Response competition and target word detection during shadowing in a dichotic listening task

College students (N = 24) served as subjects in a within-subjects study of auditory attention in which four tasks were performed. In the easiest task, a single passage was presented and shadowed while target word detections were indicated by pressing a key. The other three tasks also required target word detection, but a second passage was presented simultaneously. One task had no target words in the unshadowed passage; the other two tasks required a key-pressing response to the target words in both passages, either with one hand or with each hand. We expected performance to decrease as task complexity increased; this was partially confirmed. The task of shadowing and detecting target words is too difficult to be used to test perception or response limitations of attention.     

Some evidence regarding development of cerebral lateralization

Frequencies of significant rs for right- and left-hemisphere scales of Elementary School and Youth forms of Style of Learning and Thinking increase from K through Grade 8 (Ns = 1360) as would be expected if cerebral lateralization begins with acquisition of language and is completed in puberty.     

Stress, Rewards, and Change in the Centrality of Women’s Family and Work Roles: Mastery as a Mediator

Although research suggests that stress and rewards experienced in a social role are associated with changes in the centrality (or personal importance) of that role over time, little attention has been given to the mechanisms that account for this relationship. This study was conducted to examine change in role mastery as a mediator in the relationship between changes in role experiences (stress and rewards) and changes in centrality among 195 women who simultaneously occupied the roles of parent care provider, mother, wife, and employee. Regression analyses indicated that increases in parent care, mother, and employee stress eroded mastery in those roles. In addition, increases in rewards were associated with a bolstered sense of mastery in each of the four roles. Mastery was found to be a mediating mechanism in the relationship between stress/rewards and centrality in one of the four roles examined, the employee role. However, changes in womens perceptions of mastery were unrelated to the extent to which women changed the importance of their three family roles. These findings extend prior research by demonstrating that mastery is a mechanism through which stress and rewards are associated with centrality in the employee role.     

The Creative Industries Entrepreneur: An Analysis of Lived Experience

Expanding our understanding of the lived experience of individuals who use their creativity to realize entrepreneurial opportunity is the primary aim of this paper. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis is used, based on two interviews of one-hour duration, with eight participants. The key contribution of this research is the recognition of the Creative Industries Entrepreneur. A Creative Industries Entrepreneur is an individual who occupies a space between traditional entrepreneurship theory and established creativity models. The main driving force in opportunity formation for a Creative Industries Entrepreneur is their creative impulse. This pushes them to achieve a personhood, which can reconcile intrinsic impulses with external market forces and social imperatives.     

Contrast discrimination in human infants

The ability to detect differences in spatial contrast is crucial to object recognition and identification. This ability is generally examined by measuring the contrast discrimination function. This function represents, for a variety of conditions, the smallest contrast difference required to discriminate otherwise identical patterns. We examined human infants' ability to discriminate patterns on the basis of differences in spatial contrast. The forced-choice preferential looking procedure was used to estimate contrast increment thresholds at a number of background contrasts. The Weber fractions of 6- and 12-week-old infants were about 1 log unit higher than adult values for background contrasts ranging from 0.14 to 0.55. Furthermore, the slopes of infants' discrimination functions were much shallower than those of adults. These age differences in contrast discrimination imply certain changes in the neural mechanisms that underlie contrast encoding. They also aid our understanding of the anomalies observed in early pattern vision.     

Personality and the slope of loudness function

The slope of the loudness function in direct magnitude estimation was studied at two frequencies in two groups of naive subjects. In the first group a limited scale was used and in the second group, an open ended scale. In all conditions the slope of the loudness function was found to be significantly positively correlated with test anxiety scores.     

Social networks as assets and liabilities in recovery from stroke by geriatric patients

Interactions in the social networks of 48 elderly stroke patients were examined as factors influencing outcomes after hospital discharge. Structured interviews assessed the frequency of perceived positive and negative interactions, as well as patients' behavioral independence, time use, personal adjustment, and cognitive functioning. Negative interactions occurred less frequently than positive ones. After controlling for status at hospital discharge, negative and positive interactions differentially explained variance in morale, psychiatric symptoms, and cognitive functioning. Although negative interactions were associated with poorer morale and greater psychiatric symptoms, positive interactions were associated with less mental confusion. Patients' reporting and not reporting negative interactions did not differ significantly on a variety of social and demographic variables previously shown to predict social interactions and well-being. Findings indicate that social interactions may both impede and facilitate rehabilitation for older adults and have implications for both theories of social support and the design of therapeutic interventions.     

Family caregiving to dependent older adults: stress, appraisal, and coping

Articles presented in this 1987 APA symposium adopt a stress, appraisal, and coping framework for conceptualizing the experience of family caregiving. Each article emphasizes 2 themes: (a) caregivers' adaptation to the chronic demands of in-home caregiving and (b) factors that mediate the relationship between caregiving stress and caregiver's adaptation. The articles presented in this symposium illustrate both the utility of this theoretical approach to studying caregiving stress and the difficulty inherent in its use.     

The development of contrast constancy

The mature visual system possesses mechanisms that enable invariant perception of the contrast of an object and its features as the object undergoes changes in distance. This phenomenon, which has been called contrast constancy, obtains at suprathreshold contrasts only. Some models of contrast constancy assume the presence of narrowband spatial-frequency channels. An implication of M.S. Banks, B.R. Stephens, and E.E. Hartmann (1985, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 40, 501-527) is that contrast constancy should not be observed at 6 weeks but may be observed at 12 weeks. We examined this implication by investigating the development of contrast constancy in 6- and 12-week-old infants. Two sine wave gratings, differing in spatial frequency by a factor of 3, were presented side-by-side. The contrast of one grating was varied in order to estimate the contrast at which preference for the two gratings was equal. The equal preference points for 6-week-olds were predictable from their contrast thresholds. The 12-week-olds' equal preference points for low-contrast stimuli were predictable from their contrast thresholds, but those for intermediate and high-contrast stimuli were not. Thus, if one accepts the assumption that equal preference in infants is analogous to apparent contrast matches in adults, these data imply that contrast constancy is observed at 12 weeks but not 6 weeks. The perceptual consequences of this developmental transition are discussed.