Majority and minority influence using the afterimage paradigm: A replication with an unambiguous blue slide

This study re-examines the afterimage paradigm which claims to show that a minority produces a conversion in a task involving afterimage judgements (more private influence than public influence) as opposed to mere compliance produced by a majority. Subsequent failures to replicate this finding have suggested that the changes in the afterimages could be attributed to increased attention due to an ambiguous stimulus coupled with subject suspiciousness. This study attempted to replicate the original experiment but with an unambiguous stimulus in order to remove potential biases. The results showed shifts in afterimages consistent with the increased attention hypothesis for a minority and majority and these were unaffected by the level of suspiciousness reported by the subjects. Additional data shows that no shifts were found in a no-influence control condition showing that shifts were related to exposure to a deviant source and not to response repetition.     

Word length effects on novel words: Evidence from eye movements

The present study investigated the effects of word length on eye movement behavior during initial processing of novel words while reading. Adult skilled readers’ eye movements were monitored as they read novel or known target words in sentence frames with neutral context preceding the target word. Comparable word length effects on all single-fixation measures for novel and known words suggested that both types of words were subject to similar initial encoding strategies. The impact of the absence of an existing lexical entry emerged in multiple first-pass fixation measures in the form of interactions between word length (long and short) and word type (novel and known). Specifically, readers spent significantly more first-pass time refixating long novel targets than short novel targets; however, the first-pass time spent refixating known controls did not differ as a function of length. Implications of these findings for models of eye movement control while reading, as well as for vocabulary acquisition in reading, are discussed.     

Children's judgment and recall of causal connectives: A developmental study of “because,” “so,” and “and”

The present study examined the acceptability judgments and recall performance of children aged 6,9, and 11 years with sentences expressing psychological cause-effect relations. Thirty-two sentences containing because medially, because initially, so, and and were generated from four clause pairs. Both probable and improbable event orders were used. The results indicated that children preferred because to so or and for statements of psychological causality. However, on both tasks, first and third graders frequently failed to attend to the temporal ordering specified by each sentence construction. The younger children also tended to judge all sentences acceptable, suggesting that they were concerned only with the probable association of event pairs, and not with the usual order of the events. Order of mention strategies did not occur in any group, suggesting that they arise only when children cannot make interpretations based on probable order of events. The data also indicated that the recall task is an unreliable index of rules for comprehension and production.This article is based on research conducted by the first author as partial fulfillment of the Ph.D. requirements for the Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin.