Comparing effects of perceptual and reflective repetition on subjective experience during later recognition memory

Using the Remember/Know procedure, we compared the impact of a reflective repetition by refreshing (i.e., briefly thinking of a just-seen item) and a perceptual repetition (i.e., seeing an item again) on subjective experience during recognition memory. Participants read aloud words as they appeared on a screen. Critical words were presented once (read condition), immediately repeated (repeat condition), or followed by a dot signalling the participants to think of and say the just-previous word (refresh condition). In Experiments 1 and 2, Remember responses benefited from refreshing a word (in comparison with reading it). In Experiment 2, this benefit disappeared when participants had to refresh one of three active items. Perceptual repetition increased Remember responses in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2 regardless of whether participants had just previously seen 1- or 3-items. These findings indicate that under some circumstances, reflective and perceptual repetition may have different consequences for later subjective experience during remembering, suggesting differences in their underlying functional mechanisms.     

Penetrating the geometric module: catalyzing children's use of landmarks

We used a reference memory paradigm to examine whether 4- and 5-year-old children could be trained to use landmark features to relocate targets after disorientation. In Experiment 1, half of the children were pretrained in a small equilateral triangle-shaped room. Each of the three walls was a different color, and the target was always in the middle of the yellow wall. These children and a control group were tested in a small rectangular room with three white walls and one yellow wall; the target was placed in one of the corners. Children with pretraining responded more frequently to the correct corner than to the diagonally congruent corner on their first set of four trials in the rectangular room, whereas the children in the control group used geometric cues exclusively. Three additional groups of children (Experiment 2) showed that the use of landmark features--both salient and subtle--can be learned in as few as four practice trials in a small rectangular room. The data support the view that both geometry and landmark features are adaptively combined in the same representation.     

Adolescents in Transition to Adulthood: Parental Support, Relationship Satisfaction, and Post-transition Adjustment

The transition from high school is a pivotal period for intergenerational relations, as the asymmetry characterizing pre-transition relations with parents is reconfigured. Changes in adolescent–parent relations across this transition have potentially important implications for post-transition adjustment. A prospective study was conducted with an ethnically diverse sample that included adolescents who were not college-bound. Maternal, but not paternal, relations improved across the transition from high school to adult life. Changes in support from both mothers and fathers were associated with changes in relationship satisfaction and changes in satisfaction predicted post-transition adjustment. The results verify the importance of parental support to the quality of relational bonds between young adults and their parents. They also affirm the significance of these bonds for post-transition adjustment.     

A memory-based, Simon-like, spatial congruence effect: Evidence for persisting spatial codes

The Simon effect refers to the finding that in a task where stimulus location is irrelevant, reaction time is faster when stimulus and response locations are congruent than when they are not. Dominant theories of the Simon effect have generally attributed this spatial congruence effect to a spatial code automatically generated upon stimulus presentation. A common assumption of these theories is that this spatial code decays in less than a few hundred milliseconds following stimulus onset. We report two working-memory experiments suggesting a reexamination of this assumption—a Simon-like spatial congruence effect persisted over a delay of as long as 2400 ms. We propose that, in addition to generating short-lived perceptual codes, spatial information may be coded in working memory as part of the context associated with stimulus events. When reactivated by cues from the original event, such information may influence response selection and produce spatial congruence effects (in this case, positive when participants made a “yes” response and negative when they made a “no” response).     

Further exploration of Filipino personality structure using the lexical approach: do the big-five or big-seven dimensions emerge?

Filipino college students (N=740) rated their personalities using 502 reasonably familiar terms from a comprehensive taxonomy of Filipino trait adjectives. Using factor analysis, we replicated the seven Filipino personality dimensions identified in a previous study (Church, Reyes, Katigbak and Grimm, 1997). At least seven factors are needed to identify dimensions resembling all of the Big Five. When positive- and negative-evaluation terms are included a Negative-Valence dimension is found, but positive-evaluation terms blend with Intellect terms rather than identifying a distinct dimension. Thus, the cross-cultural generalizability of the Big-Seven model (Tellegen and Waller, 1997) is not completely supported. Correlational analyses consistently show good one-to-one correspondence between the Filipino Gregariousness, Concern for Others versus Egotism, Conscientiousness, and Intellect dimensions and Big-Five Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Intellect, respectively. The Filipino Temperamentalness and Self-assurance dimensions, although moderately correlated with Neuroticism, are multidimensional in terms of the Big Five. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Aggressive and socially insecure behaviors in kindergarten and elementary school students: a comparative study concerning gender,age and geographical background of children in Northern Greece

Social Psychology of Education - Aggression and social insecurity in children have received a lot of attention in recent research. In the current study the purpose was to examine whether specific...     

Shame and Shamelessness

What is the relation between shame and shamelessness? It may seem obvious: shamelessness is simply the absence of shame. But on reflection, it becomes clear that the story is considerably more complicated. Michelle Mason's intriguing "On Shamelessness" prompts such reflection (albeit unintentionally). Mason argues that we should be mindful of the "moral importance of shame" and "unapologetic in its defense" (403), and she does so via an examination of shamelessness and an argument to the effect that shamelessness is (with some exceptions) a moral fault. The tacit assumption is that insofar as shamelessness is a moral fault, the value of shame is vindicated. I challenge that assumption.     

Responses to the ELCA “Draft social statement on women and justice”

Social statements are social teaching and policy documents in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Created by task forces composed of ELCA members and supported by ELCA churchwide staff members, social statements are developed through a series of participatory steps. Contributors in this work share their feedback on the “Draft Social Statement on Women and Justice” with the task force as part of the process to create a proposed social statement for an assembly vote.     

Item-Cued Directed Forgetting of Related Words and Pictures in Children and Adults: Selective Rehearsal Versus Cognitive Inhibition

The main purpose of this study was to compare the relative importance of selective rehearsal and cognitive inhibition in accounting for developmental changes in the directed-forgetting paradigm developed by R. A. Bjork (1972). In two experiments, children in Grades 2 and 5 and college students were asked to remember some words or pictures and to forget others when items were categorically related. Their memory for both items and the associated remember or forget cues was then tested with recall and recognition. Fifth graders recognized more of the forget-cued words than college students did. The pattern of results suggested that age differences in rehearsal and source monitoring (i.e., remembering whether a word had been cued remember or forget) were better explanatory mechanisms for children's forgetting inefficiencies than retrieval inhibition was. The results are discussed in terms of a multiple process view of inhibition.