Auditory evoked potentials during selective listening to dichotic speech messages

The sensitivity of the scalp-recorded, auditory evoked potential to selective attention was examined while subjects monitored one of two dichotically presented speech passages for content. Evoked potentials were elicited to irrelevant probe stimuli (vowel sounds) embedded in both the right- and the leftear’s message. The amplitude of the evoked potential was larger to probe stimuli embedded in the attended message than to probe stimuli in the unattended message. Recall performance was unaffected by the presence of the probes. The results are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that this evoked potential sensitivity reflects an initial “input selection” stage of attention.     

Detection errors on the word the: evidence for reading units larger than letters.

In four experiments, subjects read 100-word passages and circled instances of the letter t. Subjects missed a disproportionate number of ts in the word the. Evidence was provided against explanations of this effect involving the location and pronunciation of the t in the and against an explanation in terms of the redundancy of the. Rather the high frequency of the appeared to be critical, and it was suggested that high-frequency words are read in terms of units larger than the letter.     

An examination of how one's attitudes toward women are reflected in one's defensiveness and self-esteem

The Berger Self-Esteem Measure, the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, and Spence's (1972) Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS) were used to test 96 undergraduates. Subjects were divided according to sex and median split scores on the personality measures. Analysis of variance revealed a significant main effect for sex and defensiveness and approached significance for the sex × self-esteem effect (p<.10). Males and females were found to respond significantly differently on the AWS scale. Highly defensive males were more discriminating toward women and self-concept appeared to be an influential variable. However, self-esteem alone did not seem to have any significant effects.