Culture-based perceptions of academic achievement among low-income elementary students

This study examined the influence of culture on students' perceptions of academic success. Students read scenarios depicting hypothetical classmates achieving success through the cultural themes of individualism, competition, communalism, or verve. Students reported their social endorsement for the hypothetical classmates. A 2x4 repeated measures analysis, examining the effects of cultural group and cultural theme on students' endorsement, revealed an interaction between the two variables. African American students were significantly more accepting of communal and vervistic high-achieving peers than European American students. European American students endorsed individualistic and competitive high achievers significantly more than African American students. These and other findings suggest that the value students attach to academic success should not be understood in the absence of cultural considerations.     

Sentence Comprehension Deficits in Alzheimer''s Disease: A Comparison of Off-Line vs. On-Line Sentence Processing

Two studies explored whether sentence comprehension impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are due to deficits in syntactic processing or memory. Study 1 used a picture-pointing sentence comprehension task to measure the final outcome of comprehension in an off-line fashion. It showed the comprehension of 30 patients with AD to be impaired, but suggested that the deficits could not be attributed solely to syntactic impairments. Study 2 investigated the effects of memory on sentence comprehension by comparing off-line (grammaticality judgment) with on-line (cross-modal naming) language processing in 11 AD and 9 control subjects. The results revealed impaired performance in the off-line task but normal performance in the on-line task using the same sentences. Performance on the off-line task correlated with independent measures of verbal working memory. These data are used to argue that sentence comprehension impairments are related to verbal working memory deficits in AD.     

Rules, representations, and the English past tense

The significance of the English past tense in current cognitive science is that it offers a clear contrast between a potentially rule-based system-the procedures for forming the regular past tense-and an unpredictable and idiosyncratic set of irregular forms. This contrast has become a focus for a wide-ranging debate about whether mental computation requires the use of symbols. Highly regular combinatorial phenomena, such as the regular past tense, are prime candidates for rule-based symbolic computation. Earlier research concentrated on the evidence for this during language acquisition, looking at how children learned the English regular and irregular verb systems. Over the last five years attention has shifted towards the properties of the adult system, and we review here some recent research into the neural correlates of the two types of procedure. The evidence suggests that there are divergences in the neural systems underlying the generation and perception of regular and irregular forms. Regular inflected forms seem to involve primarily combinatorial processes, while irregular forms appear to have a hybrid status, sharing their semantic properties with the regular forms but diverging in the phonological domain, where their form representations are stored as complete units. This indicates that the regular and irregular past tenses may not, after all, provide a clean contrast in the types of mental computation they implicate.     

Cultural contributions to constructing locus-of-control attributions

Locus of control attribution patterns have been demonstrated to predict a variety of behavioral and adaptational characteristics in a number of societies. As a consequence, questions concerning the comparability of those attributions across cultures have been of interest to social and personality theorists as well as to their more action-oriented colleagues. In the present study, the processes used by Indian college students to form those attributions have been studied and compared with those used by a similar sample in the United States. A structure-factor approach was used, because it allowed for a comparison of attribution patterns within and between cultures as well as the drawing of inferences about locus-of-control attributions that are theoretically and practically important. Results supported the utility of such an approach, identified culturally syntonic patterns in both samples, and also identified cross-cultural similarities and differences in locus-of-control attributions.     

Insulin, exercise, and dietary effects upon behavioral thermoregulation in albino rats

The objectives of this exploratory research were to assess the effects of insulin preparations (Humulin-regular and NPH) on operant behavior reinforced by schedules of microwave radiation in a cold environment and to measure changes in this thermoregulatory behavior as a function of exercise and food deprivation. Eight albino rats were conditioned to regulate their thermal environment with 6-sec. exposures of microwave (MW) radiation (SAR = 0.34 Watts/kg/(mW/cm2) under FR-1 and FR-10 schedules. Regular-insulin and NPH-insulin sessions were administered alternately with saline-control sessions for 8-hr. durations. Exercise in an activity wheel and 48 hr. of food deprivation (diet) were additional independent variables used to alter thermoregulation. Three randomized-block analysis of variance designs with repeated measures showed that insulin preparations resulted in a suppression of operant responding for heat, yet food deprivation increased rates of microwave responding. These data are interpreted in terms of functional relationships between ambient temperature changes, core body temperature, blood glucose fluctuations, and operant behavior.     

On marching to two different drummers: perceptual aspects of the difficulties

People have remarkable difficulty generating two responses that must follow different temporal sequences, unless the temporal patterns are simply related (e.g., periods in 2:1, 3:1 relation). For example, it is hard to tap to two conflicting rhythms presented concurrently (i.e., a polyrhythm) using the right and left hands (Klapp, 1979), or to tap while articulating a conflicting speech utterance (Klapp, 1981). The present experiments indicate that difficulties in processing conflicting rhythms occur even when people must (a) merely monitor the stimuli and indicate the termination of one rhythmic sequence or (b) tap with a single hand. Responding to polyrhythms is thus difficult even without multiple limb coordination. Furthermore, the difficulty of two-handed tapping to polyrhythms that involve two different tones was found to decrease as the pitch difference between the tones was decreased. This result indicates that the difficulty of rhythmic coordination can be perceptually manipulated in a striking fashion. Polyrhythmic performance thus provides an excellent opportunity for examining possible interactions of perceptual and motor organizations.