Children's strategies in producing three-dimensional relationships on a two-dimensional surface

It is a common task to give children a picture containing implicit depth cues and to require them to extract depth information from it. The cues are always selected from the adult repertoire; little is known about children's production of their own cues. In this experiment, 5- to 10-year-old children were required to draw one object behind another in a situation in which adults invariably produce the further object partially occluded by the nearer. The results were an age-related decline in the tendency to segregate the objects and an increase in the tendency to group the objects using partial occlusion, with a cross-over at 8 years. At all ages some children drew one object inside the boundary of the other. It is argued that the results are composed of two tendencies, a gradual mastery of discrete scaling phenomena (e.g., “up” on the page means “further”) within a given style, and a set of decisions to be made between incompatible styles.     

A biphasic 60-Hz synchronizer circuit for the recording of visually evoked responses in high-noise environments

A simple synchronizer clock circuit is described that aids in the rejection of 60-Hz noise from evoked potential measurements.     

Sex-role identity and male and female homosexuality

The incidences of sex-role outcome within homosexual and heterosexual male and female young adult samples were compared using a fourfold typology (both masculine and feminine, masculine, feminine, neither masculine nor feminine). Sex-role identity disparities between the female groups were more clear-cut; the most striking difference was the high incidence of masculinity (60%) within the homosexual female group. No significant differences for males were found, although a trend was noted toward higher incidence of femininity and lower incidence of masculinity in homosexuals. The second purpose of the study was to search for possible developmental antecedents to heterosexual deficit in unselected college samples. The same key pattern of psychometric indices was identified for males and females. Low heterosexuality and the closest approximation to the modal sex-role identity among homosexuals of their sex were found in females primarily identified with masculine fathers and low in role consistency and in males primarily identified with feminine mothers and low in role consistency.     

Discrimination learning and stimulus generalization by impulsive and reflective children

The proposition that impulsive children inhibit expressive behavior less than reflective children was investigated by providing third grade impulsive and reflective boys with either differential or nondifferential forms or successive discrimination training prior to tests for stimulus generalization. Consistent with specific predictions derived from Spence's theory on the roles of excitation and inhibition, it was found that: (a) Reflectives acquired the discrimination more rapidly, (b) reflectives achieved a higher level of discriminative performance, (c) impulsives exhibited more variable response reates during the nonreinforced stimulus, and (d) the type of training interacted with the child's conceptual tempo to determine the elevation and shape of the post-discrimination generalization gradients. The results provide support for the construct validity of the Matching Familiar Figures Test of reflectivity-impulsivity.     

Value systems of self and of Australian expatriates as perceived by indigenous students in Papua New Guinea

The Rokeach Value Survey was administered to 112 students at Goroka Teachers' College in Papua New Guinea. About half of the respondents ranked the values for self and the remainder ranked for Australian expatriates working in Papua New Guinea. There were several differences in the relative importance assigned to the terminal and instrumental values when the two types of ranking were compared. The students assigned more importance to general social and orthodox religious values, to some moral values, and to values involving rules of conduct related to status and authority when rankings were for self than when they were for expatriates. They ranked stimulus-seeking and materialistic values and values concerned with striving and competence higher in importance when rankings were for expatriates rather than for self. The average value systems (medians) for self and for expatriates were also compared for similarity with those obtained from groups previously tested in Papua New Guinea and in Australia. Similarity coefficients involving average rankings for self were much higher when comparisons were made within each nation than between the two nations. It was doubtful that the students were judging expatriate value systems accurately because similarity coefficients were close to zero (terminal values) and low positive (instrumental values) when average value systems for expatriates were compared with corresponding average rankings for self of Australians actually tested in Australia. Results were discussed in relation to the consequences of discrepancies in value systems between the indigenous population and expatriates and more generally as illustrating the importance of developing an ecology of values within and across nations.     

Component processes of an overt rehearsal strategy in young children

The locus of facilitation due to rehearsal was investigated in three experiments with first-grade children. Several different overt acquisition strategies in a four-item sequential memory task were compared, including ordered repetition, item repetition, item labeling, and free strategy conditions. Experiment 1 showed that ordered repetition yields most of the facilitation due to rehearsal, and Experiment 2 demonstrated that the facilitation cannot be attributed to spaced practice. Experiment 3 showed that retrieval practice during study may improve memory performance but that the facilitation due to ordered repetition and retrieval practice is relatively short term. Mere repetition and labeling were not found to be significant component processes of rehearsal in any of the experiments. These results were discussed in terms of their relevance to rehearsal training studies and a differentiation between maintenance and elaborative rehearsal.