Visual imagery: A case study

This paper describes the performance of a subject who, when presented with a word or a sentence, is abnormally proficient at spelling this material in reverse order. She reports that she does this by visualizing this material and reading off from this visual image. Her tachistoscopic performance is also abnormally good. It is suggested that her superiority in these two tasks is achieved principally because her internal visual representations are extremely resistant to disruption by other mental activities.     

THE RELATIONSHIP OF ‘EXCHANGE-ORIENTATION’ AND ‘COMMITMENT’ SCALES TO MARRIAGE ADJUSTMENT*

Believing that “exchange” and “commitment” are basic dimensions associated with marriage adjustment (MA), scales measuring these three dimensions were administered to 40 married couples. Exchange was predicted to be negatively correlated with MA, commitment positively associated with it, and an individual's exchange and commitment qualities were predicted to affect his partner's MA. The hypotheses were all supported. Further analyses, however, revealed that husbands' MA was more strongly associated with their own exchange and commitment scores than those of their wives. However, wives' MA was equally associated with their own and their husbands' exchange and commitment scores. The implications of this finding for women's position in marriage are discussed.     

Turning Experience into Competency Statements

Women who aspire to administrative jobs in education often do not even make it past the resume-screening stage because most of their managerial experience has been in volunteer/unpaid jobs, and this experience does not appear on the traditional resume, which documents paid work only. A portfolio of volunteer/unpaid administrative experiences has demonstrated validity and reliability in presenting skills to prospective employers. This article outlines the development of a self-directed manual to aid in building portfolios, and reports on the evaluation of portfolios' effectiveness in presenting competencies.     

Is there something special about memory for internally generated information?

In two experiments, the number of times subjects saw and generated words was varied, and then half the subjects were asked to judge presentation frequency and half were asked to judge generation frequency. People were more sensitive to the relative frequency of internally generated, compared with externally generated, events. Also, judgments of internal events were less affected by whether or not the subjects were given a restricted range of numbers for their judgments, and internally generated events produced more confusion in estimating external event frequency than vice versa. The results are discussed in terms of potential differences in the characteristics of memory representations originating in external, compared with internal, events and the way these might interact with the judgment process.     

Sequential transfer to related oddity problems by nursery school children

The initial learning and subsequent transfer of an oddity principle by children between 4 and 5 years of age were studied. The initial standard oddity problem was learned quickly by most of the children. A high level of performance was maintained on both transfer sets. The results were related to limitations placed on the oddity solutions learned by 4-year-olds by particular aspects of the original learning context.