The professionalisation of counselling in education and its legal implications

The questions posed in this paper concern the relationship between the counsellors' claim to be professional and the acceptance of this claim - and its implications - by the courts who act within the terms of existing legal codes. In addition, the paper seeks to clarify the importance of legal recognition in the process of professional legitimation, and examines the position of counsellors in educational institutions (especially secondary schools) in terms of their current legal status and their acceptance as professional counsellors.     

Can imagery be distinguished from other forms of internal representation? Evidence from studies of information retrieval times

This paper provides support for the notion that images, once formed, are a distinct form of internal representation, processed differently than other forms of internal representation. In two experiments, subjects decided as quickly as possible whether or not named animals had given properties. When imagery was not used, people verified properties more quickly in accordance with how strongly associated the property was with the animal in question. When images of the whole animal were consulted, in contrast, subjects were faster in accordance with increasing size of the property, and not with increasing association strength. However, if subjects imaged only the local region where a property ought to be found, and did not consult an image of the whole animal, the size of a property no longer influenced verification time. These results and their implications for the debate over imagery vs. propositional representation were discussed.     

Cross-modality matches suggest anticipated stage fright a multiplicative power function of audience size and status

Subjects adjusted the sound pressure level of a 1,000-Hz tone or the luminance of a 10° target on a translucent screen to match their anticipated subjective tension in performing before audiences represented by 1–16 color slides of old or young males or females. Consistent with a new theory of social impact, “tension” was a multiplicative power function of the number texponent ≅ .6) of people in the audience and their ages, with older t37-year-old) audiences generating 2–3 times the tension of younger Iteen-age) audiences. Male audiences elicited 50%-40% more tension than females.     

Target position and practice in the identification of letters in varying contexts: A word superiority effect

A forced-choice detection paradigm controlling for postperceptual inference was used to investigate letter identification in three-position displays. Letters from a predesignated set of four targets appeared singly, in strings of noise characters, in unpronounceable nonsense strings, and in words. Subjects knew which context would occur, but did not know which of the three display positions would contain the target. Correct detection data were collected at constant exposure duration over five testing sessions. Overall identification accuracy was higher in words than in all other contexts, the first word superiority effect to be found with targets specified in advance since Reicher’s (1969). This effect remained constant over sessions. An interaction between context type and target position showed enhanced accuracy for initial and terminal letters in words, but depressed accuracy at initial and terminal positions in other contexts. This was interpreted to mean that prior knowledge of context is used to alter the dynamics of perceptual analysis.     

On the relation between visual surround and motion aftereffect velocity

Two experiments examined the effect of changes in the visual surround upon the velocity of motion aftereffects. Experiment I showed that introduction or reintroduction of a patterned surround midway through the test period was sufficient to produce an increase in apparent velocity. However, a greater increase was observed when a patterned surround instead of a dark homogeneous surround had been used during the induction period. Experiment II demonstrated that luminance change was also sufficient to produce an increase in apparent velocity, although the extent of the increase was not as great as that produced through the use of the patterned surround in Experiment I. These results indicate that a change in stimulus surround is sufficient to produce an increase in the velocity of a motion aftereffect and that the extent of the increase is dependent upon the characteristics of both the induction and test surrounds.     

Rated preference and complexity for natural and urban visual material

In order (1) to study the relationship between complexity and preference for slides of the physical environment and (2) to test the hypothesis that the content of slides (in particular, whether nature or urban) will influence preference, independent of the rated complexity, 88 Ss were asked to rate 56 slides, both for preference and for complexity. Based on dimensional analyses, a nature and an urban dimension were identified. Three major results were obtained: (1) Nature scenes were greatly preferred to urban scenes (p < .001). (2) Complexity predicted preference within the nature domain (r = .69) and within the urban domain (r = .78). (3) Complexity did not account for the preference for nature over urban slides; the greatly preferred nature slides were, in fact, judged on the average less complex than the urban slides. The possibility is raised that the domain-specific character of the preference/complexity relationship found in this study may be general; that is, it may not be a special property of environmentally generated arrays.     

A HULLIAN CONSTANT AS AN INDEX OF INTELLIGENCE: TWO EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATIONS

Following Clark Hull, it is widely considered that the asymptote of the learning curve represents motivational factors, but that rate of approach to asymptote ('i') represents associational factors. The suggestion that i may be a measure of intelligence was tested empirically in two studies. An initial exploratory study yielded a positive correlation between i and IQ. A more rigorous replication did not. The results are discussed briefly.