Aging and input processing in dual-task situations

The psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm was used to test whether older participants suffer from input interference in dual-task situations. Young (24 years) and older (57 years) adults gave speeded responses to 2 successively presented stimuli. The results showed increased susceptibility of older participants to input interference. Further experiments revealed that this input interference is related to the salience of the 2nd stimulus and that it is specific to older participants. Our findings indicate that parallel processing at the input stages of dual-task performance requires cognitive control. An age-related decline in the control of input processes should be considered as one source of age effects in dual-task performance.     

The importance of gesture in children's spatial reasoning

On average, men outperform women on mental rotation tasks. Even boys as young as 4 1/2 perform better than girls on simplified spatial transformation tasks. The goal of our study was to explore ways of improving 5-year-olds' performance on a spatial transformation task and to examine the strategies children use to solve this task. We found that boys performed better than girls before training and that both boys and girls improved with training, whether they were given explicit instruction or just practice. Regardless of training condition, the more children gestured about moving the pieces when asked to explain how they solved the spatial transformation task, the better they performed on the task, with boys gesturing about movement significantly more (and performing better) than girls. Gesture thus provides useful information about children's spatial strategies, raising the possibility that gesture training may be particularly effective in improving children's mental rotation skills.     

Loewald's approach to psychoanalytic theory

The author suggests that part of the legacy of Hans Loewald is the nature of his approach to psychoanalytic theory. Loewald carefully considered and selectively utilized the work of theorists from a number of psychoanalytic schools of thought: id psychology, object relations theory, ego psychology, self psychology, and the interpersonal tradition. In addition, he helped pave the way for the current widespread interest in intersubjectivity, and also positioned himself in relation to those who embraced hermeneutics. Through all of this, he maintained a skeptical attitude, embodied in his belief in the complexity of the phenomena to be explored and his commitment to the perspective that psychoanalytic ideas should be open to revision.     

Being a candidate: its impact on analytic process

Despite its crucial importance to psychoanalytic training, the control analysis has received surprisingly little scrutiny by psychoanalytic writers. How the candidate's training influences analytic process--a critical feature of the control analysis--is examined. In keeping with previous contributions, it is found that the candidate's training experience does indeed influence analytic process. It is argued, however, that focusing on the influence of training itself, as some authors have done, moves discussion away from the meanings of training for each candidate and from how these meanings bear on the interplay of transference and countertransference in the control analysis. Detailed case examples illustrate how one candidate's experience of training was drawn into his control analyses in the form of enactments, supporting the conclusion that attention to the particular ways in which training influences each candidate's analytic work is critical to the candidate's psychoanalytic education.     

Working memory in older subjects: Dealing with ongoing and stored information in language comprehension

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the role of aging in working memory (WM), or at least the part involved in language comprehension, e.g., a double function of processing the ongoing information and keeping in memory the product of this processing. Young and older subjects were asked to simultaneously detect incongruities in sentences and keep increasing longer series of words (3, 4, or 5) in memory. The difficulty of incongruity detection was manipulated by variation of the number of intervening words (0, 6, or 12) between two critical words. Incongruity detection was assumed to be linked to the processing of information function of working memory. The concurrent mnemonic load consisted of material previously processed, and was assumed to be linked to the storage function of WM. Results showed that an increment in incongruity-detection difficulty led to a greater decrement in accuracy in older than in young subjects, indicating an impairment in the information-processing function. On the other hand, an increment in concurrent mnemonic load led to a slightly smaller decrement in accuracy in older subjects. Furthermore, fewer words from this mnemonic load were recalled in older subjects. It is suggested that older subjects are impaired in coping with both requirements of the task, and tend to sacrifice the storage of information recently processed to devote their resources to the immediate processing component of the task. These results are discussed in relation to their implications for language comprehension.     

Motivational determinants of reading comprehension: A comparison of French,Caucasian–American,and African–American adolescents

The relationships between adolescents' reading comprehension and their metacognitive knowledge and self-system beliefs were studied in three groups of subjects: French nationals, Caucasian Americans, and African Americans. Subjects were tested on measures of reading comprehension, metacognitive knowledge about reading processes, attributional beliefs, and academic self-concept. Correlation and regression analyses indicated cultural differences in the predictors of reading comprehension among the three groups. For French and Caucasian Americans, reading comprehension scores were related to metacognitive knowledge, academic self-concept, and attributions of success to ability. However, metacognition and motivational beliefs were mostly unrelated to comprehension performance for African Americans. Results are discussed in terms of verification of a model of motivational influences on performance, of cultural and ethnic group differences in beliefs, and the implications for generalizability of research results.     

Effects of alcohol and frustration on experimental graffiti

This study aimed to examine effects between alcohol and frustration in regard to graffiti. Forty-two subjects, 21 men and 21 women were randomly assigned in equal numbers to each of the three experimental groups, namely a Control group, an Alcohol group, and an Alcohol+Frustration group (alcohol dose: 1 ml 100% alcohol/kg body weight). For the purposes of this experiment, a test (AET) was constructed that provided scores of "scrawling-graffiti" (i.e., the amount of scrawling on pictures), "destruction", "aggression", and "sexuality". An elaboration test and a test measuring the "dispositional optimism" were also applied. The primary results indicated that (a) the Alcohol+Frustration group scored significantly higher on scrawling-graffiti compared to the Control group, (b) female subjects performed graffiti-scrawling to a greater extent than male subjects in all three groups, (c) women scored significantly higher on elaboration as compared to men. These results were interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that alcohol intake by itself is unlikely to induce destructive behavior unless accompanied by a "provocative" factor (e.g. frustration) that precipitates the putative expressions of aggressiveness.     

Negative,infinite, and hotter than infinite temperatures

We examine the notions of negative, infinite and hotter than infinite temperatures and show how these unusual concepts gain legitimacy in quantum statistical mechanics. We ask if the existence of an infinite temperature implies the existence of an actual infinity and argue that it does not. Since one can sensibly talk about hotter than infinite temperatures, we ask if one could legitimately speak of other physical quantities, such as length and duration, in analogous terms. That is, could there be longer than infinite lengths or temporal durations? We argue that the answer is surprisingly yes, and we outline the properties of a number system that could be employed to characterize such magnitudes.     

Collecting and analyzing on-line protocols from novice programmers

Methodology for collecting and analyzing on-line protocols from novice programmers is described. On-line protocols are copies of all syntactically correct programs that students have written using an interactive computer system. Since the number of on-line protocols collected is quite large, we have developed a computer program, called the Bug Finder, which can auto-matically identify semantic and pragmatic bugs in subjects’ programs. In this paper, we describe the theory upon which the Bug Finder is built and provide an example of the Bug Finder in operation.