Lifespan normative data (18–89 years) for Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices Set I

Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) Set I is a validated and brief test of fluid intelligence, ideal for use in busy clinical settings. However, there is a dearth of normative data allowing an accurate interpretation of APM scores. To address this, we present normative data from across the adult lifespan (18–89 years) for the APM Set I. Data are presented in five age cohorts (total N = 352), including two older adult cohorts (65–79 years and 80–89 years), which allows age-standardized assessment. We also present data from a validated measure of premorbid intellectual ability, which was absent from previous standardizations of longer forms of the APM. In line with previous findings, a striking age-related decline was noted, beginning relatively early in adulthood and most marked amongst lower-scoring individuals. Older adults did not demonstrate difficulty with specific test items or make an increased proportion of specific errors. Sex was not a significant predictor of performance. The data set is of particular use in the neuropsychological assessment of older adults, given the known susceptibility of fluid intelligence to both the effects of normal ageing and acquired brain injury in older age. The results are discussed in light of theories of neurological ageing.     

Phantasms of the living and of the dead

Summary In this outline no attempt has been made to prove survival, nor even to cite all of the more convincing types of cases, but to present in organized form some of the classes of evidence gathered by psychical research. During the eighty-odd years of organized research in this field, instances have been attested of apparitions which indirectly suggest the survival of personality.This article is an excerpt from one which appeared in theJournal of the American Society for Psychical Research, January, 1945, and is reprinted by permission of the author.     

Dissociations between procedural and episodic memory: effects of time and aging

The issue of multiple memory systems is explored. Young and older adults (mean ages = 20 and 71, respectively) named pictures and were tested immediately, 1, 7, or 21 days later. Episodic memory (recognition) for pictures was significantly lower in older relative to young adults and declined systematically across all retention intervals in both age groups. In contrast, procedural memory (repetition priming in picture naming) revealed no reliable age differences. In both age groups, priming declined within the first 24 hr, but unlike recognition, there was no further decrement from 1 to 21 days. There were also within-subject dissociations: The magnitude of priming was equivalent for remembered and forgotten items, and the relation between recognition and priming across intervals was nonmonotic, revealing a reversed association. The findings were interpreted within a multiple-memory-systems framework.     

Adult age comparisons in the processing of event frequency information

The usual superiority in frequency-of-occurrence judgments of younger vs. older subjects was hypothesized to result from greater strategic encoding of the materials conveying frequency information. A subject-paced, visual search task was designed to control nontarget word encoding. Relative frequency judgments for the nontarget word pairs were equally accurate for younger and older subjects, and performance of both groups was above chance. Results suggest that strategic cover-task encoding can induce age differences in incidental frequency processing. Consistent with a nonoptimal as opposed to an optimal view, automatic processes require only minimal capacity for above-chance performance, but additional strategic resources can increase performance. When such additional resources are used more by younger than by older subjects, the former are better in frequency performance.     

Does medics' social identification increase handicap for mentally retarded patients?

Briefs about mentally retarded people are more negative than briefs about other social categories; professionals, such as medical doctors evaluate them most negatively of all. It was hypothesized (a) that medics' beliefs about mentally retarded people are mediated by psychological salience of their clinical social identification, rather than by personal characteristics that medics happen to share and (b) that such beliefs will bias decisions, rather than enhance accuracy. Forty-five doctors and medical students were randomly assigned to conditions designed to enhance salience of their shared clinical social identification or individual self-perceptions. Subjects completed semantic differentials about mentally retarded people and distinguished between slides of ‘mentally retarded’ and ‘normal’ children. Beliefs of subjects in the medical condition were significantly more negative than those in the personal condition. A signal detection analysis revealed no difference between conditions in subjects' ability to distinguish between children but showed that subjects in the medical condition were significantly more likely to judge a child ‘mentally retarded’ when in doubt. Results were discussed within an information processing framework and supported the idea that a salient clinical social identity can mediate beliefs that are likely to handicap patients.     

Converging operations on a basic level in event taxonomies

Research on object concepts has identified one level of abstraction as "basic" in cognition and communication. We investigated whether concepts for routine social events have a basic level by replicating the converging operations used to investigate object concepts. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented with event names from a taxonomy and were asked to list the actions comprising the event. Many more actions were listed at the middle than at the highest taxonomic level, without a further increase at the most specific level, paralleling the pattern of superordinate-, basic-, and subordinate-level object concepts. From these action lists, brief stories were composed for each event. In Experiment 2, subjects made pairwise similarity judgments on the stories. The mean similarity of events increased with specificity, as expected. But differentiation of categories (within-category similarity compared to between-category similarity) was highest for super-ordinates, contrary to results with object categories. In Experiment 3, subjects were fastest in recognizing actions as belonging to events named at the basic level. In Experiment 4, subjects predominantly chose basic-level terms to name stories. We conclude that event taxonomies do show basic-level structure, albeit a less sharply defined and less stable structure than in object taxonomies. The benefits and hazards of extending models of object concepts to other entities, such as social events, are discussed.     

Did Georg Cantor Influence Edmund Husserl?

Few have entertained the idea that Georg Cantor, the creator of set theory, might have influenced Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement. Yet an exchange of ideas took place between them when Cantor was at the height of his creative powers and Husserl in the throes of an intellectual struggle during which his ideas were particularly malleable and changed considerably and definitively. Here their writings are examined to show how Husserl's and Cantor's ideas overlapped and crisscrossed in the areas of philosophy and mathematics, arithmetization, abstraction, consciousness and pure logic, psychologism, metaphysical idealism, new numbers, and sets and manifolds.