Previewing the neighborhood: the role of orthographic neighbors as parafoveal previews in reading

In 2 experiments, a boundary technique was used with parafoveal previews that were identical to a target (e.g., sleet), a word orthographic neighbor (sweet), or an orthographically matched nonword (speet). In Experiment 1, low-frequency words in orthographic pairs were targets, and high-frequency words were previews. In Experiment 2, the roles were reversed. In Experiment 1, neighbor words provided as much preview benefit as identical words and greater benefit than nonwords, whereas in Experiment 2, neighbor words provided no greater preview benefit than nonwords. These results indicate that the frequency of a preview influences the extraction of letter information without setting up appreciable competition between previews and targets. This is consistent with a model of word recognition in which early stages largely depend on excitation of letter information, and competition between lexical candidates becomes important only in later stages.     

The effect of word frequency, word predictability, and font difficulty on the eye movements of young and older readers

Young adult and older readers' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing target words that varied in frequency or predictability. In addition, half of the sentences were printed in a font that was easy to read (Times New Roman) and the other half were printed in a font that was more difficult to read (Old English). Word frequency, word predictability, and font difficulty effects were apparent in the eye movement data of both groups of readers. In the fixation time data, the pattern of results was the same, but the older readers had larger frequency and predictability effects than the younger readers. The older readers skipped words more often than the younger readers (as indicated by their skipping rate on selected target words), but they made more regressions back to the target words and more regressions overall. The E-Z Reader model was used as a platform to evaluate the results, and simulations using the model suggest that lexical processing is slowed in older readers and that, possibly as a result of this, they adopt a more risky reading strategy.     

Religiosity, self-control, and virginity status in college students from the “Bible Belt”: a research note

Using a sample of college students (N = 904) from the "Bible Belt," this study examines the effect of religiosity and self-control on late adolescents' delay in initiating sexual intercourse or oral sex. Findings from logistic regressions provide evidence that for each one unit increase in self-control, the odds of a male remaining a virgin or of delaying oral sex increased by a factor of 1.82 and 2.84, respectively, while for females, the odds of not engaging in oral sex increased by a factor of 1.67. In addition to the effect of self-control, a one unit increase in religiosity results in the odds of a male remaining a virgin by a factor of 3.86 and 3.30, respectively. For females the odds are increased by a factor of 4.13 and 2.60, respectively. Mediation tests also provided evidence that self-control mediated the effects by religiosity on both dependent measures. Thus, both religiosity and self-control independently and additively function as key social control mechanisms that promote late adolescent health.     

Children’s eyewitness memory: A comparison of two interviewing strategies as realized by forensic professionals

A critical issue for developmental psychology is how to obtain accurate and complete eyewitness memory reports from preschoolers without offering suggestions that might result in false allegations. We examined effects of two interviewing strategies (police/verbal interviews and clinician/prop-assisted interviews) on young children’s reports about a medical examination. A total of 58 4-year-olds participated in the study, which conformed to a 2 (Interview Type) × 2 (Number of Interviews) factorial design. Analyses revealed that interviewers spent less time off topic and asked more free recall questions in the police/verbal interviews than in the clinician/prop-assisted interviews. Compared with police/verbal interviews, clinician/prop-assisted interviews resulted in significantly more correct rejections and commission errors in children’s memory reports. However, on a final free recall test, error rates were comparable across conditions. Higher child verbal intelligence predicted memory accuracy in police/verbal interviews, and greater parental attachment anxiety predicted children being asked a higher number of misleading questions. The study provides new insights into interview techniques that promote preschoolers’ accurate eyewitness reports.     

Studying the effects of self-talk on thought content with male adult tennis players

The current study examined the effects of self-talk on thought content during a tennis forehand crosscourt exercise. 16 adult tennis players (M age = 37.3 yr., SD = 8.31) were randomly assigned to either an experimental or a control group. After completing three baseline assessments, the players of the intervention group developed and implemented self-determined instructional cue words throughout three intervention trials. The participants' thought content was divided into three categories, and repeated-measures analyses of variance indicated a significant group by time interaction for execution-related thoughts and outcome-related thoughts, but not for circumstance-related thoughts. Follow-up comparisons showed that the experimental group players' execution-related thoughts increased and outcome-related thoughts decreased significantly, whereas thought content did not change significantly in the control group. The results of this study provided evidence for the effects of self-talk on players' thought content and supported the idea that self-talk could help athletes to focus on task relevant information.     

Written Responses in a Musical Situation as a Function of the Stability of Emotional Behavior

The present study investigated the degree to which learning sets developed during formation of 20 successive concepts. Forty S s were evenly distributed among eight experimental conditions. Conditions compared were rule with attribute identification, conjunctive with disjunctive concepts, and random with ordered arrays of figures. Results showed that learning sets formed with rule identification for both conjunctive and disjunctive concepts, but not with attribute identification. Concepts were easier to learn when using systematic compared to random arrays of figures (of questionable significance), when forming conjunctive rather than disjunctive concepts (not significant), and when using rule identification instead of attribute identification. Procedural differences among studies in this area appear to be major contributors to differences among studies in the results found.     

Symmetry, Compact Closure and Dagger Compactness for Categories of Convex Operational Models

In the categorical approach to the foundations of quantum theory, one begins with a symmetric monoidal category, the objects of which represent physical systems, and the morphisms of which represent physical processes. Usually, this category is taken to be at least compact closed, and more often, dagger compact, enforcing a certain self-duality, whereby preparation processes (roughly, states) are interconvertible with processes of registration (roughly, measurement outcomes). This is in contrast to the more concrete “operational” approach, in which the states and measurement outcomes associated with a physical system are represented in terms of what we here call a convex operational model: a certain dual pair of ordered linear spaces–generally, not isomorphic to one another. On the other hand, state spaces for which there is such an isomorphism, which we term weakly self-dual, play an important role in reconstructions of various quantum-information theoretic protocols, including teleportation and ensemble steering. In this paper, we characterize compact closure of symmetric monoidal categories of convex operational models in two ways: as a statement about the existence of teleportation protocols, and as the principle that every process allowed by that theory can be realized as an instance of a remote evaluation protocol—hence, as a form of classical probabilistic conditioning. In a large class of cases, which includes both the classical and quantum cases, the relevant compact closed categories are degenerate, in the weak sense that every object is its own dual. We characterize the dagger-compactness of such a category (with respect to the natural adjoint) in terms of the existence, for each system, of a symmetric bipartite state, the associated conditioning map of which is an isomorphism.