The Frequency Accrual Speed Test (FAST): psychometric intelligence and personality correlates

Performance on a putative psychophysical measure of information processing related to intelligence (Vickers' 1995 Frequency Accrual Speed Test, FAST) was assessed in relation to two psychometric measures of intelligence (Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices and the Mill Hill vocabulary test). Participants (N = 57) completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire — Revised (EPQ‐R), and performed the FAST task under either low (70 dB) or high (90 dB) levels of white noise. FAST correlated with Raven's (r = 0.56) and Mill Hill (r = 0.28), as expected. FAST total scores were not affected by personality or personality‐by‐noise interactions. However, a measure of consistency of FAST performance (i.e. the standard deviation) was correlated negatively with total FAST scores (r = ?0.37) and positively with (EPQ‐R) extraversion (r = 0.34). The results are discussed in terms of the validity of the FAST to explicate the information processing variables in psychometric intelligence. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes: Agrammatism in Broca's aphasia,an example

One of the most striking characteristics typical of the speech of Broca's aphasics is its agrammatism — the omission of ‘function’ words and inflectional morphemes. Agrammatism is generally viewed as being symptomatic of a syntactic deficit. We argue here that such an account lacks grammatical systematicity, and that the only uniform and systematic interpretation of this deficit is in terms of phonological structure. A natural class consisting of ‘function’ words and some bound morphemes can be defined with reference to the junctural properties of sentences which characterize phonological words. It is this class of elements which tend to be omitted in agrammatic speech. The goal of this paper is not only to provide an hypothesis for the interpretation of one aphasic syndrome, but also to test and illustrate the efficacy of paying close attention to substantive universals of grammatical structure in proposing accounts of linguistic deficits.     

Blood, sex, personality, power, and altruism: factors influencing the validity of strong reciprocity

It is argued that the generality of strong reciprocity theory (SRT) is limited by the existence of anonymous spontaneous cooperation, maintained in the absence of punishment, despite free-riding. We highlight how individual differences, status, sex, and the legitimacy of non-cooperation need to be examined to increase the internal and ecological validity of SRT experiments and, ultimately, SRT's external validity.