CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN ATTENTIONAL PREFERENCE FOR COLOUR OVER FORM1

Huit groupes de sujets, différant par l'instruction et la culture, ont été soumis à un test d'appariement par la couleur ou la forme, (i) Plus le niveau d'instruction s'élève et plus se manifeste une préférence pour la forme, chez les enfants anglais citadins, les Indiens citadins et les Zambiens ruraux, mais non chez les enfants zambiens habitant la brousse lointaine ou la ville. (2) La préférence pour la forme a un rapport moins direct avec l'âge qu'avec l'instruction chez les enfants zambiens ruraux. (3) Les enfants zambiens ruraux et citadins préfèrent plus fréquemment la couleur que les enfants anglais et indiens citadins et moins fréquemment que les enfants zambiens de brousse lointaine de même niveau scolaire. (4) Les étudiants zambiens préfèrent plus fréquemment la forme que les Zambiennes adultes illettrées. (5) Aucune différence entre races n'apparaît chez les sujets d'un jardin d'enfants privilégié.     

Dimensional salience as a function of educational attainment and method of discrimination training

The effects of three methods of selective-attention training with 4-sided forms on the salience of an invagination physical dimension in discrimination judgments with a stimulus domain of 12-sided forms were examined for 6-year-old Ss of low and high educational attainment. The results demonstrated that training procedures involving perceptual demonstration or manipulation increase the invagination dimension salience in the 12-sided stimulus domain more than a verbal training procedure for low educational attainment Ss. Implications for the psychophysical study of relatedness of stimulus domains are discussed.     

The time it takes to imagine1

Stanley and Furedy (1966), using the paired-comparisons technique, reported that under conditions where size constancy held, Emmert’s law failed as distance increased beyond 90 in. Experiment 1, designed to check this report with a shorter-duration induction flash, did not yield 90 in. as the point of failure. However, although complete size constancy for direct images was again obtained, the results did not unambiguously suggest strict proportionality between afterimage size and distance. To allow a less ambiguous assessment of proportionality, Experiment 2 used magnitude-estimation procedures. Distance estimates were completely veridical, but afterimage size varied only linearly, and not proportionally, with apparent distance. It was concluded the Boring (1940) was mistaken in his attempt to reduce size constancy and Emmert’s law to the same principle.     

Preprocessing on the basis of frequency of occurrence

The release from PI methodology was used to test Oldfield's (1966) suggestion that human memory is organized in part on the basis of frequency of occurrence. An observed release from PI identified frequency of occurrence as an encoding category and provided support for the underlying assumptions of Oldfield's model.