Primary versus secondary rehearsal in imagined voices: Differential effects on recognition

Subjects were asked to rehearse word trigrams in a particular prefamiliarized male or female voice for 5, 10, or 15 sec. In Experiment 1, recognition performance improved with the amount of primary (maintenance) rehearsal only if the speaker's voice at test matched the rehearsal voice, but recognition performance improved with the amount of secondary (elaborative) rehearsal regardless of the sex of the speaker at test. With a visual testing procedure in Experiments 2 and 3, the amount of primary rehearsal given to a trigram had no effect on recognition performance unless the original voice context was reinstated mentally at test. These results suggest that: (a) Secondary rehearsal builds up semantic associations, whereas primary rehearsal serves to associate items with their physical characteristics at presentation. (b) There is an important memory search component in recognition as well as in recall. (c) Imaginal operations can yield a product in memory that is similar to that left by perceptual operations.     

Pyramid Power in Career Development

Stewart and Nejedlo discuss the use of the Career Development Pyramid as a model for career development and as a practical aid in career counseling. The model graphically depicts the synergistic relations of career choice factors, life-style, self-concept, and the specific job. The authors discuss the relationship between the quadrihedral model and current career development theories. They suggest applied uses of the pyramid and provide a working plan for copy and use by career development counselors.     

Psychopathy and structure of primary mental abilities

The Comprehensive Ability Battery (CAB) was used to assess 18 primary mental abilities in 53 white, male prison inmates for whom highly reliable ratings of psychopathy were available. None of the correlations between ratings of psychopathy and scores on the CAB tests was significant, and the overall pattern or structure of abilities was the same for inmates with low and high ratings of psychopathy. The possibility is raised that the personality characteristics of psychopaths make them appear to be brighter and more creative than they actually are. Compared with norms for male high school students, the inmates as a group generally performed well, falling near the 50th percentile on 11 of the tests. The inmates performed significantly better than the normative sample on tests of verbal ability, esthetic judgment, aiming, and representational drawing, and significantly worse on tests of ideational fluency, spontaneous flexibility, and word fluency.This research was supported by Grant MT-4511 from the Medical Research Council of Canada.     

A comparison of Canadian and Israeli separation and divorce

A nonrandom sample of 86 cases of Israel separation and divorce cases is compared with a Canadian sample of 369 having this experience. Impacts of sex-role changes, jobs and careers, children and sexuality are compared in these two national cases which exhibit many similarities and many differences. Sex-role conflicts were more frequent in Israel as were violence in separation and divorce in the Israeli sample. Adultery, though problematic in both cases, was frequently cited as a cause of divorce. Social-structural restraints and freedoms in each case are discussed as well as historical-cultural differences that help explain differing expectations and outcomes in both Israel and Canada.     

Susceptibility of a stop consonant to adaptation on a speech-nonspeech continuum: Further evidence against feature detectors in speech perception

The present experiment uses the perceptual adaptation paradigm to establish the validity of a previous test of the feature detector model of speech perception. In the present study, a synthetic stimulus series varied from a CV syllable, [ba], to a nonspeech buzz. When the endpoint tokens were employed alternatively as adaptors, the category boundary was shifted relative to unadapted identification in each adaptor condition. This result suggests that a prior test which used a vowel as the speech endpoint was legitimate because a stop consonant, an exemplary speech sound, was also susceptible to perceptual adaptation in a speech-nonspeech context. Feature detector models predict, incorrectly, that this outcome is impossible. Therefore, this finding may be taken to undermine the interpretation of adaptation as fatigue in a set of detectors tuned to detect the distinctive features of linguistic analysis.     

Saltation through the blind spot

At least three localization illusions can be produced by varying the time relations between two stimuli. Two of these, phi motion and Békésy’s illusion, have been induced in areas lacking receptors. To learn if this also occurred with the third illusion, sensory saltation, people reported their observations when Geldard’s visual rabbit was induced by stimulating points around the optic disk. The rabbit crossed the blind spot as well as other portions of the eyes, and the illusory point was often localized within the region of the blind spot. All three illusions can be localized in an area devoid of receptors.     

An animal model of the hyperactive-child syndrome suitable for the study of the effects of food additives

This report describes the use of an animal model for testing the relationship between the effects of ingesting food additives and hyperactivity. Telomian × beagle hybrid dogs were chosen as subjects because this breed has been observed to exhibit behavior seen as analogous to the hyperactivity of children. Two studies were conducted by adding or deleting butylated hydroxyanisole and Food, Drug, and Cosmetic red dye number 40 to the diet of each dog. A test of sitting was performed to measure the level of activity. While a relationship was not observed between the ingestion of the additive and the level of activity, several issues pertaining to the use of the animal model became apparent. These issues and the use of animals for future research in this area are discussed.