Relationship between the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement--Brief Form and the Wide Range Achievement Test--Revised Level 2 with incarcerated juvenile delinquents

The Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement--Brief Form and the Wide Range Achievement Test--Revised Level 2 were administered in counterbalanced order to 50 male incarcerated juvenile delinquents. The analyses showed the similar subtests on the two tests, i.e., Kaufman Reading test and WRAT-R Reading, were highly correlated. The mean standard scores of th e similar subtests were not significantly different from each other. These results contrast with the significantly lower WRAT-R scores found when scores on the WRAT-R Level 1 are compared with those on the Kaufman test.     

Cognitive styles and moral reasoning

It was hypothesized that field-dependent persons would be reasoning at the conventional level, whereas field-independent persons would reason at the post-conventional level. Data from 7 female and 3 male graduate students in Canada supported the first hypothesis (8 field-independent vs 2 field-dependent scorers), but not the second one.     

When are AIDS patients to blame for their disease? Effects of patients' sexual orientation and mode of transmission

This study examined three factors affecting college students' attributions of blame for an AIDS patient's disease: sexual orientation of the patient, mode of HIV transmission, and the sex of the subject. 148 subjects read one of six vignettes describing an hypothetical AIDS patient who was described as either an heterosexual or an homosexual man who contracted HIV through one of three avenues: blood transfusion, sexual contact, or IV drug use. The homosexual AIDS patient was considered more to blame for his illness than the heterosexual AIDS patient, but only when mode of transmission was sexual contact. In addition, mode of HIV transmission was a significant factor in attributions of responsibility, as the patient who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion was rated as less responsible than the patient who contracted HIV through sexual behavior or IV drug use. Women consistently rated the AIDS patient as less responsible than did men.     

Autonomic determinism: the modes of autonomic control, the doctrine of autonomic space, and the laws of autonomic constraint.

Contemporary findings reveal that the multiple modes of autonomic control do not lie along a single continuum extending from parasympathetic to sympathetic dominance but rather distribute within a 2-dimensional space. The physiological origins and empirical documentation for the multiple modes of autonomic control are considered. Then a formal 2-dimensional conception of autonomic space is proposed, and a quantitative model for its translation into a functional output surface is derived. It is shown that this model (a) accounts for much of the error variance that has traditionally plagued psychophysiological studies, (b) subsumes psychophysiological principles such as the law of initial values, (c) gives rise to formal laws of autonomic constraint, and (d) has fundamental implications for the direction and interpretation of a wide array of psychophysiological studies.     

Recency effects in direct and indirect memory tasks

In three experiments, subjects learned two lists under incidental conditions and were then given either a part-word or a word (extralist associate) cue. Each cue was related to one word in each list. Half the subjects were given production instructions (an indirect memory test), and half were given cued recall instructions (a direct memory test). When the interval between List 2 and the test was shortened, recency effects were found for part-word cues for both cued recall and production instructions. Little or no recency effects were found with word cues. These results are incompatible with a simple distinction between the types of memory trace or information that are tapped by direct as opposed to indirect memory tasks. Possible causes for the recency effect and for the difference between word and part-word cues are discussed.     

The specificity of the effects of stimulant medication on classroom learning-related measures of cognitive processing for Attention Deficit Disorder children

There appear to be beneficial effects of stimulant medication on daily classroom measures of cognitive functioning for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) children, but the specificity and origin of such effects is unclear. Consistent with previous results, 0.3 mg/kg methylphenidate improved ADD children's performance on a classroom reading comprehension measure. Using the Posner letting-matching task and four additional measures of phonological processing, we attempted to isolate the effects of methylphenidate to parameter estimates of (a) selective attention, (b) the basic cognitive process of retrieving name codes from permanent memory, and (c) a constant term that represented nonspecific aspects of information processing. Responses to the letter-matching stimuli were faster and more accurate with medication compared to placebo. The improvement in performance was isolated to the parameter estimate that reflected nonspecific aspects of information processing. A lack of medication effect on the other measures of phonological processing supported the Posner task findings in indicating that methylphenidate appears to exert beneficial effects on academic processing through general rather than specific aspects of information processing.     

Task dynamics and resource dynamics in the assembly of a coordinated rhythmic activity.

Task dynamics corresponding to rhythmic movements emerge from interactions among dynamical resources composed of the musculature, the link segments, and the nervous and circulatory systems. This article investigated whether perturbations of interlimb coordination might be effect over circulatory and nervous elements. Stiffness of wrist-pendulums oscillated at a common tempo and at 180 degrees relative phase was perturbed through the use of tonic activity about an ankle. Left and right stiffnesses, the common period, and the phase relation all changed. Stiffnesses increased with ankle torque in proportion to the wrist's inertial load. Despite different changes in stiffness at the two wrists, isochrony was preserved. The stability was shown to be consistent with the proportionality of changes in stiffness to the inertial loads. The phase departed from antiphase in proportion to the asymmetry of inertial loads. The size of departures decreased with increasing ankle torque. An account was developed in terms of muscular, circulatory, and nervous functions.     

Phonological access of the lexicon: evidence from associative priming with pseudohomophones.

Pseudohomophones were used in a primed naming task. In Experiments 1 and 2, target pseudowords that sounded like real words (e.g., CHARE) were preceded either by context words that related associatively to the word with which the target was homophonic (TABLE-CHARE) or by context words that were not associatively related (NOVEL-CHARE). Control pairs were TABLE-THARE and NOVEL-THARE (Experiment 1) and TABLE-CHARK and NOVEL-CHARK (Experiment 2). In relation to NOVEL, TABLE benefited the naming of CHARE but not the naming of THARE or CHARK. TAYBLE-CHAIR pairs were used in Experiment 3. If the prime TAYBLE activated/table/,then/chair/would be activated associatively and the target CHAIR would be named faster than if TARBLE was the prime. Experiment 4 extended the design of Experiment 3 to include TABLE-CHAIR pairs and a comparison of a short (280 ms) and a long (500 ms) delay between context and target onsets. The priming due to associated pseudohomophones was unaffected by onset asynchrony and equal in magnitude to that due to associated words. Results suggest that lexical representations are coded and accessed phonologically.     

Intra- and interpattern relations in letter recognition.

Strings of 4 unrelated letters were backward masked at varying durations to examine 3 major issues. (a) One issue concerned relational features. Letters with abnormal relations but normal elements were created by interchanging elements between large and small normal letters. Overall accuracy was higher for letters with normal relations, consistent with the idea that relational features are important in recognition. (b) Interpattern relations were examined by mixing large and small letters within strings. Relative to pure strings, accuracy was reduced, but only for small letters and only when in mixed strings. This effect can be attributed to attentional priority for larger forms over smaller forms, which also explains global precedence with hierarchical forms. (c) Forced-choice alternatives were manipulated in Experiments 2 and 3 to test feature integration theory. Relational information was found to be processed at least as early as feature presence or absence.