Recognition memory for pictures as a function of poststimulus interval: an empirical clarification of existing literature

Shaffer and Shiffrin (1972) found no effect of the duration of a blank poststimulus interval on recognition memory for visual scenes. The majority of subsequent studies, however, have found a positive relationship between interval duration and recognition accuracy. The present experiments were conducted to clarify these contradictory outcomes. Experiment 1 determined that Shaffer and Shiffrin's results are replicable with the method that they used in which stimulus durations and poststimulus-interval durations vary randomly within the study list. Experiments 2-3 showed that this random intermixing of durations is the critical factor that results in poststimulus interval having no effect. The results were interpreted in terms of a voluntary rehearsal process that is abandoned when there is uncertainty regarding the time of onset and offset of the stimuli.     

A critical evaluation of some commonly-employed methods for the assessment of type a coronary-prone behaviour

Type A coronary-prone behaviour has been repeatedly associated with an increased incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD) amongst middle-aged men and women. This association appears to be independent of other standard CHD risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure and elevated serum cholesterol levels. This paper presents normative and correlational data for a number of commonly-employed self-report measures of Type A behaviour and the structured interview. These data replicate U.S. findings that self-report measures tend to correlate only moderately with the Structured-Interview method of assessment of Type A behaviour. The implications of these data for researchers attempting to assess Type A behaviour, especially with limited resources, are discussed.     

Mouse killing in rats induced by lesions of the medial hypothalamus or medial accumbens: short-term preoperative exposure to a mouse does not suppress the killing

Rats were either exposed or not exposed to a mouse in their living cage for a 48-hr period. At the end of this time a bilateral lesion was made in the medial accumbens region or in the medial hypothalamus. When tested 2 days postoperatively, the killing frequency among rats that had been exposed to mice preoperatively was not significantly lower than that of rats that were not preoperatively exposed. The ineffectiveness of preoperative experience in suppressing the mouse killing induced by medial accumbens and medial hypothalamic lesions is similar to that found previously with dorsal-median raphe lesions and olfactory bulb lesions and is in contrast to the ease with which preoperative experience prevents mouse killing induced by septal lesions and serotonergic lesions induced by 5,7-dihydroxytryptamine.     

Can attention give a left-ear advantage for verbal stimuli?

Three independent groups of 8 subjects listened monaurally to a randomized list of 50 common and 50 rare words and responded ‘yes’ to rare words. Responses were analyzed for correct identifications of rare words. A 50:50 group heard an equal number of words in right and left ears and gave a small but non-significant right-ear superiority. A 66:34 group heard nearly twice as many words in the right ear as the left and gave a significant right-ear superiority. A 34:66 group heard nearly twice as many words in the left ear as the right and gave a significant left-ear superiority. Responses were also analyzed according to signal-detection theory. Implications are discussed for theories of ear advantages.     

Reconstruction of preverbal experiences

Only a few analysts (Deutsch, 1947, 1952; Braat?y, 1954) have systematically tried to investigate how nonverbal behavior may be derived from events and experiences from the preverbal phase of development. Their approaches to the analysis of such behavior differ. Extracts of an analysis are used to illustrate basic technical and theoretical questions with regard to the possibility of making use of nonverbal material to reconstruct preverbal experiences. It is inferred that the analyst's visual observations of the patient's nonverbal behavior may be a cue to significant events and trauma from the preverbal period. Besides, the specific visual imagery of the patient that, in this case, emerged just after the appearance of nonverbal behavior, may be a valuable source of data for analytic reconstruction.     

Factor structure of the Menstrual Symptom Questionnaire: relationship to oral contraceptives, neuroticism and life stress

The Menstrual Symptom Questionnaire was administered to initial and cross-validation samples of college-age women. Factor analyses performed on the data from each sample failed to support Dalton's distinction between spasmodic and congestive forms of primary dysmenorrhea. Instead, a more complicated factor structure evolved, closely resembling Webster's findings, with factors representing menstrual pain, pre-menstrual negative affect, pre-menstrual water retention, pre-menstrual pain, menstrual backache and menstrual gastrointestinal symptoms. Oral contraceptive use was negatively related to menstrual pain and backache. Neuroticism scores were positively related to all six factors, and negative life changes to four of these factors, suggesting a role for psychogenic factors in both pre-menstrual and menstrual symptomatology.     

Disrupted retrieval in directed forgetting: a link with posthypnotic amnesia

Certain reliable findings from research on directed forgetting seem difficult to accommodate in terms of the theoretical processes, such as selective rehearsal or storage differentiation, that have been put forward to account for directed-forgetting phenomena. Some kind of "missing mechanism" appears to be involved. In order to circumvent the methodological constraints that have limited the conclusions investigators could draw from past experiments, a new paradigm is introduced herein that includes a mixture of intentional and incidental learning. With this paradigm, a midlist instruction to forget the first half of a list was found to reduce later recall of the items learned incidentally as well as those learned intentionally. This result suggests that a cue to forget can lead to a disruption of retrieval processes as well as to the alteration of encoding processes postulated in prior theories. The results also provide a link between intentional forgetting and the literature on posthypnotic amnesia, in which disrupted retrieval has been implicated. With each of these procedures, the information that can be remembered is typically recalled out of order and often with limited recollection for when the information had been presented. It therefore was concluded here that retrieval inhibition plays a significant role in nonhypnotic as well as in hypnotic instances of directed forgetting. The usefulness of retrieval inhibition as a mechanism for memory updating was also discussed.