Achievement and adjustment correlates of the matching familiar figures test

To help clarify the relationship between the Matching Familiar Figures (MFF) Test and measures of school achievement and adjustment, 450 children from kindergarten, second, and fifth grades were tested and achievement scores and teacher's ratings of classroom and personal adjustment were obtained. Regardless of grades, MFF latency in most instances did not predict achievement or adjustment. At the kindergarten level the correlations between MFF errors and both achievement and adjustment were significant for most subscales but at second grade correlations were lower and generally nonsignificant except for a few adjustment items. At the fifth grade level the correlations were moderately high but when IQ was partialled out the correlations with achievement and school adjustment dropped to near zero; however, partialling out IQ did not affect the moderate correlations between errors and personal adjustment. The errors score evidencedmore important relationships than the latency scores. The relationship between the MFF and ratings of social and emotional adjustment was consistently higher than the correlations between the MFF and achievement. These results suggest that MFF errors are personalogically relevant and that MFF performance is generally more related to adjustment than achievement.     

Developmental changes in mental rotation

Subjects from Grades 3, 4, 6, and college judged whether pairs of stimuli were identical or mirror-image reversals. One stimulus of a pair was presented upright; the other was rotated 0 to 150° from the standard. The pairs were either alphanumeric symbols or unfamiliar, letter-like characters of the type found on the PMA Spatial Ability Test. Response latencies were measured. The primary results were that (a) the speed of mental rotation increased with development, (b) unfamiliar characters were rotated more slowly than alphanumeric characters, by approximately the same amount at each grade, and (c) unfamiliar characters were encoded and compared more slowly than alphanumeric symbols, by an amount that declined with development. The results are discussed in terms of the component processes that underlie developmental change and individual variation in mental rotation skill.     

The emergence of functional play in infants: Evidence for a major cognitive transition

Sixty-four infants, eight boys and eight girls at each of four ages, $\text{9}\text{1}\text{2}\text{, 11}\text{1}\text{2}\text{, 13}\text{1}\text{2}\text{,}\text{and}\text{15}\text{1}\text{2}$ months, were observed during a 15-minute free play session. Three types of play (stereotypical, relational, and functional) and the number of appropriate uses for specific realistic toys were recorded. Stereotypical play (87% of total active play at $\text{9}\text{1}\text{2}$ months) gave way to relational (35% at $\text{13}\text{1}\text{2}$ months) and functional play (52% at $\text{15}\text{1}\text{2}$ months) as the dominant activity. Both functional play and the number of different appropriate uses of toys were rare at $\text{9}\text{1}\text{2}$ months, appeared reliably at $\text{11}\text{1}\text{2}$ months and increased lineraly through $\text{15}\text{1}\text{2}$ months. A change in the quality of play from indiscriminate mouthing, waving, banging, and fingering of objects to the matching of appropriate uses for a large array of toys indicates that the child's manipulations become more object specific and functional over this 6-month age span. Among possible explanations for the linear increase in the frequency and diversity of appropriate toy uses is the suggestion that an important cognitive change occurs toward the end of the first year of life. A case study is presented to illustrate the application of the play procedure for both assessment and treatment.     

Dimensional,similarity, and configurai classification of integral and separable stimuli

Subjects classified sets of two-dimensional stimuli into two or three groups in any way they wished. For integral stimuli, classification was based on numerical balance and the similarity structure. For separable stimuli, classification was based on the dimensional structure and the configurai properties of the stimulus set. These results replicate and extend those of Handel and Imai (1972). In addition, they suggest that no closed set of stimulus concepts is possible.     

RECOGNISING CITY SCENES: A TEST OF MILGRAM'S FORMULA

Milgram et al. (1972) proposed the formula R = f(C X D) for the recognition of city scenes where R = Recognition, C = Centrality to the population flow and D = architectural or social distinctiveness. In this paper a slight modification to this formula was suggested. The centrality concept was replaced by the more adequate one of familiarity and an empirical test of the proposition was carried out. Fifty-four scenes of urban Adelaide, South Australia were chosen using the two techniques of fixed distance sampling along major roads and equivalent representation sampling from the entire urban area. High School students (N = 41) and University Students (N = 31) were shown colour slides and ratings were obtained for recognition and distinctiveness. Familiarity was assessed using frequency of travel patterns. Multiple regression analyses showed that frequency of encounter was the only significant predictor variable in the younger High School sample, but distinctiveness and frequency were both significant for the University sample. A possible explanation for this difference in terms of car usage is outlined and some critical comments on the distinctiveness concept are presented.     

Research activities of doctoral school psychologists

A survey was sent to doctoral school psychologists to determine their research productivity and topical interests. Approximately two thirds of 147 respondents indicated doing some research during 1974–1975. Studies dealing with topics of assessment and program evaluation were most prevalent. Only about one in five studies was actually published and most of these were in nonprestigious periodicals. Academic school psychologists were more likely to do research and publish than were applied school psychologists. Academic and applied psychologists did not differ in terms of numbers of unpublished written or oral research reports. The correspondence of these results with prior data on school psychology research was noted and suggestions to increase the circulation of research findings are presented.     

A left-ear disadvantage for the presentation of irrelevant sound: manipulations of task requirements and changing state

Three experiments attempted to clarify the effect of altering the spatial presentation of irrelevant auditory information. Previous research using serial recall tasks demonstrated a left-ear disadvantage for the presentation of irrelevant sounds (). Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effects of manipulating the location of irrelevant sound on either a mental arithmetic task () or a missing-item task (; Experiment 4). Experiment 3 altered the amount of change in the irrelevant stream to assess how this affected the level of interference elicited. Two prerequisites appear necessary to produce the left-ear disadvantage; the presence of ordered structural changes in the irrelevant sound and the requirement for serial order processing of the attended information. The existence of a left-ear disadvantage highlights the role of the right hemisphere in the obligatory processing of auditory information.     

The Logic of Quantum Measurements in terms of Conditional Events

This paper shows that the non-Boolean logic of quantum measurementsis more naturally represented by a relatively new 4-operationsystem of Boolean fractions—conditional events—thanby the standard representation using Hilbert Space. After therequirements of quantum mechanics and the properties of conditionalevent algebra are introduced, the quantum concepts of orthogonality,completeness, simultaneous verifiability, logical operations,and deductions are expressed in terms of conditional eventsthereby demonstrating the adequacy and efficacy of this formulation.Since conditional event algebra is nearly Boolean and consistsmerely of ordered pairs of standard events or propositions,quantum events and the so-called "superpositions" of statesneed not be mysterious, and are here fully explicated. Conditionalevent algebra nicely explains these non-standard "superpositions"of quantum states as conjunctions or disjunctions of conditionalevents, Boolean fractions, but does not address the so-called"entanglement phenomena" of quantum mechanics, which remainphysically mysterious. Nevertheless, separating the latter phenomenafrom superposition issues adds clarity to the interpretationof quantum entanglement, the phenomenon of influence propagatedat faster than light speeds. With such treacherous possibilitiespresent in all quantum situations, an observer has every reasonto be completely explicit about the environmental–instrumentalconfiguration, the conditions present when attempting quantummeasurements. Conditional event algebra allows such explicationwithout the physical and algebraic remoteness of Hilbert space.     

Vulnerable Populations in Research: The Case of the Seriously Ill

This paper advances a new criterion of a vulnerable population in research. According to this criterion, there are consent-based and fairness-based reasons for calling a group vulnerable. The criterion is then applied to the case of people with serious illnesses. It is argued that people with serious illnesses meet this criterion for reasons related to consent. Seriously ill people have a susceptibility to “enticing offers” that hold out the prospect of removing or alleviating illness, and this susceptibility reduces their ability to safeguard their own interests. This explains the inclusion of people with serious illnesses in the Belmont Report’s list of populations needing special protections, and supports the claim that vulnerability is the rule, rather than the exception, in biomedical research.