The social character of thinking

What Freud called "the reality principle," or judgment, presumes on the part of the child who has arrived at judgment the implicit grasp of a complex of concepts: truth and falsity, belief, subjective and objective, the objectively real, my perspective and yours. Work in both philosophy and infant research points to the essential importance in the development of judgment of a triangulating situation that involves particular sorts of communications between two creatures and an external object that interests them both. In this light Bion's theory of thinking is critically examined and the meaning of primary process and fantasy is discussed.     

Affective review and schema reliance in memory in older and younger adults

Previous studies have found that, when remembering, older adults often rely more on schematic knowledge than do younger adults. We replicated this finding when participants were induced to review the facts of the event; furthermore, neuropsychological correlates suggested that this age-related increase in schema reliance is associated with declines in reflective processes. In addition, when they were induced to focus on their feelings and reactions when reviewing an event, both older and younger adults' later memory of the event was strongly affected by their schematic knowledge.     

Attributions about subjectively defined career success in different occupations

The present study investigated the applicability of the attributional theory of motivation to career research. The idea that the perceived causes of individuals' subjective definitions of their career success varied for different occupations was examined. Subjects that were studied represented occupations from each of Holland's six occupational types. The occupations were mechanical engineering, medicine, fine arts and journalism, registered nursing, law, and accounting. Responses from 395 individuals showed that other's unstable effort and luck attributions about the perceived causes of incumbents' career success varied for different occupations. Implications are discussed.     

The eyewitness suggestibility effect and memory for source

We examined the possibility that eyewitness suggestibility reflects failures of the processes by which people normally discriminate between memories derived from different sources. To test this hypothesis, misled and control subjects were tested either with a yes/no recognition test or with a "source monitoring" test designed to orient subjects to attend to information about the sources of their memories. The results demonstrate that suggestibility effects obtained with a recognition test can be eliminated by orienting subjects toward thinking about the sources of their memories while taking the test. Our findings indicate that although misled subjects are capable of identifying the source of their memories of misleading suggestions, they nonetheless sometimes misidentify them as memories derived from the original event. The extent to which such errors reflect genuine memory confusions (produced, for example, by lax judgment criteria) or conscious misattributions (perhaps due to demand characteristics) remains to be specified.     

More on interpretive factors in forgetting

Subjects learned a list of paired associates and reported the elaborators actually used during learning. They also generated "second-choice" elaborators. Both first- and second-choice elaborators were classified as stimulus-related or response-related and given to independent groups of new subjects to use in learning a list of pairs. Over a 1-week retention interval, stimulus-related elaborators produced better retention than did response-related elaborators. There was also some indication that first-choice elaborators were superior to second-choice elaborators.     

Fact and fantasy: The effects of internally generated events on the apparent frequency of externally generated events

As John Locke pointed out, there are at least two sources of the contents of the mind: events that occur in the world and events that originate in the mind. Memory, as a record of experience, should contain information from both sources. The present studies investigated memory for the frequency of externally and internally generated events. Individual items were presented to subjects varying numbers of times and tested varying numbers of times. Later, subjects were asked to estimate the frequency of both types of events. Experiment 1 showed that internally generated events influenced the judged frequency of externally generated events and vice versa. The first of these was called the IFE effect and the second the IFI effect. Experiment 2 indicated that the IFE effect was greater when tests consisted of overt, as compared to covert, recall trials. The results were discussed in terms of a model for storing and using occurrence information which would account for both our ability to discriminate between and our tendency to confuse internally and externally generated memory representations.     

Duration discrimination is better with food access as the signal than with light as the signal

In Experiment 1 a go/no-go discrimination procedure was used to compare control of five pigeons' keypecking by food-access duration with control by light duration. Pecks to an illuminated key were reinforced with grain following 10-sec presentations of food access or houselight, but not after 5-sec presentations of either stimulus. Each subject discriminated food-access duration faster and to a greater degree than light duration. In four between-subject replications, pigeons discriminated food-access duration better than the duration of a localized light, the feeder light and a keylight, and with either water or food as reinforcement. In Experiment 2 control by durations of food access and light was compared using a conditional right-left choice procedure (two pigeons), and a delayed symbolic matching-to-sample procedure (six pigeons). Under both, choice accuracy again was higher on food-access trials. The results of Experiment 3, in which two pigeons received generalization trials with durations of food access and light that were intermediate to the training values, confirmed that responding was controlled by the duration dimension of both food access and light. The superior control by food access is consistent with previous evidence that food is an effective and memorable stimulus, possibly because of its biological importance. These results also provided empirical support for the commonly made assumption that stimuli differ in effectiveness. As well, the results show that the stimulus to be discriminated can play an important role in the accuracy of duration disciminations, a fact which has implications for the study of temporal discriminations in animals.     

Developmental dyslexia: Electrophysiological evidence of clinical subgroups

Event-related potentials (ERPs) to word and to musical-chord stimuli were recorded in 13 dyslexic boys and 13 age-matched normal readers. Normal readers and dyslexics whose reading handicaps involved visual-spatial processing deficits had greater word versus musical-chord ERP waveform differences over the left as compared to the right hemisphere. Dyslexics whose reading difficulties were related to auditory-verbal processing deficits did not exhibit this asymmetry. These results are interpreted as supportive of the hypothesis that the latter group of dyslexics has failed to develop normal left hemisphere specialization for processing of auditory-linguistic material.