Modality effects and the development of the word length effect in children

Two experiments investigated the development of the word length effect in children aged 4 to 10 years, comparing auditory and visual stimuli. The question addressed was whether word length effects emerged earlier with auditory presentation or visual presentation, or whether they emerged at the same age regardless of presentation modality. Results provided evidence that word length effects emerge earlier with visual than auditory presentation. The implication of our results is that with visual presentation, 4-year-olds engage in some form of verbalization strategy that involves obtaining phonological representations of picture names and mapping them on to articulatory output plans. This strategy is clearly verbal in nature, but is not necessarily characterised as cumulative verbal rehearsal.     

Stress, self-esteem, and suicidal ideation in late adolescents

The relationships among stress, self-esteem, and suicidal ideation in late adolescents were examined in a group of college students. Multiple regression analysis indicated that both stress and self-esteem were significantly related to suicidal ideation; low self-esteem and stressful life events significantly predicted suicidal ideation. The hypothesis that self-esteem would moderate the effects of life stressors on suicidal ideation was supported at the .06 level. A significant minority of the sample indicated having thoughts severe enough to be classified as clinical suicidal ideation. In general, participants who had experienced negative life events in the 6 to 12 months prior to participating in the study had lower self-esteem than those who had similar stresses within the prior six months. However, the opposite was true for clinical suicidal ideators; those who experienced negative life stressors recently had lower self-esteem than those who experienced negative life events six months to a year in the past.     

Exploring the hand test with medically ill children and adolescents

Pediatric psychologists use the tools of assessment to evaluate the psychological functioning of youth with chronic and acute medical illnesses. This study is an exploration of the use of a performance-based measure, the Hand Test (HT; Wagner, 1983), with pediatric medical patients. A sample of medical inpatients (n = 27) and psychiatric outpatients (n = 24) were administered the HT, a self-report measure, and a parent-report behavior rating scale. Results indicate that the psychiatric group scored higher than the medical group on HT Aggression, Withdrawal, and Pathological scores. The Aggression (d = 0.90) and Pathological (d = 0.80) variables were particularly robust in differentiating between groups, but the Crippled variable did not differ between groups. Hierarchical logistic regression demonstrated the incremental validity of the HT over behavior ratings alone in the classification of clinical groups. Analyses indicated that the HT can add important information in the differentiation of medically ill children from those with psychological disturbance.     

Onset but not offset of irrelevant motion disrupts inhibition of return

In seven experiments, subjects were slower to detect targets in cued static objects than in uncued static objects, revealing inhibition of return (IOR). This occurred regardless of the presence or absence of continuous motion of other, task-irrelevant objects in the display. However, if the motion of the irrelevant objects began during the interval between cue and target, the amount of IOR was considerably reduced. Offset of motion during the cue-target interval had no effect. Implications for IOR, object perception, and attentional capture are discussed.     

Nonverbal behavior and the vertical dimension of social relations: a meta-analysis

The vertical dimension of interpersonal relations (relating to dominance, power, and status) was examined in association with nonverbal behaviors that included facial behavior, gaze, interpersonal distance, body movement, touch, vocal behaviors, posed encoding skill, and others. Results were separately summarized for people's beliefs (perceptions) about the relation of verticality to nonverbal behavior and for actual relations between verticality and nonverbal behavior. Beliefs/perceptions were stronger and much more prevalent than were actual verticality effects. Perceived and actual relations were positively correlated across behaviors. Heterogeneity was great, suggesting that verticality is not a psychologically uniform construct in regard to nonverbal behavior. Finally, comparison of the verticality effects to those that have been documented for gender in relation to nonverbal behavior revealed only a limited degree of parallelism.     

Dispersion-weighted kappa: An integrative framework for metric and nominal scale agreement coefficients

The rater agreement literature is complicated by the fact that it must accommodate at east two different properties of rating data: the number of raters (two versus more than two) and the rating scale level (nominal versus metric). While kappa statistics are most widely used for nominal scales, intraclass correlation coefficients have been preferred for metric scales. In this paper, we suggest a dispersion-weighted kappa framework for multiple raters that integrates some important agreement statistics by using familiar dispersion indices as weights for expressing disagreement. These weights are applied to ratings identifying cells in the traditional inter-judge contingency table. Novel agreement statistics can be obtained by applying less familiar indices of dispersion in the same wayThis revised article was published online in August 2005 with the PDF paginated correctly.     

The recall of missing items

In two experiments, we studied the recall of missing items. Short lists of common words were presented once and were followed immediately by a random permutation of all but one of the presented items. The task of the subject was to recall the missing item--that is, the item present in the study set but missing from the probe set. Experiment 1 replicated the high accuracy with five-item lists originally reported by Yntema and Trask (1963) and showed that the latencies were quite short (about 750 msec). Experiment 2 varied list length unpredictably and showed that accuracy was a function of both list length (four, five, or six items) and serial position. Latency was again quite short but was essentially independent of list length and serial position. It was possible to simulate most of the effects with the power set model with no free parameters (i.e., parameters that varied with the experimental manipulations). The results seemed to be more consistent with a direct access model (the power set model of TODAM; Murdock, 1995) than with a simple search or serial-scanning model.     

Teaching pigeons to commit base-rate neglect

Whereas humans display base-rate neglect in a behavioral analogue of the base-rate problem, pigeons have been shown to behave optimally in a comparable task, appropriately weighting base-rate and case-cue information. Previous studies have shown that prior experience may interfere with optimal decisions for human subjects, a result consistent with the position that poor and illogical decisions often follow from the misapplication of learned rules. The present study shows that pigeons will also display base-rate neglect if given extensive pretraining with informative case cues. Two experiments with pigeons, in a matching-to-sample procedure designed to mimic the classic base-rate problem, show that pigeons display base-rate neglect after extensive pretraining with the matching task.     

Linguistic cues enhance the learning of perceptual cues

When language is correlated with regularities in the world, does it enhance the learning of these regularities? This question lies at the core of both notions of linguistic bootstrapping in children and the Whorfian hypothesis. Support for an affirmative answer is provided in an artificial-noun-learning task in which 2-year-old children were taught to distinguish categories of solid and nonsolid things with and without supporting correlated linguistic cues.