An IBM method for computing intraserial correlations

A method for computing intraserial correlations using a 602-A Calculating Punch, an 077 Collator, a 513 Gang Punch, and a 403 Tabulator is described. An example of the use of the procedure and an estimate of the time needed with each machine are given. This procedure is compared with another method, which makes use of a more powerful IBM machine.This research was supported in part by the United States Air Force under Contract No. AF 33(038)-25726, monitored by the Air Force Personnel and Training Research Center. Permission is granted for reproduction, translation, publication, use and disposal in whole and in part by or for the United States Government.     

Sex,sex role,and psychomotor reminiscence

Effects of sex and sex role on psychomotor reminiscence and task proficiency were investigated in samples of masculine males, masculine females, feminine males, and feminine females, as defined by the Bem Sex Role Inventory. Sex contributed significantly to the variance of reminiscence and to the slopes of prerest practice gains, as others have found. Sex role contributed virtually nothing to the variance of reminiscence, but feminine subjects of both sexes reached generally higher levels of performance than masculine subjects. Sex and sex role effects were orthogonal at all points of comparison.     

Hypermnesia: the role of repeated testing

The present study was designed to determine whether the increased recall of pictures across repeated tests (hypermnesia) is due to increasing strength of imaginal traces during the retention interval or to increased retrieval practice from prior tests. Subjects studied 60 pictures and then recalled them after various delays that were filled with instructions and, in two cases, reading a passage. Recall on a first test showed no change with retention interval. With retention interval held constant, however, the number of pictures recalled varied directly with the number of prior tests subjects had been given. This finding points up the critical nature of retrieval factors in producing hypermnesia.     

Source attributions and false memories: a test of the demand characteristics account

When lists of related words are presented to subjects, they sometimes recall or recognize nonpresented words related to those lists (critical lures). In fact, subjects sometimes claim to remember which of two speakers said the critical lures. We examined whether this finding could be accounted for by demand characteristics. If subjects’ willingness to make source attributions to critical lures reflects experimental demand, one would predict that subjects should be willing to change and should have little confidence in these attributions. Subjects made more attributions, were less likely to change their attributions, and were more confident in their attributions for critical lures than for unrelated distractors. Subjects had even more confidence in the attributions that they made for words that had actually been presented, and they were even less likely to change these attributions. These findings suggest that false memories are quite compelling but that they are also subtly different from true memories.     

Causal attributions for unemployment in Barbados

The importance of various explanations for unemployment in their country was rated by 468 predominantly young people from the Caribbean island of Barbados. The twenty explanations provided, which were taken from other studies, showed a clear structure. The six factors that emerged from them were lack of effort on the part of the unemployed, lack of ability, failure of trade unions, effects of government policy, regional and world-wide changes, and poor industrial management. Endorsement of these explanations was related to sex, age, and education, but was not related very clearly to employment status.     

Barbadian adolescents' views of the "ideal" family

An instrument examining the perceptions of "ideal" family functioning was administered to 536 adolescents aged 12 to 18 yr. in Barbados. Analysis indicated fairly extensive differences between the views of male and female students, somewhat fewer differences in age and type of school attended, and very few differences associated with household composition and religious affiliation.     

Exhibitionists: sexual preferences for exposing

An assessment of the sexual preferences of exhibitionists and matched non-offenders, revealed greater arousal to scenes of exposing among the offenders but the actual degree of deviant preferences was not marked. Closer analyses of the individual response profiles, using various criteria for deviance, indicated that only a small proportion of exhibitionists displayed deviant arousal. We take these results, along with the findings from previous research, to deny the primacy of sexual motivation in exhibiting behavior. We also consider these results to indicate that there is little value in determining the sexual preferences of exhibitionists when planning treatment or estimating their risk to re-offend.     

The Bias of Crowds: How Implicit Bias Bridges Personal and Systemic Prejudice

As public awareness of implicit bias has grown in recent years, studies have raised important new questions about the nature of implicit bias effects. First, implicit biases are widespread and robust on average, yet are unstable across a few weeks. Second, young children display implicit biases indistinguishable from those of adults, which suggests to many that implicit biases are learned early. Yet, if implicit biases are unstable over weeks, how can they be stable for decades? Third, meta-analyses suggest that individual differences in implicit bias are associated weakly, although significantly, with individual differences in behavioral outcomes. Yet, studies of aggregate levels of implicit bias (i.e., countries, states, counties) are strongly associated with aggregate levels of disparities and discrimination. These puzzles are difficult to reconcile with traditional views, which treat implicit bias as an early-learned attitude that drives discrimination among individuals who are high in bias. We propose an alternative view of implicit bias, rooted in concept accessibility. Concept accessibility can, in principle, vary both chronically and situationally. The empirical evidence, however, suggests that most of the systematic variance in implicit bias is situational. Akin to the “wisdom of crowds” effect, implicit bias may emerge as the aggregate effect of individual fluctuations in concept accessibility that are ephemeral and context-dependent. This bias of crowds theory treats implicit bias tests as measures of situations more than persons. We show how the theory can resolve the puzzles posed and generate new insights into how and why implicit bias propagates inequalities.     

Getting ahead of yourself: Parafoveal word expectancy modulates the N400 during sentence reading

An important question in the reading literature regards the nature of the semantic information readers can extract from the parafovea (i.e., the next word in a sentence). Recent eye-tracking findings have found a semantic parafoveal preview benefit under many circumstances, and findings from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) also suggest that readers can at least detect semantic anomalies parafoveally (Barber, Van der Meij, & Kutas, Psychophysiology, 50(1), 48–59, 2013). We use ERPs to ask whether fine-grained aspects of semantic expectancy can affect the N400 elicited by a word appearing in the parafovea. In an RSVP-with-flankers paradigm, sentences were presented word by word, flanked 2° bilaterally by the previous and upcoming words. Stimuli consisted of high constraint sentences that were identical up to the target word, which could be expected, unexpected but plausible, or anomalous, as well as low constraint sentences that were always completed with the most expected ending. Findings revealed an N400 effect to the target word when it appeared in the parafovea, which was graded with respect to the target’s expectancy and congruency within the sentence context. Furthermore, when targets appeared at central fixation, this graded congruency effect was mitigated, suggesting that the semantic information gleaned from parafoveal vision functionally changes the semantic processing of those words when foveated.