Procedural learning of unstructured categories

Unstructured categories are those in which the stimuli are assigned to each contrasting category randomly, and thus there is no rule- or similarity-based strategy for determining category membership. Intuition suggests that unstructured categories are likely to be learned via explicit memorization that is under the control of declarative memory. In contrast to this prediction, neuroimaging studies of unstructured-category learning have reported task-related activation in the striatum, but typically not in the hippocampus—results that seem more consistent with procedural learning than with a declarative-memory strategy. This article reports the first known behavioral test of whether unstructured-category learning is mediated by explicit strategies or by procedural learning. Our results suggest that the feedback-based learning of unstructured categories is mediated by procedural memory.     

“Yes,I Have Sometimes Stolen Bikes”: Blindness for Norm‐Violating Behaviors and Implications for Suspect Interrogations

Across two experiments, we studied a phenomenon akin to choice blindness in the context of participants' accounts of their own history of norm‐violating behaviors. In Experiment 1, N = 67 participants filled in an 18‐item questionnaire about their history of norm‐violating behaviors (QHNVB). Subsequently, they were questioned about four of their answers, two of which had covertly been manipulated by the experimenter. Of the 134 manipulations, 20 (14.9%) remained undetected concurrently and 13 were accepted in retrospect (9.7%). In Experiment 2 (N = 37), we inserted a one‐week interval between questionnaire and interview. Twenty‐seven (36.5%) of the 74 manipulations remained undetected concurrently and three were accepted in retrospect (8.1%). Data obtained in a four‐week follow‐up indicated that our manipulations may have long‐term effects on participants' perception of their own history of norm‐violating behaviors. Implications for the occurrence of false confessions during the course of an interrogation are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

the inventory of recent life experiences for cancer patients (IRLE-C): A decontaminated measure of cancer-based hassles

Abstract

Cancer is recognized to have multifaceted stressful impact on all areas of a patient's life. Researchers commonly use self-report questionnaires, intended to measure stressors objectively. However, the item-content and response-format of such scales often tap physical and mental responses to stress, thereby contaminating prediction of adverse impact. This article reports the development and validation of English and French versions of the Inventory of Recent Life Experiences for Cancer Patients (IRLE-C) which is designed to minimize such “criterion-contamination”. This entailed (1) avoiding items reflecting physical or subjective distress; (2) rating stressors for degree of exposure only; and (3) use of an innocuous scale title. The initial item pool was administered serially to a sample of 100 Francophone breast-cancer and prostate-cancer patients. To guard against inflating reliability and validity estimates through capitalizing on chance, we administered the 30-item final scale to an independent sample of 96 Francophone breast-cancer and prostate-cancer patients undergoing radiation treatment. Following the item-selection step, factorial structure and validity analyses were performed using the combined French-speaking sample (n= 196). Second, we administered the English version of the scale to an English-speaking sample of 127 cancer patients (various cancer sites and stages). The measure showed good internal consistency (.94 and .89 for the Francophone and Anglophone samples respectively) and met criteria for a 2-week test-retest reliability (r= .70 for the item-selection subsample and .80 for the cross-replication sub-sample). Correlations between the IRLE-C and the POMS Total Mood Disturbance were around .60 for both the Francophone and Anglophone samples. Avoiding contamination (through content and format) without losing its relationship to subjective distress, the IRLE-C appears a useful instrument for applying the stress-process model in oncology to establish clear distinctions among stressors, mediators, reactions, and consequences.     

On the waxing and waning of working memory: action orientation moderates the impact of demanding relationship primes on working memory capacity

The present research examined how action- versus state-oriented individuals (Kuhl & Beckmann, 1994) utilize their working memory capacity under varying situational demands. Participants visualized either a demanding or an accepting person, after which their working memory capacity was assessed. Among action-oriented participants, visualizing a demanding person led to greater operation spans (Study 1) and superior memory for intention-related information (Study 2) than visualizing an accepting person. State-oriented participants displayed the opposite pattern, such that visualizing an accepting person led to greater operation spans (Study 1) and superior memory for intentions (Study 2) than visualizing a demanding person. These findings indicate that action versus state orientation moderates the impact of situational demands on working memory capacity.     

Words created by children versus aphasic adults: an analysis of their form and communicative effectiveness

The creation of words through the novel combination of English morphemes (e.g., "map ball" to refer to a globe) was studied in 40 preschool children, 40 grade school children, and 40 adults. These lexical innovations were collected while subjects named pictured objects, and were evaluated in terms of incidence, communicative effectiveness, novelty, semantic accuracy, and certain linguistic characteristics. Preschool children's innovations were as communicatively effective as those of grade school children and adults and contained the highest proportion of innovations with redundant elements. Grade school children produced the highest proportion with semantic inaccuracies. This suggests that preschoolers invent words from a limited set of highly familiar terms, whereas grade schoolers rely more on partially known terms. In addition, the children's innovations differed significantly from those previously collected from aphasic adults. This demonstrates that aphasia does not cause a regression to an early level of linguistic sophistication.     

Maturational changes in Canadian adolescents' cognitive attitudinal structure concerning marijuana

Thirty-four items concerning marijuana use were administered three times to a cohort of Canadian high school students between Grades 11 and 13, in 1977 (n = 439), 1978 (n = 419), and 1979 (n = 167). These items were designed to measure four distinct constructs: attitude, perceived peer approval or disapproval, concern about risks, and symbolic protest against conventional society. A cross-sectional factor analysis of the Grade 13 data supported the hypothesized factor structure, as had earlier work with college students. However, analogous analyses on the Grade 11 and Grade 12 data contradicted the hypothesized factor structure. Most notably, separate factors for positive and negative attitude appeared in the Grade 11 and 12 analyses. The data were interpreted primarily in terms of maturational changes, largely through elimination of alternative interpretations by internal analyses and previous findings. Implications were discussed for adolescent cognitive-attitudinal development, attitude theory, and analysis of panel data.     

Picture-naming in aphasia

The distribution of picture-naming errors for Broca's aphasics (n = 9), Wernicke's aphasics (n = 9), conduction aphasics (n = 9), frontal anomics (n = 7), and posterior anomics (n = 9) was examined to determine the diagnostic power of error types in picture-naming. Negated responses were associated with Broca's aphasia, whole-part errors ("hose" for nozzle) were associated with frontal anomia, and poor phonemic cuing was associated with Wernicke's aphasia. In addition, the relative distribution of the three most prominent naming errors-phonemic errors, semantic errors, and multiword circumlocutions-tended to distinguish the two anomic subgroups from the other aphasia subgroups. Anomic aphasics produced the fewest phonemic errors and the most multiword circumlocutions; this pattern suggests minimal word-production difficulty in anomic aphasia relative to the other aphasia syndromes. Despite such group differences, the overall picture indicates that there is considerable similarity among aphasia syndromes in terms of picture-naming behavior.