Conceptualizations of valence and instrumentality: A fourfold model

Within the framework of valence-instrumentality (VI) theory, a fourfold model is developed to predict the contribution which is made by one outcome of an alternative to the valence of that alternative. The proposed model uses four subjective conditional probabilities which are based on the presence and absence of an alternative, and on the occurrence and nonoccurrence of an outcome. Valence is defined as the difference between the attractiveness values of the occurrence of an alternative (or an outcome) and the nonoccurrence of an alternative (or an outcome). Also, differences between subjective probabilities replace instrumentalities. Alternative valence-instrumentality formulations are analyzed in relation to the proposed fourfold model. The proposed model can be understood as a consistent application of Vroom's model (1964, Work and motivation, New York: Wiley), while other models are judged to be relatively deficient. The fourfold model, in combination with a matrix formulation of expectancy concepts, addresses a number of criticisms of VI theory and makes possible a test of the theory within the limits of its own assumptions.     

Meaning in life: Discovered or created?

Against the background claims that a meaningful life is more likely to be the product of creation than discovery and that a meaningful life must involve both subjective satisfaction and an objective moral component, three foundations of a meaningful life are discussed. These include the quality of one's relationships, the integrative power of one's goals and projects, and the role of story or stories. Concerning the role of story, the theological challenge is to choose that story or those stories that place life in a genuinely ultimate context.     

Memory and aging: Implications for theories of memory development during childhood

Research is reviewed suggesting that early school age children and older adults demonstrate a similar pattern of performance deficits (relative to the performance of young adults) on memory tasks, raising the possibility that age-related changes in some common factor might account for both memory development and memory decline. It is argued here that whereas “metamemory” theory of memory development does not provide a viable theory of memory decline, Craik's (F. I. M. Craik & M. Byrd, 1982, in F. I. M. Craik & S. E. Trehub (Eds.), Aging and cognitive processes, New York: Plenum; F. I. M. Craik & E. Simon, 1980, in L. W. Poon, J. L. Fozard, L. S. Cermak, D. Arenberg, & L. W. Thompson (Eds.), New directions in memory and aging, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum) attentional deficit theory of memory decline provides a viable theory of memory development as well. Evidence supporting this position is reviewed, and directions for future research are discussed.     

The effect of associations and expectations on lexical decision making in normals, alcoholics, and alcoholic Korsakoff patients

This study examined whether patients with Korsakoff's disease suffer from increased PI during encoding. The ability of the name of one category, e.g., BIRD, to prime the processing of members of another category, e.g., BODY PARTS, in a lexical decision task was used to assess the amount of PI during encoding. This task required a subject to inhibit the normal associations to BIRD. Young normals (25 years), older normals (48 years), alcoholics (45 years), and alcoholic Korsakoff patients (59 years) performed two lexical decision tasks. In the first experiment, the appearance of the neutral prime XXX 750 msec before the probe signaled that if the probe was a word, there was a 75% chance that it was from a particular category (e.g., BODY PARTS). The prime facilitated reaction time for words from the expected category for all four groups. The prime slowed reaction time for words that were not from the expected category for the young normals but did not influence reaction time for unexpected words for the three older groups. The second experiment was identical to the first except that a category word was used as the prime. The category word used as the prime was unrelated to the category of the words that were likely to follow it. For example, BIRD might be used to signal the likelihood that the word would be from the category, BODY PARTS. Again, young normals were slower to respond to unexpected probe words, but the three older groups were not. Again, the prime facilitated reaction time for expected words for the young normals, older normals, and alcoholics. However, the word prime did not facilitate reaction time for expected words for the alcoholic Korsakoff patients. That the word prime did not facilitate reaction time for the Korsakoff patients was viewed as evidence that they were unable to inhibit its normal associations and were more sensitive to PI from these associations than the other subjects.     

Infants’ sensitivity to familiar size: The effect of memory on spatial perception

Two experiments investigated infants’ sensitivity to familiar size as information for the distances of objects with which they had had only brief experience. Each experiment had two phases: a familiarization phase and a test phase. During the familiarization phase, the infant played with a pair of different-sized objects for 10 min. During the test phase, a pair of objects, identical to those seen in the familiarization phase but now equal in size, were presented to the infant at a fixed distance under monocular or binocular viewing conditions. In the test phase of Experiment 1, 7-month-old infants viewing the objects monocularly showed a significant preference to reach for the object that resembled the smaller object in the familiarization phase. Seven-month-old infants in the binocular viewing condition reached equally to the two test phase objects. These results indicate that, in the monocular condition, the 7-month-olds used knowledge about the objects’ sizes, acquired during the familiarization phase, to perceive distance from the test objects’ visual angles, and that they reached preferentially for the apparently nearer object. The lack of a reaching preference in the binocular condition rules out interpretations of the results not based on the objects’ perceived distances. The results, therefore, indicate that 7-month-old infants can use memory to mediate spatial perception. The implications of this finding for the debate between direct and indirect theories of visual perception are discussed. In the test phase of Experiment 2,5-month-old infants viewing the objects monocularly showed no reaching preference. These infants, therefore, showed no evidence of sensitivity to familiar size as distance information.     

Testing visual short-term memory: Simultaneous versus sequential presentations

Two experiments testing immediate ordered recall are presented; in these experiments, subjects engaged in repetitive speech (“articulatory suppression”) during a visual presentation in order to prevent auditory recoding of the stimuli. In both experiments, a simultaneous presentation produced results that suggested the use of visual short-term memory, whereas a sequential presentation did not. In Experiment 1, visual confusion errors occurred more often than would be expected by chance for a simultaneous presentation but not for a sequential presentation. In Experiment 2, recall from visual short-term memory was expected to suffer more when subjects wrote a prefix than when they spoke a prefix; this effect occurred for a simultaneous presentation but not for a sequential presentation. These results suggest that existence of a visual short term store that retains a simultaneous presentation but not a sequential presentation.