Reaction time to letter name or letter case

Subjects were shown two letters from the set BDGbdg. In one condition, subjects were required to decide whether or not the letters had the same name. In the other condition, subjects decided whether or not the two letters were presented in the same case. Reaction times were always faster when the two letters on a given trial were physically identical. However, there was no difference in the speed of a name match or a case match when the two letters were not physically identical. Since subjects could have based a case match on the presence or absence of a single feature — a protruding vertical line — it was concluded that subjects are not able to selectively attend to a single visual feature in order to identify a letter. Rather, a subject analyzes several features in parallel in order to arrive at a simultaneous decision about a letter's name or case.     

Intelligence and spontaneous flexibility in adulthood and old age

Interrelationships among measures of intelligence and spontaneous flexibility were examined at two age levels using a multitrait-multimethod matrix design and other multivariate procedures. Measures of intelligence were Ravens Matrices and WAIS Vocabulary, WAIS Digit Symbol, and WAIS Similarities. Blots, Hidden Pictures, Brick Uses, and Impossibilities were used as measures of spontaneous flexibility. Subjects were 100 younger (X¯= 19.54,S.D.= 1.23) and 100 older (X¯= 63.99,S.D.= 2.94) men and women tested at two occasions. Adult age differences in factor structure were explored using a maximum likelihood analysis; common variances among the measures were greater for the elderly compared to the younger adults. Findings supported a dedifferentiation hypothesis with regard to both intelligence and spontaneous flexibility.     

Some psycholinguistic aspects of person perception

Adjective-noun combinations in person perception are analyzed from an integration-theoretical view, with special reference to judgments of likableness, occupational proficiency, and social value. Different theoretical considerations are shown to apply to these three judgment dimensions, but all can be conceptualized in terms of the valuation and integration operations of integration theory. Experimental support for this conceptual analysis is given for likableness and occupational proficiency. Advantages of the integration-theoretical analysis over congruity formulations are pointed out.     

Individual differences in the detection of embedded figures

The individual differences in processing obtained by Hock (1973) were extended to two experiments in which the embedded figures test was recast into the form of a yes-no reaction time task. Ss emphasizing analytic processes detected the embedded figures more rapidly than Ss emphasizing structural processes, supporting the hypothesis that attention to the parts of the embedded figures was the strategy most appropriate for the task. Based on the interaction between familiarity (normal vs rotated orientation) and embeddedness (intact vs embedded figures), it was concluded in both experiments that familiarity facilitated the detection of the embedded figures for analytic Ss. For structural Ss, familiarity was similarly found to facilitate the detection of the embedded figures, but only when a template-matching strategy was possible (when the target figure and the embedded figure were physically identical).     

Extension cues in open and closed figures

Subjects were shown line drawings of figures differing in degree of closure, and asked what the drawings most looked like. Responses were dichotomized into “upright” (e.g. beaker) and “extended” (e.g. runway). Although, overall, about twice as many upright as extended responses were given, relatively open figures yielded about twice as many extended responses as did relatively closed figures. Converging lines as such appeared an unexpectedly weak cue for extension, and horizontal discontinuity in a drawing seemed more suggestive of extension than did vertical discontinuity. Reclassifying the responses as two- or three-dimensional showed that although two-dimensional responses were less common overall, they were three times as common in relatively closed drawings. Predictions are made relating the findings to standard visual illusions.     

Sequential letter and word recognition in deaf and hearing subjects

To examine the processing of sequentially presented letters of familiar and nonsense words, especially among Ss of vastly differing experience on sequential tasks, three groups of Ss were tested on letters of words spelled sequentially on an alphanumeric display and on letters of words fingerspelled. These were a deaf group (N=33) with little or no hearing and who varied in their fingerspelling ability; a staff group (N=12) who taught fingerspelling and were highly proficient; and a hearing group (N=19). Of principal interest was the finding that the hearing Ss did better on nonsense letter recognition, while the deaf group did better on word recognition. Word length was important except to the staff Ss on fingerspelled words, which also suggests that concentration on fingerspelling proficiency forces attention to the whole word and not its component letters. Hearing Ss, who are the group faced with an unfamiliar task, seemed to attend to each letter and hence had more difficulty with recognition of the longer unit.     

Mechanisms of aural encoding: I. Distinctive features for consonants

To examine the importance of distinctive features that are used to encode consonants (following Wickelgren’s analysis) in an immediate recall task, sequences of 5 consonants, all paired with the vowel /a/ were constructed and presented aurally for recall. The middle three items in each sequence all had either the same place of articulation (front, middle, or back of the vocal apparatus), orthe same manner of articulation (voiced, unvoiced, or nasal), or were unrelated in either place or manner (control). It was shown that, in comparison with the control sequences, consonants imbedded among others articulated similarly were recalled less accurately, suggesting that these distinctive features are important in encoding and memory maintenance. A comparison of the 3 manner and 3 place features showed that the greatest difficulty in recall occurred for the similar manner sequences (especially voiced and unvoiced, implicating manner of articulation as the critical distinctive feature in aural encoding. Some discussion is also presented of a distinction between articulation and acoustic factors in encoding processes.     

A replication and extension of the Eriksen and Steffy (1964) experiment on short-term visual storage

Eriksen and Steffy (1964) were critical of short-term visual storage effects (STVS) because they were unable to find any evidence for them. In their first experiment they found instead great interference in performance over the same ISIs in which STVS is usually found. Their second experiment eliminated the interference by avoiding a bright second flash, but it still produced no evidence for STVS. Keele and Chase (1967) demonstrated that Eriksen and Steffy’s second condition failed to find STVS because the memory load was too small, and perhaps because the luminance was too low. However, the design of Eriksen and Steffy’s second experiment is not the one typically used to find STVS. Eriksen and Steffy’s first experiment was replicated here, and a second condition was added in which each S was also tested in a light adapted version. Interference was found in the former, as Eriksen and Steffy also found, but not in the latter. Little STVS was found in either of these conditions, presumably for reasons similar to those demonstrated by Keele and Chase.