this study was to examine the predictive validity of a teacher nomination procedure for identifying at- risk children. Two hundred and twenty-five children were nominated by their teachers as well- adjusted (n= 75), socially withdrawn (n=76), or socially aggressive (n=74) during the fourth grade. Five years later, 198 of these children (88%) were located and their adjustment evaluated. Significant differences among the nominated children were found on a variety of measures, including academic grades, sociometric status, and social behavior. In addition, differences in school dropout and delinquent offenses were noted. Results are discussed in terms of the validity of teacher nomination procedures and their utility in identifying at- risk youth.     

Rate variables and automatized naming in developmental dyslexia

The rate variable in rapid automatized naming (RAN) was investigated in 50 adolescent and 40 adult students with developmental dyslexia, in matched normal controls, and in learning-disabled students without reading difficulties. Visual stimuli depicting familiar colors and common objects were presented in isolation at three film speeds and three exposure times. Film speed and exposure time contributed as independent variables to error rate; and dyslexic subjects of both age groups made significantly more naming errors than controls. Dyslexic subjects also responded with longer naming latencies than controls when the same RAN stimuli were presented in a continuous sequential mode as a matrix of rows and columns. Naming latencies in the sequential presentation were highly correlated with naming errors in the film version. The implications of reduced naming rates for nongraphological stimuli in developmental dyslexia are discussed.     

Hemispheric involvement in shadowing vs. interpretation: a time-sharing study of simultaneous interpreters with matched bilingual and monolingual controls

A time-sharing study used shadowing and interpretation/paraphrasing tasks to evaluate lateralization in professional interpreters individually matched to bilingual and monolingual controls. A two-step multivariate general linear model procedure was used to determine lateralized effects and extent of disruption produced by the tasks. Results revealed the monolingual group to be left lateralized for both tasks, but the two bilingual groups were lateralized in the LH only for shadowing. The monolingual group was significantly different from the bilingual groups in the pattern of hand asymmetry for interpretation/paraphrasing. The findings replicate outcomes of prior repeated measures analysis of variance procedures on percentage of change scores. However, new information is added by the more refined analysis. The findings are also discussed in terms of previous laterality studies using similar tasks and subject samples.     

Role of spatial location in integration of pictorial information across saccades

Identification of a fixated object in a visual display is facilitated by integrating information from a preview of that object in the periphery with information extracted on the subsequent foveal fixation (Pollatsek, Rayner, & Collins, 1984). These experiments investigated the extent to which this integration is dependent on the spatial location of the information remaining constant. Two preview objects were presented in the periphery; Ss fixated that region and named a single target object that appeared in the same spatial location in which one of the two preview objects had been presented. Of primary interest was the facilitative effect when a preview object was identical to the target object as a function of whether they were in the same spatial location. The major finding was that although there was a small effect of switching, there was still a substantial preview benefit even when the location of the identical object switched. In addition, the switching effect did not interact with the level of identity between the preview and target. There was also a preview benefit in conditions in which there were no eye movements and the preview and target objects were at least 5 degrees apart. Thus, the data indicate that the process object identification is relatively insensitive to location information and that object information and location information are coded fairly independently.     

A componential analysis of pacemaker-counter timing systems

Why does counting improve the accuracy of temporal judgments? Killeen and Weiss (1987) provided a formal answer to this question, and this article provides tests of their analysis. In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects responded on a telegraph key as they reproduced different intervals. Individual response rates remained constant for different target times, as predicted. The variance of reproductions was recovered from the weighted sum of the first and second moments of the component timing and counting processes. Variance in timing long intervals was mainly due to counting error, as predicted. In Experiments 3-5, unconstrained response rate was measured and subjects responded at (a) their unconstrained rate, (b) faster, or (c) slower. When subjects responded at the preferred rate, the accuracy of time judgment improved. Deviations in rates tended to increase the variability of temporal estimates. Implications for pacemaker-counter models of timing are discussed.     

A model of character recognition and legibility

This article presents a model of character recognition and the experiments used to develop and test it. The model applies to foveal viewing of blurred or unblurred characters and to tactile sensing of raised characters using the fingerpad. The primary goal of the model is to account for variations in legibility across character sets; a secondary goal is to account for variations in the cell entries of the confusion matrix for a given character set. The model consists of two distinct processing stages. The first involves transformation of each stimulus into an internal representation; this transformation consists of linear low-pass spatial filtering followed by nonlinear compression of stimulus intensity. The second stage involves both template matching of the transformed test stimulus with each of the stored internal representations of the characters within the set and response selection, which is assumed to conform to the unbiased choice model of Luce (1963). Though purely stimulus driven, the model accounts quite well for differences in the legibility of character sets differing in character type, size of character, and number of characters within the set; it is somewhat less successful in accounting for the details of each confusion matrix.     

Attentional processing and the independence of color and orientation

Judgments of the color and shape of a stimulus specified by a cue indicating its location demonstrate stochastic independence. Evidence for the independence of color and orientation was obtained when the cue followed stimulus offset immediately, the cue followed stimulus offset by 2 s, and when either a central or peripheral precue focused attention on the cued stimulus at the time of its presentation. It appears that an object's color and orientation are represented independently even following the attentional focusing thought to support feature integration.     

Moon illusion in pictures: a multimechanism approach

The existence of the moon illusion in pictorial representations was demonstrated in 6 experiments. Ss either judged the size of the moon in pictures, depicted as on the horizon or high in the sky, or drew horizon and elevated moons. The horizon moon was consistently judged to be larger than the elevated moon, independent of the angle at which the pictures are viewed. The distance paradox usually observed with the moon illusion (horizon moon apparently closer than the elevated moon) also exists in pictures. The magnitude of both size and distance effects depends on the salience of depicted depth cues. The pattern of results suggests that the moon illusion is caused by several interacting mechanisms and that use of pictorial stimuli may allow the separation of various cognitive from physiological contributions to the illusion.     

Composite holographic associative recall model (CHARM) and blended memories in eyewitness testimony

The idea that compositing or blending occurs in human episodic memory stems from two sources: (a) distributed memory models and (b) studies on the errors that occur in eyewitness testimony. These two traditions of research--theoretical and empirical--have been independent and distinct. Here, data from the eyewitness testimony paradigm are simulated by the distributed model CHARM (Composite Holographic Associative Recall Model). Of focal concern are Loftus's studies, which have been interpreted in favor of the blending hypothesis, and McCloskey and Zaragoza's studies, which have been interpreted as refuting Loftus's position. Both of these seemingly contradictory results, as well as recent findings with yes/no recognition, fall out of the model. Finally, the model predicts empirically found color shifts and provides specifications for when blends and memory impairments will and will not be expected.     

The effects of right hemisphere damage on the pragmatic interpretation of conversational remarks

The ability to interpret conversational utterances was assessed in a group of 12 male patients with unilateral right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) and 12 non-brain-damaged, age-matched male control subjects. Subjects listened to short vignettes which described both the affective tone of the relationship between a speaker and an actor, and the actor's performance on a task. Each vignette concluded with the speaker characterizing the actor's performance. In half of the items, the speaker's utterance was literally true; in the other half, the utterance was literally false and invited a nonliteral interpretation. Results showed no appreciable differences in the performance of control subjects and RHD patients when interpreting literally true utterances. In contrast, the two groups differed reliably when interpreting the pragmatic intent of nonliteral utterances: Control subjects used information about both the actor's performance and the speaker-actor relationship, while RHD patients demonstrated difficulty in using the information about the speaker-actor relationship. Results have implications for patients' understanding of essential elements of conversations, such as characters' internal states and their intentions in employing different forms of literal and nonliteral language.