Exactly how manyp values is a picture worth? A commentary on Loftus’s plot-plus-error-bar approach

Loftus (1993b) has recently argued that hypothesis testing is largely irrelevant and should be replaced with a “plot-plus-error-bar” (PPE) presentation of the data. We agree that such figures can be useful. However, they do not preclude standard hypothesis testing procedures, and they should be used to supplement rather than to supplant the latter. The insufficiency of PPEs is most apparent in the case of mixed designs and factorial within-subject designs. In such cases, there is no single value that is appropriate to represent the standard error.     

Classifying ℵo-Categorical Theories II: The Existence of Finitely Axiomatizable Proper Class II Theories

Clark and Krauss [1977] presents a classification of complete, satisfiable and _o-categorical theories in first order languages with finite non-logical vocabularies. In 1988 the first author modified this classification and raised three questions about the distribution of finitely axiomatizable theories. This paper answers two of those questions.     

Book Reviews

Pastoral Psychology -     

Behavioural goals determine inhibitory mechanisms of selective attention

It has been argued that during selection of target objects, irrelevant distractor objects are inhibited (e.g. Tipper, 1985). This article examines whether distractor inhibition is an invariant process that occurs in the same way for each act of selection, or whether it is a flexible process that adjusts to particular behavioural goals. We review previous studies and report new experiments that demonstrate that inhibition is a flexible process. Those internal representations of the distractor that are most associated with the action to be directed toward the target are inhibited. Other properties of the ignored object can remain in an active state and can facilitate subsequent behaviour.     

On the strategic modulation of the time course of facilitation and inhibition of return

In studies of exogenous attentional orienting, response times for targets at previously cued locations are often longer than those for targets at previously uncued locations. This effect is known widely as inhibition of return (IOR). There has been debate as to whether IOR can be observed in discrimination as well as detection tasks. The experiments reported here confirm that IOR can be observed when target discrimination is required and that the cue-target interval at which IOR is observed is often longer in discrimination than in detection tasks. The results also demonstrate that the later emergence of IOR is related to perceptual discrimination rather than to response selection differences between discrimination and detection tasks. More difficult discrimination tasks lengthen the SOA at which IOR emerges. In contrast, increasing task difficulty by adding a distractor to the location opposite the target shortens the SOA at which IOR emerges. Together, the results reveal an adaptive interaction between exogenous and endogenous attentional systems, in which the action of the orienting (exogenous) system is modulated endogenously in accord with task demands.     

Family and Neighborhood Fit or Misfit and the Adaptation of Mexican Americans

In this study, a person-environment fit model was used to understand the independent and combined roles of family and neighborhood characteristics on the adjustment of adults and children in a sample of 750 Mexican American families. Latent class analysis was used to identify six qualitatively distinct family types and three quantitatively distinct neighborhood types using socioeconomic and cultural indicators at each level. The results showed that members of single-parent Mexican American families may be particularly at-risk, members of the lowest-income immigrant families reported fewer adaptation problems if they lived in low-income neighborhoods dominated by immigrants, members of economically successful immigrant families may be more at-risk in integrated middle class neighborhoods than in low-income neighborhoods dominated by immigrants, and members of two-parent immigrant families appear to be rather resilient in most settings despite their low socioeconomic status.