Favorable Evaluations of Blacks and the Handicapped: Positive Prejudice,Unconscious Denial,or Social Desirability?1

Prior research has shown that subjects in an impression formation setting rated an interviewee more favorably if he was labeled as either black or physically handicapped than if he was not labeled. This seems to contradict common assumptions about the nature of stigma. Three interpretations of these findings are advanced: They may reflect actual positive biases held by college students regarding members of these outgroups; they may represent unconscious distortions of subjects' true feelings; or they may represent conscious distortions of true feelings in order to make socially desirable responses. The present study was undertaken to test the third possibility by means of a so-called bogus pipeline manipulation, in which some subjects were led to believe that the experimenter had access to their actual feelings about the interviewee. The results indicated that the high rating of the black was a social desirability phenomenon, but the high rating of the handicapped person was not.     

When courtesy offends: effects of positive and negative behavior by the pbysically disabled on altruism and anger in normals.

The initial hypothesis was that physically disabled help-seekers will receive more aid from normal people than will help-seekers when both types of actors display positive personal qualities, whereas the reverse outcome will occur when both display negative qualities. In the first experiment a wheelchair-bound or normal confederate was either friendly and achievement oriented (positive condition) or caustic and apathetic (negative condition) while administering verbal tasks to subjects who were later asked to help the confederate. Contrary to prediction, subjects offered more help to the normal than to the disabled tester in the positive condition, and showed the reverse pattern in the negative condition. It was conjectured that subjects in the positive condition were annoyed by the disabled person's display of "normal" characteristics, whereas in the negative condition they sympathetically accepted the disabled person's inadequacies as befitting a victim of severe misfortune. A new experiment was done, which replicated the independent variables of the first study, but substituted two new dependent variables: covert anger arousal and perception of the confederate as happy-unhappy. As expected, covert anger was greater in the wheelchair-positive condition than in the normal-positive condition, and greater in the normal-negative condition than in the wheelchair-negative condition. Regardless of the confederate's physical status, subjects perceived negative behavior as a sign of unhappiness.     

Adaptive executive control: Flexible multiple-task performance without pervasive immutable response-selection bottlenecks

A new theoretical framework, the EPIC (Executive-Process/Interactive-Control) architecture, provides the basis for accurate detailed computational models of human multiple-task performance. Contrary to the traditional response-selection bottleneck hypothesis, EPIC's cognitive processor can select responses and do other procedural operations simultaneously for multiple concurrent tasks. Using this capacity together with flexible executive control of peripheral perceptual-motor components, EPIC computational models account well for various patterns of mean reaction times, systematic individual differences in multiple-task performance, and influences of special training on people's task-coordination strategies. These diverse phenomena, and EPIC's success at modeling them, raise strong doubts about the existence of a pervasive immutable response-selection bottleneck in the human information-processing system. The present research therefore helps further characterize the nature of discrete versus continuous information processing.     

Alpha factor analysis of infallible variables

The relationship between the factor pattern,F, derived from fallible (containing measurement error) observations on variables and the factor pattern,F*, derived from infallible observations on variables is investigated. A widely believed relationship betweenF andF*, viz.,F*=AF whereA is a diagonal matrix containing the inverses of the square roots of the reliabilities of the variables, is shown to be false for several factor analytic techniques. Under suitable assumptions, it is shown that for Kaiser and Caffrey's alpha factor analysisF* andF are related byF*=AF. Empirical examples for which the corresponding elements ofF* andAF are equal to two decimal places are presented. The implications of the equality ofF* andAF for alpha factor analysis are discussed.I wish to acknowledge the generous assistance of Drs. Chester W. Harris and Henry F. Kaiser in the execution of the research reported in this paper.     

When more is less: feedback effects in perceptual category learning

Rule-based and information-integration category learning were compared under minimal and full feedback conditions. Rule-based category structures are those for which the optimal rule is verbalizable. Information-integration category structures are those for which the optimal rule is not verbalizable. With minimal feedback subjects are told whether their response was correct or incorrect, but are not informed of the correct category assignment. With full feedback subjects are informed of the correctness of their response and are also informed of the correct category assignment. An examination of the distinct neural circuits that subserve rule-based and information-integration category learning leads to the counterintuitive prediction that full feedback should facilitate rule-based learning but should also hinder information-integration learning. This prediction was supported in the experiment reported below. The implications of these results for theories of learning are discussed.     

Treadmill gait analysis does not detect motor deficits in animal models of Parkinson's disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Computerized treadmill gait analysis in models of toxicant exposure and neurodegenerative disorders holds much potential for detection and therapeutic intervention in these models, and researchers must validate the technology that assists in that data collection and analysis. The present authors used a commercially available computerized gait analysis system that used (a) a motorized treadmill on retired breeder male C57BL/6J mice, (b) the toxicant-induced (1-methyl-1-, 2-, 3-, 6-tetrahydropyridine) MPTP mouse model of Parkinson's disease (PD), and (c) the superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) G93A transgenic mouse model of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The authors compared the detection of deficits by computerized treadmill gait analysis in MPTP-treated mice with inked-paw stride length and correlated these measures to dopamine (DA) loss. The authors found that the computerized treadmill gait analysis system did not distinguish MPTP-treated mice from vehicle controls, despite a nearly 90% deficit of striatal DA. In contrast, decreases in inked-paw stride length correlated strongly with DA losses in these same animals. Computerized treadmill gait analysis could neither reliably distinguish SOD1 G93A mutant mice from controls from 6 to 12 weeks of age nor detect any consistent early motor deficits in these mice. On the basis of the authors' findings, they inferred that computerized gait analysis on a motorized treadmill is not suited to measuring motor deficits in either the MPTP mouse model of PD or the SOD1 G93A mouse model of ALS.     

Comparing the effects of positive and negative feedback in information-integration category learning

Categorical learning is dependent on feedback. Here, we compare how positive and negative feedback affect information-integration (II) category learning. Ashby and O’Brien (2007) demonstrated that both positive and negative feedback are required to solve II category problems when feedback was not guaranteed on each trial, and reported no differences between positive-only and negative-only feedback in terms of their effectiveness. We followed up on these findings and conducted 3 experiments in which participants completed 2,400 II categorization trials across three days under 1 of 3 conditions: positive feedback only (PFB), negative feedback only (NFB), or both types of feedback (CP; control partial). An adaptive algorithm controlled the amount of feedback given to each group so that feedback was nearly equated. Using different feedback control procedures, Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that participants in the NFB and CP group were able to engage II learning strategies, whereas the PFB group was not. Additionally, the NFB group was able to achieve significantly higher accuracy than the PFB group by Day 3. Experiment 3 revealed that these differences remained even when we equated the information received on feedback trials. Thus, negative feedback appears significantly more effective for learning II category structures. This suggests that the human implicit learning system may be capable of learning in the absence of positive feedback.     

Knowledge cannot explain the developmental growth of working memory capacity

According to some views of cognitive growth, the development of working memory capacity can account for increases in the complexity of cognition. It has been difficult to ascertain, though, that there actually is developmental growth in capacity that cannot be attributed to other developing factors. Here we assess the role of item familiarity. We document developmental increases in working memory for visual arrays of English letters versus unfamiliar characters. Although letter knowledge played a special role in development between the ages of 6 and 8 years, children with adequate letter knowledge showed practically the same developmental growth in normalized functions for letters and unfamiliar characters. The results contribute to a growing body of evidence that the developmental improvement in working memory does not wholly stem from supporting processes such as encoding, mnemonic strategies, and knowledge. A video abstract is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJdqErLR2Hs&feature=youtu.be     

LeRoy Walters and Julie Gage Palmer,The Ethics of Human Gene Therapy

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics -