Assessment of retrieval strategy in incidental, intentional, and inclusion tests with word-fragment cues

The purpose of this study was to assess retrieval strategy in incidental, intentional, and inclusion tests with word-fragment cues following a levels-of-processing manipulation at study. The results of Exp. 1 showed small levels-of-processing effects in incidental tests, and most subjects reported involuntary rather than voluntary retrieval of study-list words. In an intentional test, although levels of processing had a much greater effect, quite a few subjects also reported involuntary rather than voluntary retrieval of study-list words, and these subjects showed a smaller effect of levels of processing than subjects reporting voluntary retrieval. These results suggest that subjects given instructions for both voluntary and involuntary retrieval of study-list words in an inclusion test might not in fact attempt voluntary retrieval at all, but simply adopt an involuntary retrieval strategy. The results of Exp. 2 provided evidence to support this suggestion. The general implication is that where test contamination refers to subjects' failure to use retrieval strategies in accordance with test instructions, inclusion tests can be contaminated, as well as incidental or intentional tests, and that it is always necessary to obtain converging evidence about the actual strategies subjects use.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

Personality Factors and Inhibited Career Development: Testing the Unique Contribution of Shyness

This study evaluated the hypothesis that shyness is uniquely associated with delayed development of personal resources for dealing with career tasks during the college years. In addition to shyness, the set of relevant personality factors included academic self-esteem and dysphoria. Canonical correlation and semipartial analysis were used to assess the mutual and unique variance associated with these three personality factors and a set of career development variables pertinent to college students in late adolescence. Results revealed that shyness was uniquely related with vocational self-concept crystallization and aspects of vocational maturity (e.g., attitudes toward planning), but unrelated with indexes of self and environmental exploration. Academic self-esteem was only related to vocational self-concept, while dysphoria evidenced no unique association with any career variables. Implications of the expected and unexpected findings are discussed.     

Acquisition of blood, injury, and needle fears and phobias

The origins of fear and phobia of blood, injury, and injections were investigated in a sample of 128 fearful university students. Based on Mutilation Questionnaire scores, subjects were designated as common fear, high fear, or phobic. Ss reports of their onset experiences obtained from structured interviews were categorized into one or more acquisition pathways of conditioning, vicarious observation, and information. Of the 73% of Ss who recalled one or more onset experiences, 76% reported conditioning-like events as the primary pathway with the majority reporting fear-related UCSs. Vicarious experiences were reported as primary by 20% and 3% reported information as being primary in their fear onset. Severity of fear was unrelated to the pathway by which it was acquired, to whether the onset was recalled, and if recalled, whether it was due to a single or to multiple traumatic events. Results are discussed in terms of methodological problems of memory issues and means by which data are collected.     

Book Reviews

G rünbaum , A dolf . Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis
H ollis , J ames . The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife
B ertoia , J udi . Drawings from a Dying Child: Insights into Death from a Jungian Perspective
H olt , D avid . The Psychology of Carl Jung: Essays in Application and Deconstruction     

A DEVELOPMENTAL DEFICIT IN LOCALIZING OBJECTS FROM VISION

Abstract— We describe a college student, A. H., with a developmental deficit in determining the location of objects from vision. The deficit is selective in that (a) localization from auditory or tactile information is intact, (b) A H reports the identity of mislocalized objects accurately, (c) visual localization errors preserve certain parameters of the target location, and (d) visual localization is severely impaired under certain stimulus conditions, but nearly intact under other conditions. These results bear on the representation and processing of location information in the visual system, and also have implications for understanding developmental dyslexia.     

Reply to William R. Ferrell’s paper “A model for realism of confidence judgments: Implications for underconfidence in sensory discrimination”

Ferrell’s decision-variable partition model and our subjective distance model belong to the same family of Thurstonial models. The subjective distance model is limited to sensory discrimination with the method of constant stimuli and rooted in such notions as discriminal dispersion and sense distance. Ferrell’s model is intended to be wider in scope and to apply to both cognitive and sensory tasks. Both models need supplementary assumptions to predict calibration phenomena. The point of departure for us is the fact that the model predicts under-confidence under “guessing” and the empirical finding that people are about 100% correct when they report “absolutely certain.” Ferrell makes assumptions about cutoffs on the decision variable. The respondent is assumed to adjust or not adjust cutoffs according to “cues to difficulty.” We disagree with Ferrell’s claim that the hard-easy effect is explained by the respondent’s failure to adjust cutoffs sufficiently when there is a change in level of difficulty, and argue that this amounts to little more than a translation of the hard-easy effect into the lingua of Ferrell’s decision-variable partition model. Our argument is that the hard-easy effect is a consequence of the post hoc division of items according to solution probability. In addition, error variance may contribute to regression effects that enlarge the hard-easy effect. Finally, in contrast to Ferrell’s position, we regard inference (cognitive uncertainty) and discrimination (sensory uncertainty) as different psychological processes. An understanding of calibration in these two areas requires separate models.