The influence of personal and family factors on achievement needs and concerns of African-American and Euro-American college women

The relation of personal and family factors to three types of achievement was examined. A sample of 172 African-American and 105 Euro-American women completed four instruments assessing gender role attitudes, daydream achievement, daydream affiliation, n Ach and n Aff, and a demographic profile. Multivariate and univariate analyses of variance showed that African-American more than Euro-American women described themselves as masculine and androgynous and reported more traditional achievement-related daydream activity. Racial differences were also observed for family factors' contributions to gender role attitudes. However, personal variables contributed to gender role attitudes for both groups. Gender role attitudes were also differentially associated with n Ach, daydream achievement, and daydream affiliation. The results are interpreted as support for the continued need to consider structural and cultural influences when investigating women and achievement.     

Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

Event order versus syntactic structure in recall of adverbial complex sentences

Two experiments using recall of sentences examined two contrasting principles of clause ordering in a type of complex sentences: the main-clause-first (syntactic) principle and the event-order (or temporal-causal order) prir ciple. In Experiment 1, these two principles were studied in complex sentences with a main clause and a subordinate adverbial clause-e.g., When she heard the thunder, she stopped playing Frisbee. In sentences of this type the subordinate clause typically describes a temporally or causally antecedent event, while the main clause describes a subsequent event in the temporal-causal sequence. These two principles make opposite predictions on what is the psychologically simpler or preferred order of the two clauses in this type of complex sentence. Results of Experiment 1 showed an overall preference in memory for main-clause-first order. In Experiment 2, complex sentences with a main clause and a subordinate clause not temporally or causally related were also used in a sentence recall task. Similar results were obtained. The implication of these findings for the determinants of linguistic structures was discussed.     

Mathematica: A flexible design environment for neural networks

Several neural networks were developed inMathematica in order to explore the role of “spiky” neurons in neural network memory simulations. UsingMathematica for this task confirmed its value as a powerful tool for neural network development: It exhibited distinct advantages over other environments in programming ease, flexibility of data structures, and the graphical assessment of network performance.     

Individual Differences in the Pursuit of Self-Uniqueness Through Consumption

In this paper, we report an original study of the relationships between self-attributed need for uniqueness and several consumer dispositions. The results indicate that the self-attributed need for uniqueness is related to consumers' desires for scarce, innovative, and customized products and to consumers' preferences for unusual shopping venues, but not to consumers' susceptibilities to normative influence. Moreover, we find that these relationships are mediated by a latent variable reflecting individual differences in the tendency to pursue uniqueness through consumption. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed along with directions for future research.     

Need probability affects retention: A direct demonstration

Recent memory theory has emphasized the concept ofneed probability—that is, the probability that a given piece of learned information will be tested at some point in the future. It has been proposed that, in real-world situations, need probability declines over time and that the memory-loss rate is calibrated to match the progressive reduction in need probability (J. R. Anderson & Schooler, 1991). The present experiments were designed to examine the influence of the slope of the need-probability curve on the slope of the retention curve. On each of several trials, subjects memorized a list of digits, then retained the digits in memory for 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 sec. Some trials ended with a recall test; other trials ended with the message, “no test.” In Experiment 1, the likelihood of encountering a memory test (i.e., the need probability) was made to either increase or decrease as the retention interval increased; in Experiment 2, need probability either was flat (invariant across retention intervals) or decreased as the retention interval increased. The results indicated that the shape of the need-probability curve influenced the slope of the retention curve (Experiment 1) and that the effect became larger as the experimental session progressed (Experiment 2). The findings support the notion that memory adapts to need probabilities and that the rate of forgetting is influenced by the slope of the need-probability curve. In addition, all of the forgetting curves approximated a power function, suggesting that need probability influences the slope but not the form of forgetting.     

Cerebral Anesthetization for Localization of Speech: The Contribution of W. James Gardner

In 1949, the neurologist Juhn Wada reported the first use of a new procedure for determining the localization of speech and language in neurological patients: examination of the effects on speech and language after injecting a barbiturate, sodium amytal, into the internal carotid artery of each hemisphere in succession. By the 1960s, Wada'sIntracarotid Amobarbital Procedure,orIAP,had become the method of choice for identifying the speech-dominant side in one kind of neurological patient, persons with epilepsy who are candidates for surgical resection, and it remains so today. In 1941, however, an American neurosurgeon, W. James Gardner, reported his use of a different anesthetization procedure for speech localization in neurological patients. Instead of injecting sodium amytal through the blood supply, as in the IAP, Gardner injected procaine hydrochloride directly into cortical tissue. In this paper, we provide a brief biography of Gardner. We then discuss his method of cortical anesthetization, the theoretical and empirical background guiding his use of this method and his choice of patients, and, finally, the fate of Gardner's method within the scientific community.     

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.     

The Imaginary Audience, Self-Consciousness, and Public Individuation in Adolescence

ABSTRACT In this study, we examined the construct of the imaginary audience (Elkind & Bowen, 1979), presumably a precipitant of adolescent egocentrism, as it relates to public individuation and self-consciousness. We hypothesized that the imaginary audience inhibits public individuation and represents a critical form of public self-consciousness. We also argued that the imaginary audience is a normal aspect of early adolescent development that diminishes in the context of secure parental relationships by late adolescence but remains salient if these relationships are insecure. These hypotheses were examined in a cross-sectional study of 850 adolescents in the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 12th grades. Support was generally found for the hypothesized relations. The validity and limitations of the imaginary audience and public individuation constructs are discussed, along with more general theoretical issues concerning adolescent self-consciousness.