The effect of apparent movement on mental rotation

Eleven subjects were timed as they judged whether a small bar perpendicular to one side of a clockhand would point left or right if the hand was pointing upward (i.e., at the "12 o'clock" position). The clockhand was shown in two successive orientations 30 degrees apart, so that it was perceived to jump from one to the other in either a clockwise or a counterclockwise direction. Reaction times were consistent with the interpretation that the subjects "mentally rotated" the clockhand from its perceived orientation back to the upright before making their decisions. The direction of the jump influenced perceived orientation but did not influence either the direction or rate of mental rotation itself.     

Predicting cognitive recovery from closed head-injury in children and adolescents

Longitudinal data from 84 head-injured children and adolescents, who were tested at three points in the first year postinjury, were analyzed to determine the best combination of demographic, injury-related, and behavioral factors predicting cognitive performance. Dependent variables were language, memory, visuomotor, and speeded performance factor scores obtained through confirmatory factor analyses of an extensive test battery. Multiple regression analyses indicated that injury severity and the existence of previous psychological, physical, or cognitive disorders were primary for predicting acute (1 month post-hospital discharge) performance for older subjects. For younger subjects, however, parental marital status was the most important correlate of acute cognitive performance. Those residing in homes with both parents fared better than children in one-parent families. At 6 months and 1 year postinjury, the older subjects who performed most poorly initially remained the most impaired. For younger children, acute cognitive standing was also an important predictor of later performance, but parental marital status remained a crucial influence on their longer-term recovery of cognitive skills.     

Implementation of global memory models with software that does symbolic computation

A number of software tools are available that do symbolic computation that can facilitate the theoretical analysis of a mathematical model. We made use of one these tools, Mathematica (Wolfram, 1988), to implement the global familiarity memory models of Gillund and Shiffrin (1984) and Murdock (1982, 1983). We describe our implementation, and illustrate the flexibility and efficiency of use that these tools allow.     

The effects of a plastic-film covering on vibrotactile pattern perception with the Optacon

Three experiments were conducted to determine whether the perception of vibrotactile patterns presented to the fingertip on the Optacon (a reading machine for blind persons) would be affected by covering the array with a plastic membrane. Occasionally in psychophysical and physiological studies that involve the Optacon, the array is covered with a plastic film to minimize electrical transients during electrophysiological recording and to maintain cleanliness. In the three studies described here, observers performed a spatial acuity task, identified patterns of a previously learned set, and judged the loudness of vibrotactile noise patterns by means of absolute magnitude estimation, on both the covered and the uncovered-array. Performance in the spatial acuity and pattern identification tasks was not affected by the presence of the protective film. The rate of growth of perceived intensity was also the same with and without the plastic film, although there was a slight increase in vibrotactile detection threshold with the film.     

A critical evaluation of the semantic-episodic distinction

Tulving (1983, 1984) has recently claimed that a wide range of evidence supports the distinction between episodic and semantic memory systems. He has provided a list of features to describe the differences between the two systems and a set of experimental results to demonstrate the distinction. In this article, we present opposing evidence that invalidates many of the distinguishing features and contradicts interpretations of the supporting experiments. In addition, we argue that the question of whether there are two separate memory systems cannot be answered without a specific theory about the differences between the systems.     

Memory connections between thematically similar episodes

Recent theories about the representation of thematic information in memory propose that two episodes that share a theme are connected together through a thematic structure. We investigated the use of such cross-episode connections in comprehension and memory in six experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 used a priming technique; it was found that verification time for a test sentence from one story was speeded by an immediately preceding test sentence from a thematically similar story but only when subjects were given instructions to rate the similarities of the stories. In the remaining experiments, a single test sentence was presented immediately after a story was read, with timing controlled by presenting the story one word at a time. Response time for a test sentence from a previously read story was facilitated if the immediately preceding story was thematically similar, but only if the previously read story was extensively prestudied. We conclude that, during reading of an episode, thematic information may be encoded so as to lead to activation of similar episodes and formation of connections in memory between episodes, but such encoding is not automatic and depends on subjects' strategies and task difficulty.     

A role for hemispheric asymmetry in human behavioral variability

A model is presented in which functional lateral specialization and selective hemisphere priming combine to provide a mechanism for behavioral variability. The model is tested and supported by two experiments in which lateral attentional priming produces significant reductions in between-subject and within-subject variability. These findings help us to understand the source of behavioral variability, broaden our knowledge of the gross structures and functions of the brain, provide information about the manipulation of perceived control, and offer a technique for increasing statistical power in a wide variety of research settings.     

A Computational Model of Linguistic Humor in Puns

Humor plays an essential role in human interactions. Precisely what makes something funny, however, remains elusive. While research on natural language understanding has made significant advancements in recent years, there has been little direct integration of humor research with computational models of language understanding. In this paper, we propose two information‐theoretic measures—ambiguity and distinctiveness—derived from a simple model of sentence processing. We test these measures on a set of puns and regular sentences and show that they correlate significantly with human judgments of funniness. Moreover, within a set of puns, the distinctiveness measure distinguishes exceptionally funny puns from mediocre ones. Our work is the first, to our knowledge, to integrate a computational model of general language understanding and humor theory to quantitatively predict humor at a fine‐grained level. We present it as an example of a framework for applying models of language processing to understand higher level linguistic and cognitive phenomena.     

Visions of the Future: The Analyst's Expectations and their Impact on the Analytic Process

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -