Contents of volume 145

Volume contents

Contents of volume 145     

An own gender bias and the importance of hair in face recognition

There is a large literature on the own race bias, the finding that people are better at recognizing faces of people from their own race. Here an own gender bias is shown: Males are better at identifying male faces than female faces and females are better at identifying female faces than male faces. Encoding a person's hair is shown to account for approximately half of the own gender bias when measured using hit and false alarm rates. Remember/know judgements and confidence measures are taken. Encoding a person's hair is critical for having a "remember" recollective experience. Parallels with the own race bias and implications for eyewitness testimony are discussed.     

Sensory mediation of stimulus-driven attentional capture in multiple-cue displays

Three location-cuing experiments were conducted in order to examine the stimulus-driven control of attentional capture in multiple-cue displays. These displays consisted of one to four simultaneously presented direct location cues. The results indicated that direct location cuing can produce cue effects that are mediated, in part, by nonattentional processing that occurs simultaneously at multiple locations. When single cues were presented in isolation, however, the resulting cue effect appeared to be due to a combination of sensory processing and attentional capture by the cue. This suggests that the faster responses produced by direct cues may be associated with two different components: an attention-related component that can be modulated by goal-driven factors and a nonattentional component that occurs in parallel at multiple direct-cue locations and is minimally affected by goal-driven factors.     

Evading detection on the MMPI-2: does caution produce more realistic patterns of responding?

Studies on MMPI and MMPI-2 malingering indexes often sacrifice generalizability in an attempt to control internal validity. This study improves external validity while still maintaining internal validity by providing graduate student participants with a realistic context for malingering on the MMPI-2 (n=94) and MMPI (n=30). Contextual parameters include a realistic life predicament, psychological knowledge, an incentive, the presence versus absence of a specific diagnosis, and a caution to be realistic. This study found that cautioning participants not to overexaggerate their responses significantly improves their ability to evade detection on the MMPI-2 and MMPI. Standard malingering indexes (Infrequency, F; Back Side, F, Fb; F-Correction, F-K; and Infrequency-Psychopathology, F(p)) were insufficiently sensitive in identifying simulators using common cutoff scores for these cautious simulators.     

Conjoint recognition and phantom recollection

A new methodology for measuring illusory conscious experience of the "presentation" of unstudied material (phantom recollection) is evaluated that extracts measurements directly from recognition responses, rather than indirectly from introspective reports. Application of this methodology in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm (Experiments 1 and 2) and in a more conventional paradigm (Experiment 3) showed that 2 processes (phantom recollection and familiarity) contribute to false recognition of semantically related distractors. Phantom recollection was the larger contributor to false recognition of critical distractors in the DRM paradigm, but surprisingly, it was also the larger contributor to false recognition of other types of distractors. Variability in false recognition was tied to variability in phantom recollection. Experimental control of phantom recollection was achieved with manipulations that were motivated by fuzzy-trace theory's hypothesis that the phenomenon is gist-based.     

How young children spend their time: television and other activities.

Time-use diaries were collected over a 3-year period for 2 cohorts of 2- and 4-year-old children. TV viewing declined with age. Time spent in reading and educational activities increased with age on weekdays but declined on weekends. Time-use patterns were sex-stereotyped, and sex differences increased with age. As individuals' time in educational activities, social interaction, and video games increased, their time watching entertainment TV declined, but time spent playing covaried positively with entertainment TV. Educational TV viewing was not related to time spent in non-TV activities. Maternal education and home environment quality predicted frequent viewing of educational TV programs and infrequent viewing of entertainment TV. The results do not support a simple displacement hypothesis; the relations of TV viewing to other activities depend on the program content, the nature of the competing activity, and the environmental context.     

Production uncertainty as a contextual moderator of employee reactions to job design.

A number of authors in the job design field have proposed production uncertainty, the degree to which a qualified incumbent faces unexpected problems in the course of job performance, as a possible moderator of the effectiveness of job design. However, empirical support for this view is limited and has not been explicitly recognized within mainstream job design theory. This study of production operators in a waste water treatment setting provides further empirical support for production uncertainty as a contextual variable influencing job design outcomes, demonstrating that the relationship between job control and affective outcomes (job satisfaction and intrinsic motivation) varies with the level of production uncertainty.     

Measuring Feeling of Knowing: Comment on Schraw (1995)

Schraw compares two coefficients for the 2×2 contingency tables resulting from many feeling of knowing (FOK) studies: Hamann's coefficient and Goodman and Kruskal's γ. He favours Hamann's coefficient and gives examples where Hamann's coefficient produces what might be considered the more intuitive result. Further scrutiny reveals that these examples are not as convincing as Schraw makes them out to be. Because Hamann's coefficient depends on the row and column marginals, it does not map onto FOK ability as well as Goodman and Kruskal's γ, which is a direct measure of the diagnostic worth of FOK ratings.