The effects of autobiographical elaboration on noun recall

Four experiments demonstrate that autobiographical elaboration is a rich and powerful encoding process. Autobiographical elaboration was induced by using a modified free-association procedure. Subjects were presented stimulus words and were instructed to think of a personal experience that the words reminded them of and to date the remembered experience on a 7-point temporal-category scale (i.e., minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, never). Unexpected free recall of the stimulus words showed a recency effect (Experiments 1, 3, and 4), autobiographical orienting produced better noun recall than either a semantic or a structural orienting task (Experiments 2 and 3), and the recency effect observed in Experiments 1, 3, and 4 appears to have been due to differences in autobiographical elaboration (Experiment 4).     

Issues in the Transition to Teams

The process of retrofit change from traditional work structures to a team structure is described from the viewpoint of employees engaged in the process. Results of extensive interviews and factor analysis of a questionnaire administered to a large group of incipient team members revealed four general factors of concern in this transition to teams. Relationships between these factors and performance improvement over time were found.     

Death education in American medical schools: Tolstoy's challenge to Kübler-Ross

No one has done more to shape contemporary physicians' and nurses' understandings of dying and death than Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. A comparison of her views to those of another era, as delineated by Leo Tolstoy, raises questions concerning Kübler-Ross' five-stage theory and points out inadequacies in current medical education and in the values that shape American culture. According to Kübler-Ross, the dying person angrily asks “Why me?” Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych is more concerned about the implications for cosmic justice than for self-perpetuation, and angrily asks “Why death?” One's sadness is born of depression (sadness over the nearness of one's death), the other's is born of despair (sadness over the apparent meaninglessness of life or of life as one has lived it). Kübler-Ross and Tolstoy also differ in their views of what can be done to “sweeten the pill,” whether “acceptance” is the best way to face death, and whether death ought to be viewed as a barrier to self-fulfillment or a means of self-transcendence.     

Minority recruitment into the genetic counseling profession

In the past, genetic counseling training programs have had an abundance of applicants for the number of slots available. They have, however, had a very limited pool of minority applicants. At the June 1992 meeting of the genetic counseling training programs directors the topic of minority recruitment was explored. The resources and recommendations that resulted from this discussion can be used by other medical training programs.     

When acoustic sequences are not perceptual sequences: The global perception of auditory patterns

Warren, Bashford, and Gardner (1990) found that when sequences consisting of 10 40-msec steady-state vowels were presented in recycled format, minimal changes in order (interchanging the position of two adjacent phonemes) produced easily recognizable differences in verbal organization, even though the vowel durations were well below the threshold for identification of order. The present study was designed to determine if this ability to discriminate between different arrangements of components is limited to speech sounds subject to verbal organization, or if it reflects a more general auditory ability. In the first experiment. 10 40-msec sinusoidal tones were substituted for the vowels; it was found that the easy discrimination of minimal changea in order is not limited to speech sounds. A second experiment substituted 10 40-msec frozen noise segments for the vowels. The succession of noise segments formed a 400-msec frozen noise pattern that cannot be considered as a sequence of individual sounds, as can the succession of vowels or tones. Nevertheless, listeners again could discriminate between patterns differing.only in the order of two adjacent 40-msec segments. These results, together with other evidence, indicate that it is not necessary foracoustic sequences of brief items (such as phonemes and tones) to be processed asperceptual sequences (that is, as a succession of discrete identifiable sounds) for different arrangements to be discriminated. Instead, component acoustic elements form distinctive “temporal compounds,” which permit listeners to distinguish between different arrangements of portions of an acoustic pattern without the need for segmentation into an ordered series of component items. Implications for models dealing with the recognition of speech and music are discussed.     

Allergic disorders and attention deficit disorder in children

It has been suggested that children with attention deficit disorder-hyperactivity (ADDH) are likely to show allergic disorders, and that both ADDH and allergic disorders may share a common biological background. In a large sample of children from the general population we found no association between parent, teacher, and self-reports of ADDH behaviors and a history of allergic disorders (asthma, eczema, rhinitis, and urticaria) at ages 9 or 13 years. Similarly, reports of ADDH behaviors at age 13 years were not related to level of atopic responsiveness by skin test or serum IgE levels. Our findings call into question the hypothesis that there is a relationship between ADDH and allergic disorder.The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Research Unit is supported by the Health Research Council of New Zealand, and involves several departments of the University of Otago. The authors are indebted to the many people whose contributions made this study possible, and in particular the members of the sample and their parents.     

Spectral restoration of speech: Intelligibility is increased by inserting noise in spectral gaps

In order to function effectively as a means of communication, speech must be intelligible under the noisy conditions encountered in everyday life. Two types of perceptual synthesis have been reported that can reduce or cancel the effects of masking by extraneous sounds: Phonemic restoration can enhance intelligibility when segments are replaced or masked by noise, and contralateral induction can prevent mislateralization by effectively restoring speech masked at one ear when it is heard in the other. The present study reports a third type of perceptual synthesis induced by noise: enhancement of intelligibility produced by adding noise to spectral gaps. In most of the experiments, the speech stimuli consisted of two widely separated narrow bands of speech (center frequencies of 370 and 6000 Hz, each band having high-pass and low-pass slopes of 115 dB/octave meeting at the center frequency). These very narrow bands effectively reduced the available information to frequency-limited patterns of amplitude fluctuation lacking information concerning formant structure and frequency transitions. When stochastic noise was introduced into the gap separating the two speech bands, intelligibility increased for “everyday” sentences, for sentences that varied in the transitional probability of keywords, and for monosyllabic word lists. Effects produced by systematically varying noise amplitude and noise bandwidth are reported, and the implications of some of the novel effects observed are discussed.     

An examination of the relationship between visual capture and prism adaptation

The phenomena of prismatically induced “visual capture” and adaptation of the hand were compared. In Experiment 1, it was demonstrated that when the subject’s hand was transported for him by the experimenter (passive movement) immediately preceding the measure of visual capture, the magnitude of the immediate shift in felt limb position (visual capture) was enhanced relative to when the subject moved the hand himself (active movement). In Experiment 2, where the dependent measure was adaptation of the prism-exposed hand, the opposite effect was produced by the active/passive manipulation. It appears, then, that different processes operate to produce visual capture and adaptation. It was speculated that visual capture represents an immediate weighting of visual over proprioceptive input as a result of the greater precision of vision and/or the subject’s tendency to direct his attention more heavily to this modality. In contrast, prism adaptation is probably a recalibration of felt limb position in the direction of vision, induced by the presence of a registered discordance between visual and proprioceptive inputs.