Phonemic effects in reading comprehension and text memory

Two experiments investigated the role of phonemic information in adult reading comprehension and replicated the visual tongue-twister effect in a new paradigm–a modified probe memory task. College students took longer to read sentences that repeated word initial consonants (tongue-twisters) than matched control sentences. Equally important, subjects also took longer to respond to probe words from tongue-twisters. Slower response times in both the sentence reading task and the probe memory task indicate that the tongue-twister effect is indeed phonemic in nature and that phonemic information is used in memory during comprehension.     

ON THE VALUE OF KNOWING ONE'S LIKES AND DISLIKES:

Abstract— On the basis of laboratory research indicating that accessible altitudes ease decision making we hypothesized that freshmen who enter college knowing their likes and dislikes regarding academically relevant issues may experience better health in this new life setting To test this hypothesis, we conducted a prospective study in which students completed self-report inventories of negative life events and mental and physical health at two points in time. The accessibility of attitudes toward academically relevant issues was assessed in the initial session Regression analyses revealed three-way interactions between attitude accessibility, stress (as indexed by the number of negative life events), and initial health status when initial health, the generally positive relation between stress and illness was buffered by the possession of accessible attitudes For students with relatively poor initial health, recovery Has generally greater among those experiencing less stress, especially as attitude accessibility increased.     

Is visual image segmentation a bottom-up or an interactive process?

Visualimage segmentation is the process by which the visual system groups features that are part of a single shape. Is image segmentation a bottom-up or an interactive process? In Experiments 1 and 2, we presented subjects with two overlapping shapes and asked them to determine whether two probed locations were on the same shape or on different shapes. The availability of top-down support was manipulated by presenting either upright or rotated letters. Subjects were fastest to respond when the shapes corresponded to familiar shapes—the upright letters. In Experiment 3, we used a variant of this segmentation task to rule out the possibility that subjects performed same/different judgments after segmentation and recognition of both letters. Finally, in Experiment 4,we ruled out the possibility that the advantage for upright letters was merely due to faster recognition of upright letters relative to rotated letters. The results suggested that the previous effects were not due to faster recognition of upright letters; stimulus familiarity influenced segmentation per se. The results are discussed in terms of an interactive model of visual image segmentation.     

Computer dialogue system (CDS): A system for capturing computer-mediated dialogue

In the process of studying human tutoring sessions as a basis for building an intelligent tutoring system, we developed a computer dialogue system (CDS) that allows two PC users to communicate with each other over a telephone line by typing at a computer keyboard. CDS records the content of dialogue on a disk in a specified, well-formatted way. It also makes available a way to mimic some of the characteristics of face-to-face dialogue such as repair. It was developed in the Smartcom III (Hayes Communication package) environment. Thus, it is fast, portable, and easy to use. In addition, to help us study the recorded dialogues, we have also written a numbering program to label each turn and each sentence within each turn. Although CDS was originally designed for the study of tutorial dialogues between students and teachers, it can be used to conduct and record dialogues of any kind.     

Perceptual interference and facilitation with auditory imagery

It has been claimed both that (1) imagery selectivelyinterferes with perception (because images can be confused with similar stimuli) and that (2) imagery selectivelyfacilitates perception (because images recruit attention for similar stimuli). However, the evidence for these claims can be accounted for without postulating either image-caused confusions or attentional set. Interference could be caused by general and modality-specific capacity demands of imaging, and facilitation, by image-caused eye fixations. The experiment reported here simultaneously tested these two apparently conflicting claims about the effect of imagery on perception in a way that rules out these alternative explanations. Subjects participated in a two-alternative forced-choice auditory signal detection task in which the target signal was either the same frequency as an auditory image or a different frequency. The possible effects of confusion and attention were separated by varying the temporal relationship between the image and the observation intervals, since an image can only be confused with a simultaneous signal. We found selective facilitation (lower thresholds) for signals of the same frequency as the image relative to signals of a different frequency, implying attention recruitment; we found no selective interference, implying the absence of confusion. These results also imply that frequency information is represented in images in a form that can interact with perceptual representations.     

Spatial and temporal processing in the auditory and visual modalities

Three experiments tested the idea that auditory presentation facilitates temporal recall whereas spatial recall is better if the input modality is visual. Lists of words were presented in which the temporal and spatial orders were independent, and instructions to the subjects determined whether recall would be given in a spatial or temporal order. In all three experiments, a significant interaction between the input modality and the type of recall was found, such that visual presentation resulted in superior recall over auditory presentation in the spatial conditions and auditory presentation yielded superior recall to visual in the temporal conditions. The present results contradict an earlier study by Murdock that showed that auditory presentation resulted in better performance than visual presentation in a nominally spatial task. An explanation for the discrepancies between the results of that study and the present one is presented.     

Tests that discriminate between dyslexic and other learning-disabled boys

Dyslexic and nondyslexic boys within a single community's learning-disabled class were given a set of tests; performance on each of these tests has been reported to be significantly impaired in other dyslexic children compared to learning-disabled and normal groups. Linear discriminant function analysis revealed that error types rather than levels of performance best separated the carefully matched learning-disabled groups. Slow naming and high percentage of “dysphasic” errors characterized dyslexic boys. Visual temporal-spatial matching and “configuration-deficient” perceptual errors characterized the adequate readers who have other learning disabilities.     

Second-order relational properties and the inversion effect: Testing a theory of face perception

Recognition of faces is more severely impaired by inversion than is recognition of other types of objects. This was originally interpreted as evidence for the existence of special face-recognition mechanisms. Recently, Diamond and Carey (1986) attributed the inversion effect to the use of second-order relational properties that are important for, but not unique to, face recognition. According to their hypothesis, face recognition differs from the recognition of most other objects in its dependence on second-order relational properties. This hypothesis was tested in two experiments by comparing the effects of inversion on the identification of dot patterns that differed in the extent to which they required the encoding of second-order relational properties. Identification of the second-order relational patterns was not more disrupted by inversion than was identification of first-order patterns. These results fail to support the hypothesis that second-order relational properties are responsible for the inversion effect.