Impulsivity and perception: individual differences in the processing of the local and global dimensions of stimuli

There appears to be an association between a "global" mode of perceptual processing and a cluster of personality traits, one of which is impulsivity. The goal of the present study was to clarify this relationship. Subjects differing in impulsivity (as measured by a self-report inventory) performed speeded cardsorting tasks. They sorted stimuli consisting of large letters made up of smaller letters. Highly impulsive subjects had no more difficulty than other subjects in ignoring the large, "global," letters when they tried to attend to the smaller, "local," letters of which they were composed, nor were they more vulnerable than other subjects to Stroop-like response interference produced by the global letters. High impulsives did have particular difficulty when the task required that they integrate the information provided by the local and global letters. This finding can be explained in terms of individual differences in the value placed on speed relative to accuracy in information processing.     

Induction of depressive affect after prolonged exposure to a mildly depressed individual

Scores on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were periodically obtained from the roommates of college students who exhibited a persistent mild depression over a 3-month period. For comparative purposes, BDI scores were also obtained from roommates of individuals who were transiently depressed and from subjects with nondepressed roommates. In comparison with control subjects, the roommates of persistently depressed persons displayed a progressive increase in BDI score over the course of the study.     

Contributions of elicitation to measures of self-control

Pigeons' not pecking or pecking constituted choice between a delayed, large reinforcer and an immediate, small reinforcer (self-control) and at other times between a delayed reinforcer and no reinforcer (omission). Both a tone and a keylight were tested as choice signals, and the delayed reinforcer was either response independent or response dependent. Pigeons pecked during the choice signals on over 95% of the trials in the self-control procedure, and pecked during the choice signals on over 75% of the trials in the omission procedure. Consistent pecking was observed with either the tone or the keylight as a choice signal, with the exception that a tone paired with a response-independent delayed reinforcer did not maintain pecking in the omission procedure. Pigeons pecked during more choice signals when delayed reinforcers were response dependent than when the delayed reinforcers were response independent. These results indicate that Pavlovian conditioning influences self-control experiments, especially in single-key procedures.     

A survey os school psychologists'' use of behavior modification procedures

A national survey of behavior modification procedures used by school psychologists is reported. Usable questionnaires were received from 148 (49%) of 300 randomly selected members of the 1982 National Association of School Psychologists directory. Each respondent was asked to indicate the type of exposure, use, and inclusion of data collection procedures for each of 18 commonly used behavioral techniques. Conditional probabilities between type of exposure and use found strong relationships between supervision and subsequent use. The implications for the field of school psychology and future directions for training programs are discussed.     

Biomagnetism from the neuropsychiatric viewpoint--principles of recent developments in diagnostic procedure

The following survey is intended to demonstrate and discuss some principle problems of biomagnetism and the application in clinical fields. The development of special technical parameters especially by the SQUID method is initiating new possibilities of research and completing the neurobiologically determinated basis and conditions of neuropsychiatric disorders. The Magnetoencephalography (MEG) will be represent an important role of a new functional diagnostic method.     

Social categorization,visual cues,and social judgements

Recent research on social cognition suggests that lifelike visual and vocal information about a person may strongly mediate the impact of prior social categorical knowledge on social judgements. Other research, however, on the contribution of visual cues to impression formation, suggests that they have relatively little impact. This study sought to resolve these conflicting findings by examining the effect of visual cues on social judgements when subjects possess prior social categorical knowledge varying in salience to the experimental task. Videotaped target interviews were monitored by observers in either sound and vision or sound only, and measures were taken of the targets' perceived personality, their ‘actual’ and ‘predicted’ social performance, and social acceptance by observers. Whilst salience of categorization strongly influenced the quality of judgements, visual cues had little if any effect. However, visual cues strongly influenced subjects' confidence in all three sets of judgements, sound and vision subjects being consistently more confident than their sound only counterparts. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research in both social cognition and visual cues.     

Symbolic comparisons with and without perceptual referents: Is interval information used?

In an attempt to investigate the range effect obtained by Moyer and Bayer (1976), two groups of subjects were taught to associate colors with circles that differed in size by larger or smaller intervals and then participated in a symbolic comparison task, in which they determined which of two simultaneously presented symbols (the first letters of two colors) represented the larger magnitude. A third group of subjects, who merely learned an arbitrary ordering of the colors along the dimension of size, also participated in the symbolic comparison task. Despite the fact that no practice trials were given, there was no effect of interval size in either early or late blocks, and the circle-learning groups did not differ in performance from the group who only learned an arbitrary ordering of colors, even when pairs containing end terms were removed from the analysis. It is concluded that subjects do not use analogue codes in symbolic comparison tasks involving small, repeated sets of arbitrarily defined symbols.     

Parents' teaching strategies with their children: The effects of parental and child status variables

The intent of the study was to examine the effects of parental (mother and father) and child (gender and communicative status) status variables on the teaching strategies used by parents in a paper-folding task. The linguistic and nonverbal strategies of 120 parent-child groupings were analyzed during paper-folding tasks. Parents' strategies were coded according cognitive demand and directiveness. Results indicated that strategies varied as a function of children's communicative status. Parents were less directive and more demanding of nonhandicapped children compared to handicapped children. Parents' strategies seemed to be determined by children's ability to sustain discourse. Results are discussed in terms of Vygotsky's notion of the zone of proximal development.This research was partially supported by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education, Office of Special Education (Grant No. G007902000) to I. Sigel and A. McGillicuddy-DeLisi at Educational Testing Service, Princeton, and from the Biomedical Research Support Grant Program, Division of Research Resources, N.I.H. (Grant No. BRSG 507RR07025-17) to the first two authors. We acknowledge the helpful comments of two anonymous reviewers.