Concrete Construction Employees: When Does Procedural Fairness Shape Self‐Evaluations?1

According to the Group Value Model, group authorities and procedures communicate symbolic information to people about whether the group values or respects them. Employees for a concrete construction company completed a questionnaire about their work experiences in either English or Spanish. Among employees who identified more strongly with the concrete construction company, the quality of supervisor treatment predicted employees' feelings of respect and personal self-efficacy. Further, for employees who identified with the company, feeling respected by their colleagues mediated the relationship between fair treatment by a single supervisor and self-efficacy. Even when the working context encourages short term and instrumental goals, these results suggest that employees who identify with the company still care about fair treatment because of the self-relevant information it communicates to them.     

The Underlying Architecture of the Creative Worlds of Children: Young Persons from the UK and China Unwittingly Generate More Concepts that Violate Ontological Category Structure Than Do Older Adults During an Exemplar‐Generation Task

Is our cognition the underlying architecture of the recurrent and pan‐cultural imaginative ideas of children and adolescents? Recent cross‐cultural studies show that children and adolescents recall proportionally more creative, counterintuitive concepts than older adults. One outstanding concern is that cultural transmission is also constrained by how concepts emerge into culture. Hence, a broad sample of age demographics in UK and China (10–58 years; N = 90) participated in an exemplar‐generation task where participants assembled statements exemplifying conceptual categories of positive and negative emotion, imagery, humor, and inferential potential. Multiple regression analysis considering counterintuitiveness and age revealed young persons generated significantly more imaginative, counterintuitive ideas than older adults, in both UK and China groups. This cross‐cultural support for an underlying cognitive architecture of human creativity builds on Ward's (1994) research on structured imagination.     

Real-time comprehension processes in agrammatism: A case study

The ability of an agrammatic patient to construct structural syntactic and interpretative representations on-line was tested in two experiments. The first focused on global representations spanning an entire utterance, while the second examined lexical syntactic and semantic constraints on verb-argument relations. An off-line version of the second experiment was also carried out. There were two major findings. First, the patient could construct a semantic, but not syntactic, representation of an utterance. Second, he was much more dependent than normal upon pragmatic information. These results are discussed with respect to current claims about the nature of agrammatic comprehension deficits.     

Spatial updating and training effects in the first year of human infancy

The ability of infants to locate an invisible target after reorientation in their direction of facing was examined in a series of experiments. In a featureless environment, localization of the target site improved between 4 and 8 months. At 8 months it was shown to be dependent on the training procedure. Infants received either instrumental training in which they were trained to anticipate the occurrence of an event at the site, or association training in which one event immediately followed another regardless of their responses. After instrumental training, localization was dependent on visual cues whereas after association training it occurred whether or not visual cues were provided. Contrary to earlier findings, it was concluded that an updating strategy based on proprioceptive information is operative from the second half of the first year.     

Temporal characteristics in apparent movement: Omega movement vs. PHI movement

A vertical line stimulus was presented alternately at two positions on an oscillo scope face, with no interstimulus interval. Observation of this stimulus produced haphazard alternation between a number of movement percepts, which were divided into four categories: phi, omega and partial movement, and no movement. Attention to one category did not increase the proportion of time movement in that category it was reported. Proportion of time reported for each category varied differentially as a function of alternation frequency. Upper and lower displacement amplitude limits were measured as a function of frequency for phi and omega movement. Both limits for omega movement differed from those for phi movement. The results imply that phi and omega movement involve separate processing stages in the visual system.     

ADOLESCENTs' EXPECTATIONS OF FUTURE EVENTS - A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY OF AUSTRALIANS,AMERICANS, AND INDIANS

An important developmental task of adolescents is to consider future possibilities and begin to make choices and plans. In this investigation, samples of 15-year-olds of both sexes from small towns in India, the United States, and Australia were asked to list seven important events they expected in the future, to indicate the approximate time that would elapse before the occurrence of each, and whether each was pleasant or unpleasant. Raters categorized responses for content. The two American samples, twelve years apart, were very similar in their responses. All groups listed predominantly pleasant events. Australian girls showed longer time spans than American girls; and Indian boys, but not girls, produced longer time spans than most of the Australians or Americans. A number of significant differences in the content of responses appeared.     

Tactual picture identification by blind and sighted people: Effects of providing categorical information

Four experiments examined the influence of categorical information and visual experience on the identification of tangible pictures, produced with a raised-line drawing kit. In Experiment 1, prior categorical information aided the accuracy and speed of picture identification. In a second experiment, categorical information helped subjects when given after the examination of each picture, but before any attempt at identification. The benefits of categorical information were also obtained in another group of subjects, when the superordinate categories were named at the start of the experiment. In a third experiment, a multiple-choice picture recognition task was used to eliminate the difficulty of naming from the picture-identification task. The multiple-choice data showed higher accuracy and shorter latencies when compared with identification tasks. A fourth experiment evaluated picture identification in blindfolded sighted, early, and late blind participants. Congenitally blind subjects showed lower performance than did the other groups, despite the availability of prior categorical information. The data were consistent with theories that assume that visual imagery aids tactual perception in naming raised line drawings. It was proposed that part of the difficulty in identification of raised line pictures may derive from problems in locating picture categories or names, and not merely in perception of the patterns.