A psychometric analysis of the Personal Attributes Questionnaire

The psychometric properties of the Personal Attributes Questionnaire were examined in independent samples of male and female high school students, college students, and adults. In each of the six samples a two-factor structure (masculinity/instrumentality and femininity/expressivity) paralleling the empirically derived scales was found. Additional factor analyses of negative masculine and feminine traits were reported. Discriminant analyses revealed highly significant differentiation between the sexes. The reliabilities (Cronbach alpha) of the unit-weighted scales in each sample were also satisfactory.Support for this research was provided by NASA Grant NSG 2065 (Robert L. Helmreich, Principal Investigator) and NSF Grant BNS 78-08911 (Janet T. Spence and Robert L. Helmreich, Principal Investigators). The article was prepared while the second author was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, with support from the Spencer Foundation, NIMH Grant 5T32MH14581-03, and the University of Texas Research Institute.     

Pilot personality and crew coordination: implications for training and selection

The performance of pilots can be construed as a product of skill, attitude, and personality factors. Although a great deal of effort within the aviation community has been focused on ensuring technical expertise, and new efforts highlight attitudes associated with crew coordination, personality factors have been relatively unexplored. Further, it is argued that past failures to find linkages between personality and performance were due to a combination of inadequate statistical modeling, premature performance evaluation, and/or the reliance on data gathered in contrived as opposed to realistic situations. The goal of the research presented in this article is to isolate subgroups of pilots along performance-related personality dimensions and to document limits on the impact of crew coordination training between the groups. Two samples of military pilots were surveyed in the context of training in crew coordination. Three different profiles were identified through cluster analysis of personality scales. These clusters replicated across samples and predicted attitude change following training in crew coordination.     

Don’t make a fetish of faults: a vindication of moral luck

Philosophical Studies - Is it appropriate to blame people unequally if the only difference between them was a matter of luck? Suppose Alice would drive recklessly if she could, Belen drove...     

Ryle on knowing how: Some clarifications and corrections

I argue for an account of know‐how as a capacity for practical judgment—a view I derive from Gilbert Ryle. I begin by offering an interpretation of Ryle and by correcting a number of widespread misconceptions about his views in the current debate. I then identify some problems with Ryle's account and finally present my own view which, I argue, retains Ryle's insights while avoiding his mistakes.     

Modeling the Influence of Language Input Statistics on Children's Speech Production

We trained a computational model (the Chunk-Based Learner; CBL) on a longitudinal corpus of child–caregiver interactions in English to test whether one proposed statistical learning mechanism—backward transitional probability—is able to predict children's speech productions with stable accuracy throughout the first few years of development. We predicted that the model less accurately reconstructs children's speech productions as they grow older because children gradually begin to generate speech using abstracted forms rather than specific “chunks” from their speech environment. To test this idea, we trained the model on both recently encountered and cumulative speech input from a longitudinal child language corpus. We then assessed whether the model could accurately reconstruct children's speech. Controlling for utterance length and the presence of duplicate chunks, we found no evidence that the CBL becomes less accurate in its ability to reconstruct children's speech with age.     

Semantic interference in the picture-word interference task: Is there a pre-lexical,conceptual contribution to the effect?

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Picture naming takes longer in the presence of a semantic-categorically related distractor word compared to an unrelated distractor word. This semantic...