Age-related increases in the effects of automatic semantic activation.

Automatic semantic activation was assessed in a version of the flanker task, in which nominally irrelevant words were presented above and below a target word. The category membership of the flanking word was consistent, inconsistent, or neutral with respect to the target word. Older adults showed greater inhibition and equivalent facilitation in the time taken to classify the target words than did younger adults in 2 of 3 experiments, in contrast to previous findings. The present results are generally consistent with 3 dominant perspectives in cognitive aging: the complexity hypothesis, environmental support, and the inhibition-deficit view. Manipulation of the overall magnitude of the flanker effect produced results most consistent with the inhibition-deficit view that older adults are less able to inhibit automatic processes than are younger adults. Some problems with the inhibition-deficit view are also discussed.     

Effects of adult age on structural and operational capacities in working memory

Eight experiments were conducted in which young adults and older adults were asked to report the latest value of 1 of several continuously changing numeric or spatial variables. Accuracy of reporting the current value of the target variable was lower with increases in the number of potentially relevant variables and with increases in the number of required processing operations. Young and older adults exhibited similar effects of the number of potentially relevant variables (hypothesized to be sensitive to the structural capacity of working memory) and of the number of required processing operations (hypothesized to be sensitive to the operational capacity of working memory), but older adults were generally less accurate than young adults.     

Instructional planning: information collected by school psychologists vs. information considered useful by teachers

A limited national sample of 49 school psychologists and 30 regular education teachers provided information on assessment for the purpose of instructional planning. School psychologists listed the types of information they most often collected for this purpose and teachers listed the types of information considered most useful for this purpose. While some indications of agreement were found between school psychologists and teachers, there were also several inconsistencies in the views of the two groups regarding assessment procedures for instructional planning. The findings are discussed in light of empirical evidence on the contribution of various types of assessment data to instructional planning.     

Perceived effort in sniffing: The effects

Previous research has shown that perceived odor strength does not vary with flow rate of an odorant vapor entering the naris when that variation is produced by subject-controlled changes in sniff pressure, but that it does vary with flow rate when the variation is produced by experimenter-controlled changes in the resistance of the olfactometric system. We have suggested an odor-constancy model in which invariance of perceived odor strength is linked to perceived effort of sniffing, and have hypothesized that changed resistance will have its effect because there is no corresponding change in perceived effort when sniff pressure is held constant. In two studies, subjects made magnitude estimations of the perceived effort of sniffing; sniff pressure was controlled by having the subject match his sniff, displayed on a storage oscilloscope face, to a pattern specifying its required shape, duration, and level. In Experiment 1, resistance was fixed while sniff pressure varied; perceived effort grew as the .8 power of the required sniff pressure. In Experiment 2, sniff pressure and resistance were varied in a factorial design; perceived effort grew as the .8 power of pressure at fixed resistance, but remained unchanged when resistance varied at fixed pressure. This outcome provides indirect support for the odor-constancy model, since it shows that perceived effort covaries with flow rate under the condition in which constancy is found but does not change under the condition in which constancy fails.     

Teacher Beliefs,Classroom Interaction and Personal Causation1

The study reports relationships between teachers' belief systems (Harvey), a teacher-pupil interaction measure of classroom influence, pupils' perception of the dimate of the dassroom, and pupils' academic achievement. Results demonstrate that more complex teachers encourage more pupil influence, and are perceived as having a more origin climate. In classrooms of high pupil influence and perceived origin climate, the pupils have higher academic achievement. These results are discussed in terms of the theory of personal causation and are cited as evidence for the value of the study of action sequences as related to verbal-utterances of the actors.     

Phonemic behavior of aphasic patients with posterior cerebral lesions

The investigation analyzed the phonemic paraphasic errors of 10 asphasic patients with posterior cerebral lesions. The results indicated that paraphasic speech is characterized by complex confusions, often occurring at the ends of words and often involving phonemic transpositions. Many of the unusual and unexpected phonemic errors appeared to be due to simultaneous semantic and phonologic confusions.