Do dichotic listening procedures measure lateralization of information processing or retrieval strategy?

The data from two dichotic studies, both of which evaluated spontaneously generated response strategies under free recall and one of which also manipulated retrieval strategy by instruction, supported a conception that what dichotic procedures mostly measure are response strategies—mobile and readily deployed without loss of mnemonic capability. Consequently, competitional methods which are heavily influenced by output factors appear to be unreliable as a means of evaluating input processing dominance.     

Rapid educational rehabilitation for prison inmates

One of the major goals of prisons has been the educational rehabilitation of inmates. Studies have shown that predelinquents as well as delinquents could be motivated to achieve in academic areas through the use of an incentive system. The present study attempted to extend the behavioral yield of such a system with prison inmates. The academic performance of two inmates in math and English were compared when two levels of incentives were made contingent on that performance. The results showed that the two inmates passed academic tests as much as nine times faster under an enriched schedule of incentives than under a standard one. This increase in rate of performance was translated into actual academic achievement as one of the inmates passed 9th through 12th grade algebra in only 14 days. A standardized test confirmed this academic advancement for both inmates. These high rates of performance and academic achievement are even more dramatic in view of the fact that five months prior to this procedure, both inmates had been tested as being below average in intelligence.     

Some psychometric correlates of behaviour in India and Canada(1)

A number of questionnaires, measuring category-width, risk-taking propensity, tolerance of ambiguity, world-mindedness and authoritarianism, were administered to samples of university students in India and Canada. The results are consistent with previous investigations and indicate that the Indians, as contrasted with the Canadians, prefer narrow categories, choose conservative risks, are less tolerant of ambiguity, are more authoritarian and, if attending a Hindu College, are less world-minded. The relationship of these orientations to other variables such as achievement motivation are discussed and the importance of antecedent child-rearing practices is noted.     

Transformations. II. Latency of generation

This study tested the hypothesized relationship between the rules of sentence transformation and preresponse processing time in a short-term memory and transformation task. The transform instruction was placed either before or after the stimulus sentence, and verbal responses were made with immediate or delayed auditory feedback. The data showed conclusively that the amount of processing required by different grammatical transformations does not relate, to the theoretical linguistic derivation, even when transformations are grouped into an ordinal ranking of difficulty rated by the number of nominal transform rules required. An instruction prefix facilitates information processing and interacts with the grammatical task. Sentence generation was retarded significantly by the imminent onset of delayed auditory feedback. This effect of imminentDAF appears to be a new finding.     

Transformations. I. The effect of DAF on sentence generation

A hypothesis based on the psycholinguistic derivation of sentences was tested. The task required that sentences temporarily stored in memory be transformed and spoken with delayed auditory feedback. An instruction to repeat the stimulus sentence verbatim or grammatically transform it was placed either immediately before or immediately after the sentence. Two measures of interference were obtained based on the syllable rates for the response times. The different grammatical forms showed significant variation in the amount of interference, but the amount of interference appeared to relate primarily to the length of the transformed sentence rather than to its derivational complexity. Interaction between the position of the instruction and the sentence generation task is discussed in terms of the underlying memory functions involved. A further test was proposed.