Incidental retention of speaker’s voice

Geiselman and Bellezza (1976) concluded that any retention in memory of the sex of a speaker of verbal material is automatic. Two possible reasons for this were hypothesized: the voice-connotation hypothesis and the dual-hemisphere parallel-processing hypothesis. In Experiment 1, the to-be-remembered sentences contained either male or female agents. Incidental retention of sex of speaker did not occur. This result does not support the dual-hemisphere parallel-processing hypothesis, which indicates that retention of voice should be independent of sentence content. In Experiment 2, the sentences contained neutral agents and incidental retention of sex of speaker did occur. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 support the connotation hypothesis. The different results with regard to incidental retention of speakers’s voice found in Experiments 1 and 2 were replicated in Experiment 3 using a within-subjects design. Experimemt 4 was conducted to determine if a speaker’s voice does, in fact, influence the meaning of a neutral sentence. In agreement with the voice-connotation hypothesis, sentences spoken by a male were rated as having more “potent” connotations than sentences spoken by a female.     

Long-term memory for speaker’s voice and source location

One hundred and twenty-eight subjects tried to recall 20 simple sentences that for some subjects were presented in two different voices or were presented from two loudspeakers on different sides of the room. In addition, some subjects were instructed to remember not only the sentences, but also their voice and location attributes. Intentional instructions for location resulted in poorer recall of the sentences, but intentional instructions for voice did not. The voice attribute seemed to be automatically coded under both intentional and incidental instructions for remembering the attribute, whereas the location attribute seemed to require cognitive processing in addition to that required for encoding the meaning of the sentence. A test for clustering by voice in recall was done to determine if the evidence for automatic ceding of voice was merely an artifact resulting from better recall because of organization. However, no clustering was found. The ideas that speaker's voice and sentence meaning were processed in parallel by different hemispheres of the brain and that the connotation of the voice influenced the meaning of each sentence were offered as two possible explanations of the results.     

Conditioned orienting and defensive responses in the developing rat

Infant rats (16, 21, and 26 days old) received 3 days of classical conditioning training to Tone/Shock pairings using heart rate as the index of conditioning. The youngest group (16 days old) showed no evidence of conditioning at any stage of acquisition. In the 21- and 26-day-olds, response to the conditioned stimulus (CS) was a deceleration in heart rate during the first day of training. By day 3, the conditioned response (CR) shifted to cardioacceleration. The data were interpreted as offering strong support for a two-stage model of information processing in the infant rat, comprised of a conditioned orienting response in the first stage and a conditioned defensive response in the second.     

Self-attention and self-report: The "veridicality" hypothesis

Wicker (1969) summarized the state of the art in the area of attitude/behavior consistency by suggesting that attitude measures are often only slightly related to overt behaviors. Since that time literally hundreds of studies have been conducted dealing with the question of how the predictive validity of self-assessment can be improved—above the 30 figure that Wicker suggested represents the typical upper limit of correlations between self-reported attitudes and behavior. This article deals with perhaps one of the simplest factors that does appear to be related to accurate self-assessment: internal focus of attention. Research in the area of self-awareness theory is discussed, leading to the conclusion that assessments of various aspects of the self, including attitudes, cognitions, and affective and somatic states, usually are more accurate when they are made by a respondent whose attention is self-directed. By the same token, overt behavior also tends to be more consistent with previously expressed attitudes when it occurs under conditions conducive to self-focus. In discussing this research, it is suggested that self-awareness promotes accuracy in two ways: (a) It focuses the respondent's attention more carefully on those aspects of the self made relevant by the instrument and (b) it increases the person's motivation to report accurately on those self-dimensions. It is also suggested, however, that this latter factor can sometimes work against consistency. In this regard, a variety of situations are discussed in which motives that may conflict with the desire to report accurately, such as ego-protectiveness, are also enhanced by self-focused attention. Finally, a number of empirical questions are presented as guidelines for future research.     

Updating memory using mnemonic devices

The process of memory updating enables people to recall information most recently associated with a particular stimulus context and to ignore or forget information previously associated with it. In a series of five experiments utilizing mnemonic devices it was found that when associative interference was maximized, only a limited disruption of updating resulted. In addition, mnemonic recall was not dependent on the utilization of higher-order memory components. However, support was found for the hypothesis that memory can be searched using temporal cues and for the idea that the size of the search set formed in memory is important. It was found that the older the event was to be recalled, the greater were the number of events in the search set and therefore the greater was the magnitude of the recall error. The size of the search set created in memory and the role of temporal-contextual cues in defining this search set may be important factors not only in mnemonic recall but in other types of learning and recall as well.