Jury selection in two countries: a psychological perspective

A comparative survey of jury selection practices in Britain and the United States indicates that the two countries differ along a number of dimensions, including the emphasis on the jury selection process in the trial, the amount and type of information available about prospective jurors, and the frequency with which trial lawyers alter the composition of the jury. The probable impact of these differences is analysed by considering the importance of jury composition in determining a jury’s verdict, the effectiveness of lawyers in exercising their challenges, and broader effects of jury selection procedures in the two countries.     

Increased regional cerebral glucose metabolism and semantic memory performance in Alzheimer's disease: A pilot double blind transdermal nicotine positron emission tomography study

Nicotinic receptor dysfunction and impaired semantic memory occur early in Alzheimer's disease patients (AD). Previous research implied that nicotine's ability to enhance alertness, arousal, and cognition in a number of nonclinical populations was a function of its ability to stimulate CNS nicotinic cholinergic receptors. In this study it was hypothesized that transdermal administration of nicotine would increase both regional cerebral glucose metabolism (rCMRglc) and semantic memory (as assessed by verbal fluency). Two mild AD and two elderly controls underwent positron emission tomography scanning during a double blind nicotinic agonist verbal fluency challenge procedure. rCMRglc increases occurred in both AD patients, but not controls. In the two AD patients, verbal fluency scores increased by an average of 17%. One elderly control's verbal fluency increased, and the other decreased. These findings suggest that nicotine's effect on metabolism and verbal fluency is due to its ability to stimulate the cholinergic system.     

A Psychometric Investigation of the Usefulness of the Easi-III Temperament Survey in the Australian General Population

The psychometric properties of Buss and Plomin's EASI-III Temperament Survey were examined for a random sample of 290 respondents from the Australian general population. These data support the use of the emotionality, activity and sociability scales with some minor modifications, but cast doubt on the impulsivity scale. Not only did impulsivity emerge as a multidimensional construct, but its components related to other temperaments in markedly different ways. The preliminary analyses also suggested that the EASI-III could be used to measure other constructs, the most important of which are neuroticism and extraversion. The advantages offered by the EASI-III over currently available instruments are discussed: in particular, the simplicity and clarity of the items and the well-articulated sampling framework for their selection.     

Dichoptic induction of Mccollough-type effects

If left-oblique and right-oblique black/white gratings are presented alternately to one eye, and unpatterned red and green fields are presented alternately to the other, orientation-sensitive chromatic after-effects are induced. With the colour-stimulated eye the hue usually seen on a test grating is complementary to that originally paired with its orientation, with the pattern-stimulated eye the hue is the same as that originally paired.

The experiments reported here show that: (a) the time course of decay of these chromatic after-effects (for each eye) fits approximately the same power law as that found for the normal McCollough effect; (b) analogous chromatic after-effects, opposite in the two eyes, can be dichoptically induced using pairs of stimuli other than gratings, such as dot patterns differing in magnification.

These results suggest that strongly coloured light in one eye can induce a weakly complementary bias in the colour-signalling system of the other eye, at a level peripheral to the site of the McCollough-type adaptation.     

Encoding strategy and sensory and semantic interference

Studies were designed to compare the effects of encoding strategies on two types of interference, sensory and semantic. Paired-associate lists were learned under instructional sets encouraging interactive imagery or repetitious rehearsal. Sensory interference was created by mispairing rhymes and semantic interference was produced by mispairing associatively related words. In control lists word pairs were unrelated. The results indicated that encoding strategy did not influence amounts of sensory and semantic interference. Mispairing rhymes produced the same amount of confusion as mispairing associates whether pairs were encoded through interaction imagery or through repetitious rehearsal. These effects were found with both short and long encoding intervals. The findings are inconsistent with the idea that encoding operations or strategies applied to word pairs completely determine the type of code activated for those pairs. Both sensory and semantic codes appear to be activated under each kind of encoding strategy.     

The language of possibility and probability: Effects of negation on meaning

Modal adjectives (e.g., “possible” and “probable”) have been the subject of much discussion by linguists and logicians. For ordinary speakers, it was found that an important aspect of the meaning of modal adjectives is that they can all be used to qualify the truth of a statement: Subjects sorted modal adjectives according to similarity of meaning and then ordered the same adjectives solely according to their degree of qualification. The sorting data yielded a one-dimensional scaling solution of low stress that correlated highly with the results from the ordering task. Using the same techniques, negation was found to translate a modal adjective down the scale of qualification (e.g., “improbable” is more qualifying than “probable”) so that the order of affirmative adjectives with respect to each other is preserved for the corresponding negated adjectives. Negation in this domain is more analogous to a subtractive, rather than multiplicative, process. Also, affixal negation, as in “improbable” was consistently found to be more qualifying than lexical negation, as in “not probable.     

Grandparents and Stepgrandparents: Challenges in Counseling the Extended-Blended Family

Remarriage of parents may bring new grandparents and stepgrandparents into the lives of children, creating new family structures and needs for adjustment. The extended-blended family may benefit from specific counseling interventions.     

Individual differences in mental animation during mechanical reasoning

In three experiments we tested the effects of spatial visualization ability on performance of a motion-verification task, in which subjects were shown a diagram of a mechanical system and were asked to verify a sentence stating the motion of one of the system components. We propose that this task involves component processes of (1) sentence comprehension, (2) diagram comprehension, (3) text-diagram integration, and (4) mental animation. Subjects with law spatial ability made more errors than did subjects with high spatial ability on this task, and they made more errors on items in which more system components had to be animated to solve the problem. In contrast, the high-spatial subjects were relatively accurate on all trials. These results indicate that spatial visualization is correlated with accuracy on the motion-verification task and suggest that this correlation is primarily due to the mental animation component of the task. Reaction time and eye-fixation data revealed no differences in how the high- and low-spatial subjects decomposed the task. The data of the two groups of subjects were equally consistent with a piecemeal model of mental animation, in which components are animated one by one in order of the causal chain of events in the system.     

FUZZY-TRACE THEORY AND FRAMING EFFECTS IN CHILDREN'S RISKY DECISION MAKING

Traditional theories of cognitive development predict that children progress from intuitive to computational thinking, whereas fuzzy-trace theory makes the opposite prediction To evaluate these alternatives, framing problems were administered to preschoolers, second graders, and fifth graders Consistent with fuzzy-trace theory, results indicated (a) that younger children focused on quantitative differences between outcomes and did not exhibit framing effects (risk avoidance for gains, risk seeking for losses) and (b) that older children assimilated these quantitative differences and displayed framing effects