The effect of cue-familiarity, cue-distinctiveness, and retention interval on prospective remembering

Five experiments investigated the effects of cue familiarity, cue distinctiveness, and retention interval on prospective remembering. Results showed that (1) performance in a prospective memory task is facilitated when the cue is unfamiliar and/or distinctive; and (2) it is impaired by 3-minutes' delay between the instructions and the task (Experiment 1). A beneficial effect of distinctiveness was also found when perceptual rather than semantic distinctiveness was tested (Experiment 2). Experiments 3 and 4 ruled out the hypotheses that “unfulfilled expectancy” of an event (i.e. non-appearance of the cue during training) (Experiment 3), or some sort of “habituation” in the target context (Experiment 4), may have caused the low performance observed in the delayed conditions. Finally, results from Experiment 5 showed that delay negatively affected prospective remembering when it was filled with either a demanding interpolated activity (practice in a STM task) or an undemanding motoric activity (repetitive hands movements). Unfilled delay and an undemanding verbal activity (counting) were found not to affect prospective memory. Implications for the mechanisms underlying prospective remembering are discussed.     

Women,men, and aggression in an egalitarian society

Vanatinai, a small island society off New Guinea, is egalitarian, with no indigenous formal systems of rank or authority. Assertiveness and autonomy are highly valued as personal qualities and equivalent for males and females. Overt aggression is condemned and violence is rare. Women were the aggressors in four out of five incidents over ten years. Sexual jealousy was the dominant motif in all five cases. This article considers, in historical contexts, indigenous concepts of the gendered person and their relations to anger, violence, and the supernatural aggression of sorcery and witchcraft. The Vanatinai case is evidence that the rarity of intragroup violence, especially of attacks by men on women, is a characteristic of egalitarian societies.An earlier version of this paper was read at the Session on Female Aggression at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, in November 1991. I would like to thank session participants, Douglas Fry, Victoria Burbank, Robert Lepowsky, Florence Lepowsky, and the anonymous reviewers forSex Roles for their helpful comments at various points. The fieldwork in Papua New Guinea on which this paper is based was carried out over a total of eighteen months in 1977–1979, 1981, and 1987. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the National Science Foundation, Chancellor's Patent Fund and Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley, the Papua New Guinea Institute of Applied Social and Economic Research, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.     

The dynamics of Prägnanz

Summary There is quite wide-spread agreement about the relevance of pattern Pragnanz (Koffka, 1935) with respect to the human interpretation of visual patterns. There is less agreement about whether pattern Pragnanz is based solely on pattern information (static) or also on the history of the perceiver (dynamic). In Van Leeuwen and Van den Hof (1991), experimental data concerning serial patterns are presented within the framework of the dynamic-network approach initiated by Buffart (1986, 1987). These experimental data are claimed to give evidence against the static-coding approach initiated by Leeuwenberg (1969, 1971). In the present paper, however, I show first that Buffart's theoretical basis is incorrect, and that in fact Leeuwenberg's static-coding approach is the basis for the dynamic-network approach. Second, I show that those experimental data rather give evidence in favor of the static-coding approach, by using those same data for a test of the most recent static-coding model (Van der Helm & Leeuwenberg, 1991; Van der Helm, Van Lier, & Leeuwenberg, 1992). Finally, I propose a reconciliation between the two approaches, in the sense that the dynamic-network model could be shaped in such a way that it yields a simulation, and maybe even an enrichment, of the static-coding model.     

Patterns of 4-month-old infant responses to hidden silent and sounding people and objects

Responses of 4-month-old infants to hidden people and objects were investigated with equated task demands. Twenty-one 4-month-old infants were administered a combined task, in which they were shown a sounding stimulus that continued to sound after hiding, an auditory task, in which sound was the only source of information about the position of the object in space, and a vision task, in which a silent stimulus was shown to the infants prior to hiding. Five infant behaviours were coded: reaching, gazing, body movements, vocalizations and smiles. The infants reached significantly more for hidden objects than for people, to whom they vocalized instead. They further smiled, and moved their bodies more towards their invisible mother than to the other stimuli. Thus infants responded differentially to people and objects whether the stimuli were soundless (so that there was no cue to their presence) or not. This suggested that infants appreciated (a) that an object had been hidden; (b) this object was either animate or inanimate; and (c) different procedures were appropriate for the retrieval of, or for interacting with animate and inanimate objects. Discussion centres on the underlying representational system that allows for such appreciation.     

A compensatory approach to optimal selection with mastery scores

A Bayesian approach for simultaneous optimization of test-based decisions is presented using the example of a selection decision for a treatment followed by a mastery decision. A distinction is made between weak and strong rules where, as opposed to strong rules, weak rules use prior test scores as collateral data. Conditions for monotonicity of optimal weak and strong rules are presented. It is shown that under mild conditions on the test score distributions and utility functions, weak rules are always compensatory by nature. The authors are indebted to Wilbert Kallenberg for his valuable comments and to Jan Gulmans for providing the data for the empirical example. The names of the authors are alphabetical; they are equally responsible for the contents of this paper.     

A Grammatical Specific Language Impairment in Children: An Autosomal Dominant Inheritance?

The aim of this study is to provide further characterization of a subgroup of so-called “Grammatical specific language-impaired (SLI)” children. The Grammatical SLI children have a persistent and disproportionate impairment in grammatical comprehension and expression of language. Previous research has indicated that their language impairment may be characterized by a domain-specific and modular language deficit. This study provides an initial investigation as to whether there is a genetic basis underlying their disorder as has been found for other forms of SLI and for SLI in general. The incidence of familial aggregation of language impairment was investigated in 12 Grammatical SLI children (aged 9:3 to 12:10). A familial language impairment (LI) history was classified as positive if one or more of the probands' relatives had a history of a speech/language or reading/writing problem which required speech therapy or any other form of remedial help. Case history information provided an initial indication that the Grammatical SLI children had a significantly higher incidence of a positive familial LI history than could be expected by chance. A questionnaire provided evidence of a positive LI history in the first-degree relatives of the SLI probands and 49 normally developing control probands. The SLI probands had a clearly and significantly higher incidence of a positive familial LI history than the control probands (77.8 vs. 28.5%, respectively). The results are consistent with a genetic basis underlying Grammatical SLI. The pattern of impairment in the SLI probands' relatives is consistent with an autosomal dominant genetic inheritance. In contrast to the control probands, the SLI probands' impaired relatives did not show a male gender bias. Thus, the gene does not appear to be sex-linked. The data indicate that further research is warranted to investigate the nature of the LI in the relatives of the Grammatical SLI probands and the genetic characteristics of this subgroup. The implications for the biological, domain-specific, and modular bases to language are discussed.     

Effects of diagnostic classification systems on clinical hypothesis-generation

In this study it was determined whether (a) classification as opposed to absence of classification has an effect on the quality of clinical hypotheses (b) the DSM-III-R and the CBCL have a different effect on the quality of clinical hypotheses, and (c) the potential difference between the DSM-III-R and the CBCL is moderated by the different number of syndromes identified by these systems. To investigate these questions, an experiment was conducted in which 86 clinicians generated hypotheses for six cases. The clinicians were divided into a DSM-III-R, a CBCL, and a control group. Of the six cases, two were classified by both classification systems as one syndrome, two were classified as one syndrome by the DSM-III-R but as two syndromes by the CBCL, and two were classified as two syndromes by the DSM-III-R but as one syndrome by the CBCL. The quality of the hypotheses was determined by means of four dependent variables selected from an overview of qualitative criteria: explanatory value, redundancy, possibility of operationalization, and specificity. No differences between the CBCL and the control groups were found. The DSM group performed better than the control group regarding explanatory value and redundancy. The DSM-III-R group also scored better than the CBCL group regarding explanatory value, particularly when the number of identified syndromes was two for the CBCL and one for the DSM-III-R.     

REPEATED EXPOSURE TO SUGGESTION AND THE CREATION OF FALSE MEMORIES

Abstract— The purpose of the present study was to extend research on repetition and illusory truth to the domain of eyewitness suggestibility. Specifically, we assessed whether repeated exposure to suggestion, relative to a single exposure, facilitates the creation of false memory for suggested events. After viewing a video of a burglary, subjects were asked questions containing misleading suggestions, some of which were repeated. Their memory for the source of the suggestions was tested. The results show that following repeated (relative to a single) exposure to suggestion, subjects were more likely to (a) claim with high confidence that they remembered the suggested events from the video (Experiment 1) and (b) claim that they consciously recollected witnessing the suggested events (Experiment 2). The effects of repeated exposure were highly reliable and were observed over retention intervals as long as I week.