A case of therapy by proxy?

Consultancy was offered to a worker requesting help, because of some concern he felt as to how best to progress with a single-parent family where a teenage son with a mental handicap wished to move out and establish himself independently. The situation appeared to us to be 'stuck', with parent and son engaged in a mutually distressing cycle of antagonism with both emotional and physical violence. During the consultancy, communication was established with the parent via messages carried by the worker, and significant change was promoted through these interventions. This work was novel, unusually complex and carried implications for theory, practice and ethics.     

Learning with microcomputers: Training primary school children on a problem-solving program

This study investigated the effects of structured training at two informational levels on children's performance on a problem-solving computer program. An informed-training group (strategy training with detailed explanations) performed at a superior level to a blind-training group (strategy training with no explanations) and a control group. This superiority was maintained 3 weeks later on retest. The results are discussed in relation to the processes that mediate and facilitate training.     

The effect of prediction accuracy on choice reaction time

In this study, we examined the effect of prediction accuracy on reaction time (RT). Subjects performed on three blocks of choice RT trials, all of which involved the mapping of four stimuli (red, green, 1, or 0) onto two response keys. The subjects were told that the four stimuli were equally probable and that their task was to respond to each stimulus onset by pressing the correct key. In one block (stimulus-prediction), the subjects predicted, prior to each trial, the precise stimulus that would appear. In a second block (category-prediction), the subjects predicted the category of the stimulus (i.e., color or digit) that would appear. In a third block (no-prediction), the subjects simply responded to each stimulus without making a prior prediction. In the stimulus-prediction block, RT was faster for correct predictions than for incorrect predictions. In addition, RT was faster on trials in which an incorrect prediction involved the correct category than on trials in which it involved the incorrect category: that is, a "half-wrong" prediction was better than an "all-wrong" prediction. In the category-prediction block, RT was faster when the stimulus category was predicted correctly than when it was not. There was little evidence of a response-facilitation contribution to the correct-prediction effect. These results permit inferences concerning the encoding and organization of information in memory.     

Effect of irrelevant information on the processing of relevant information: Facilitation and/or interference? The influence of experimental design

Previous studies have provided conflicting evidence concerning the question of whether irrelevant information can facilitate the processing of relevant information in a choice reaction time task. Results of the present study demonstrated that indications of facilitation and/or interference were dependent on the context in which baseline trials were administered. Three groups of 24 subjects pressed a left-.or right-hand key in response to the onset of an X or 0 that was accompanied by a monaural or binaural tone. The monaural toneprovided an irrelevant directional cue since, oia some trials, it was ipsilateral to the correct response (corresponding trials), while, on other trials, it was contralateral Inoncorrasponding trials). When binaural (baseline) trials were presented in the same block as the monaural trials, data suggested that the directional cue produced both facilitation and interference. However, when baseline trials were presented in one block, and corresponding and noncorresponding trials were mixed together in another block, data suggested an interference effect only. The difference was attributed to differences in the degree of stimulus uncertainty within a block of trials.     

STM capacity for Chinese and English language materials

This paper delineates the theoretical implications of a program of research on short-term memory using Chinese characters as stimuli, and compares the findings with studies of short-term memory that use English language materials. The 14 experiments on which it is principally based, carried out in the People’s Republic of China and in the U.S.A., are reported in detail in Yu et al. (1984), W. Zhanget al. (1984), and G. Zhang and Simon (this issue). One major theoretical product of this research is an experimentally tested model that reconciles the chunking theory of STM capacity with the articulatory loop theory of Baddeley, making good quantitative predictions of capacity compatible with both. Another result, obtained by using homophones as stimuli, is a demonstration that STM is mainly acoustically encoded, but that there are an additional two or three chunks of visually or semantically encoded short-term memory available. Chunks are shown to play the same role in immediate recall and rote learning in both the Chinese language and English language stimuli; and STM capacity, measured in chunks, is essentially the same for materials in both languages.