When what is said is important: A comparison of expert and attractive sources

Ninety-eight female subjects were presented with a statement made by an attractive or an expert source suggesting that people should sleep less than the usual eight hours. For approximately half of the subjects the source gave a simple statement of opinion, for the other half six separate supporting arguments were also presented. As predicted the manipulation of number of arguments provided had more influence on the effectiveness of the expert than the attractive source. Results were interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that quite different dynamics underly the persuasive power of attractive and expert individuals.     

Triadic decision making in lexical memory

Word and category recognition was investigated in the context of other stimuli, where the semantic distance relationships among the stimuli were derived from multidimensional scaling. On each trial, three horizontal strings of letters were presented. In the word condition, a positive response was required when the three strings formed three words; in the category condition, a positive response was required when the three strings formed words belonging to the same category. The results indicated that: (a) category decisions take about 150-200 msec longer than do word decisions, (b) word decisions are facilitated by a common categorical membership but semantic distances within the category are relatively unimportant, and (c)within-category semantic distances systematically altered response time for the category condition. It was hypothesized that semantic distance relationships may be sensitized for categorical decisions, but that only large semantic distances function effectively for word decisions.     

Voice recognition by matching to sample

Voice recognition was assessed by a matching to sample procedure in 30 right-handed adults with normal hearing. The subject was required to indicate which of three voices speaking a nonsense syllable matched the speaker of a sample vowel. Subjects were able to recognize voices with reasonable accuracy, but there were no significant differences as a function of ears or practice, and performance was not markedly affected by knowledge of results or mode of response. There was a significant difference as a function of the temporal position of the matching voice, with recognition being most accurate when the matching voice was first and least accurate when it was third. Further research is necessary to determine whether voice recognition should be classified as the type of verbal ability associated with the cerebral hemisphere dominant for speech, or whether it is the type of nonverbal auditory ability associated with the nonspeech hemisphere.This research was supported in part by grant MA-1652 from the Medical Research Council of Canada.