The stability of validity coefficients over time: Ackerman's (1988) model and the general aptitude test battery

This study examined P. L. Ackerman's (1988) model of skill acquisition within an applied setting. Differences were examined between jobs on the basis of task consistency: changes in performance variability across experience, learning curves, and stability of ability-performance correlations across experience. Results showed the degree of task consistency influenced the shape of learning curves, with jobs composed of primarily consistent tasks improving more rapidly and reaching asymptote sooner. In addition, trends in ability-performance correlations were moderated by the degree of task consistency within ajob. Specifically, forjobs with primarily consistent tasks, general cognitive ability best predicted early performance whereas psychomotor ability best predicted later performance. In contrast, general cognitive ability was the strongest predictor across experience for jobs with primarily inconsistent tasks.     

Forgetting of intentions in demanding situations is rapid

Demanding work settings often require the deferral of intended actions. In 3 experiments, participants were to withhold a response until they encountered a task change (which occurred 5, 15, or 40 sec later). To approximate highly demanding settings, the experimenters sometimes divided attention during the delay period. During some of the delays the experimenters interrupted the participants with an additional task (Experiment 1). Demanding conditions as well as interruptions revealed rapid forgetting of intentions at levels that would be considered significant in applied settings. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this rapid forgetting was not reduced by strategic rehearsal and implementation intention strategies. The results suggest that maintaining intentions over brief delays is not a trivial task for the human cognitive system.     

Maternal depression and the timing of mother–child dialogue

Turn-taking in dialogue is an essential part of communication and early language experience. The prevalence of utterances and the timing of responses in dialogue were examined at 14 and 36 months of age in 104 mother–child dyads from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (EHSREP). Mothers varied in their level of depression risk (measured with the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression scale; CES-D). Although maternal utterance rate did not vary significantly across any factors, the latency of mothers' responses to their children decreased with development (12 ms/month) and was significantly related to that of their own children (i.e., slow-responding children had slow-responding mothers). Mothers with higher levels of depressive symptoms were 11% slower in responding to their children than mothers with low depression risk, suggesting that the interactive timing of speech to children may be particularly sensitive to maternal depression, modifying the contingent properties of children's early language experience.     

Peer group influence as a factor in smoking behavior of adolescents

Adolescents, as the fastest growing group of smokers, have been a focus and concern of health educators and researchers. Adolescent smoking is of particular interest because initiation and early habits are known to have important implications for lifetime smoking or cessation. Despite the well-known centrality of the peer group in adolescent behavior, smoking cessation programs have been largely directed toward individuals rather than groups, with emphasis on encouraging the individual to say "no." In this paper, smoking behavior and peer group patterns among a sample of 1,689 Grade 8 students from southern Ontario were analyzed to ascertain possible patterns of indirect influence by friends and acquaintances. Gender differences also were assessed. It was found that peer groups are crucially important in the initiation of smoking among young adolescents, particularly females. The patterns of indirect peer influence on girls is such that girls are less likely to stop smoking once they have begun than are boys.     

Encoding difficulty and memory enhancement for young and older readers

Memory for text that required active construction (generation) on the part of the reader to comprehend some of the information was examined. (Letters were deleted from the words composing some of the idea units of the text). For both high school students and older adults, idea units that had letters deleted were remembered better than idea units with intact words on a cued-recall test. This pattern held for easier as well as for harder letter deletions. It was concluded that retention of textually presented information can be improved in older adults if the presentation format of the text induces or guides mental operations that support good encoding. Production-deficiency accounts and attentional/resource deficiency accounts of age-related text memory decrements are discussed in light of the present results.     

Mental models,pictures, and text: Integration of spatial and verbal information

In the past several years, there has been an acceleration in the publication of cognitive research on the interplay between linguistic and pictorial/spatial information. To report on and encourage this sort of research, we organized a symposium at the 1991 meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association. The articles in this special section ofMemory & Cognition are based on the work presented at the symposium. In this introduction, we offer a suggestion forwhy the integration of linguistic and spatial information is not only a possibility, but a requirement for effective communication. Our suggestion follows the linguistic analysis of the closed-class elements that convey spatial relations, the prepositions (Talmy, 1983). The structure of language provides but a small set of prepositions to encode the vast number of spatial relations that we can perceive. Thus, to understand a situation that a speaker or a writer is conveying, the listener or reader must combine linguistic information with (perhaps metric) spatial information derived from pictures, the environment, or memory.     

Age-related deficits in prospective memory: the influence of task complexity.

Younger and older subjects were asked to perform an action whenever target words occurred during a short-term memory task. The difficulty of this prospective memory task was manipulated by varying the delay preceding the occurrence of a target event and by varying the number of different target events. Age-related performance differences emerged when there were several different target events but not when there was one target event presented several times. Age-related performance differences, when they occurred, were associated with poorer retrospective memory for the target events. The results were interpreted in terms of a componential analysis of prospective memory, which assumes both similarities and differences between prospective and retrospective memory.     

CUE COMPETITION EFFECTS:

Abstract— The ability to predict future consequences on the basis of previous experience with the current yet of environmental cues is one of the most fundamental of all cognitive processes. Thix sttidv investigated how the validity of one cue influences the effectiveness of another cue for predicting a criterion. The results demonstrate a cue competition effect—increasing the validity of one cue decreased the effectiveness of another cue in a linear prediction task, even though the two cues were statistically independent.     

Normal aging and prospective memory

We develop a laboratory paradigm for studying prospective memory and examine whether or not this type of memory is especially difficult for the elderly. In two experiments, young and old subjects were given a prospective memory test (they were asked to perform an action when a target event occurred) and three tests of retrospective memory (short-term memory, free recall, and recognition). From the perspective that aging disrupts mainly self-initiated retrieval processes, large age-related decrements in prospective memory were anticipated. However, despite showing reliable age differences on retrospective memory tests, both experiments showed no age deficits in prospective memory. Moreover, regression analyses produced no reliable relation between the prospective and retrospective memory tasks. Also, the experiments showed that external aids and unfamiliar target events benefit prospective memory performance. These results suggest some basic differences between prospective and retrospective memory.