Children's temperament in the US and China: similarities and differences

We report the results of research investigating temperamental characteristics of children in the People's Republic of China and the US using a parent-report instrument, the Children's Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ), defining temperament as individual differences in emotional, motoric, and attentional reactivity and self-regulation. Subjects were 624 6- to 7-year-old children, from Shanghai and the north-western region of the US. The 15 CBQ scales were factored for both samples, employing a principal axis factor analysis with an oblique rotation. Our findings indicated considerable similarity of factor structure in the two cultures, obtaining three factors labelled Surgency, Negative Affect, and Attentional Self-Regulation or Effortful Control. Differences across cultures were also found, with Surgency and Effortful Control scores being relatively higher than Negative Affect in the US sample and Negative Affect being relatively higher than Surgency and Effortful Control in the Chinese sample. Gender differences were also found to vary across cultures. Our findings are congruent with a view of underlying cultural similarities in temperamental variability across these cultures, influenced over time by the children's culturally varied experience.     

Context effects in repetition priming are sense effects

This articlereports three experiments that investigate the role ofcontext in repetition priming using a lexical decision task. The experiments show that repetition priming is either eliminated or significantly reduced if a change in context also alters the perceived sense of a nonhomographic target word. If perceived sense is not altered, a change in context is inconsequential. This points to the important role played by perceived sense in repetition priming. An explanation within a sense-specific activation framework is proposed in preference to a modified processing view.     

Displaying proportions and percentages

Pie and bar charts are commonly used to display percentage or proportional data, but professional data analysts have frowned on the use of the pie chart on the grounds that judgements of area are less accurate than judgements of lenth. Thus the bar chart has been favoured. When the amount of data to be communicated is small, some authorities have advocated the use of properly constructed tables, as another option. The series of experiments reported here suggests that there is little to choose between the pie and the bar chart, with the former enjoying a slight advantage if the required judgement is a complicated one, but that both forms of chart are superior to the table. Thus our results do not support the commonly expressed opinion that pie charts are inferior. An analysis of the nature of the task and a review of the psychophysical literature suggest that the traditional prejudice against the pie chart is misguided.     

Redintegration and Response Suppression in Serial Recall: A Dynamic Network Model

This article presents a dynamic network model of redintegration and response suppression. Redintegration is the process that disambiguates partially retrieved memorial information into an overt response, and response suppression renders retrieved items temporarily unavailable for further report. Most models of serial recall assume the presence of both processes, but few explain how they are performed. Exploration of the network revealed that it can predict recency in serial recall of lists of varying lengths, the pattern of the associated transposition, omission, intrusion, and repetition errors, and the temporal dynamics of retrieval. The network thus augments any existing model of serial recall that assumes a distributed vector representation but does not specify the processes underlying redintegration and response suppression.     

Prejudice Toward Immigrants1

In the present study, 4 variables (realistic threats, symbolic threats, intergroup anxiety, and negative stereotypes) were used to predict prejudice toward immigrants from Cuba, Mexico, and Asia in samples of students from states in the United States that are affected by immigration from these areas (Florida, New Mexico, and Hawaii, respectively). All 4 variables were significant (or marginally significant) predictors of attitudes toward these immigrant groups. Evidence is presented that the predictor variables are conceptually and empirically distinct. However, these variables do appear to be tied together by an underlying theme: They all concern threats to the in-group or its members. Some of the implications of the results for intergroup relations are discussed.     

Model Checking Techniqes for the Analysis of Reactive Systems

Model checking is a widely used technique that aids in the designand debugging of reactive systems. This paper gives an overview onthe theory and algorithms used for model checking, with a biastowards automata-theoretic approaches and linear-time temporallogic. We also describe elementary abstraction techniques useful forlarge systems that cannot be directly handled by model checking.     

Dynamics of communication in emergency management

This study investigated the dynamics of communication between members of an emergency management team faced with controlling a hazardous chemical spill. The effects of two sets of factors on communication were investigated; task‐specific factors pertaining to characteristics of the emergency management task that are constant across different emergency situations, and situation‐specific factors pertaining to the unique characteristics of the current situation. The results showed that both these factors were important in determining the pattern of communication between key team members. Verbal exchanges were found both to be correlated with the occurrence of critical events and to follow a 30‐minute temporal cycle. The implications of the results for theories of naturalistic decision making are discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Temporal isolation does not facilitate forward serial recall—or does it?

In numerous recent studies in short-term memory, it has been established that forward serial recall is unaffected by the temporal isolation of to-be-remembered items. These findings contradict the temporal distinctiveness view of memory, which expects items that are temporally isolated from their neighbors to be more distinct and hence remembered better. To date, isolation effects have only been found with tests that do not constrain output order, such as free recall. This article reports two experiments that, for the first time, report a temporal isolation effect with forward serial recall, using a running memory task in which the end of the list is unpredictable. The results suggest that people are able to encode and use temporal information in situations in which positional information is of little value. We conclude that the overall pattern of findings concerning temporal isolation supports models of short-term memory that postulate multidimensional representations of items.