Short-term retention of superimposed and of spatially distinct multiletter visual arrays

On each trial, Ss attempted to retain a series of five visually presented letters while concurrently “shadowing” (repeating aloud) a rapid series of aurally presented letters. If serial-position accuracy is ignored, they were able to store more than only the last letter of a typical series, even though all five letters appeared on the same screen, and that performance was superior to the retention of five auditorily presented letters. Together, these findings suggest that a form of visual storage might have been employed for the retention of visual stimuli and, specifically, one that was relatively immune to erasure as compared to “iconic” storage. In further support of that hypothesis, retention of such visual series as measured by free-recall accuracy was not inferior to that of five letters, each of which was presented on a separate screen.     

Seek and ye shall find: test results are what you hypothesize they are

Expert clinicians were given batteries of psychodiagnostic test results (Rorschach, TAT, Draw-A-Person, Bender-Gestalt, Wechsler) to analyze. For half, a battery came along with a suggestion that the person suffers from Borderline Personality disorder, and for half, that battery was accompanied by a suggestion that he suffers from Paranoid Personality disorder. In Study 1, the suggestion was made indirectly, through a background story that preceded the test results. In Study 2, the suggestion was made directly, by the instructions given. The experts saw in the tests what they hypothesized to be there. In particular, the target diagnoses were rated higher when they were hypothesized than when they were not. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Novelty assessment in the brain and long-term memory encoding

Recent positron emission tomography (PET) studies have identified neuronal components of widespread novelty-assessment networks in the brain. We propose that the efficacy of encoding on-line information into long-term memory depends on the novelty of the information as determined by these networks, and report a test of this “novelty/encoding” hypothesis. Subjects studied a list of words. Half of the words were “familiar” by virtue of their repeated presentation to the subjects before the study of the critical list; the other half were novel, in that they had not previously been encountered in the experiment. The results conformed to the prediction of the novelty/encoding hypothesis: accuracy of explicit (episodic) recognition was higher for novel than for familiar words.     

Faculty work orientations as predictors of work attitudes in the physical and social sciences

This study examines the relationship between university professors' work orientation and attitudes toward their work. Specific and global work orientations are related to extrinsic and intrinsic attitudes toward (1) career attraction, (2) work satisfaction, and (3) commitment to the profession. The major findings of the study are (1) global work orientation is a strong predictor of attitudes toward intrinsic aspects of work in the social sciences and is a moderate predictor in the physical sciences; (2) specific work orientation is a strong predictor of attitudes toward extrinsic aspects of work in the physical sciences and is a moderate predictor in the social sciences; (3) global work orientation is not related to extrinsic work attitudes in the physical and social sciences; and (4) specific work orientation is not related to intrinsic work attitudes in the physical and social sciences.     

Dream content of schizophrenic, nonschizophrenic mentally ill, and community control adolescents

This study compared the manifest dream content of 20 schizophrenic adolescent inpatients whose medications were stable for at least four weeks, 21 adolescent inpatients with other mental disorders (nonschizophrenic group) matched for age and gender, and 31 matched community controls. All participants were administered the standardized Formal Dream Content Rating Scale (FDCRS), which evaluates dream-related anxiety, cognitive disturbance, implausibility, involvement, primitivity, and recall, as well as two additional scales measuring emotional expression and duration of dream report. The Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale (PANSS) was administered to the two inpatient groups. The community controls demonstrated more involvement and emotional expression than the schizophrenic patients; furthermore, they demonstrated more implausibility and had a greater duration of dream report compared with the nonschizophrenic group. In the schizophrenic patients only, elevated scores on the negative subscale of the PANSS were significantly correlated with lower scores on involvement, emotional expression, and dream recall. No relationship was found between the positive subscale of the PANSS and any of the FDCRS subscales. These results suggest that psychopathology per se, rather than the specific psychiatric disturbance, may be associated with impoverishment of dream content, and that negative, rather than positive, schizophrenic symptomatology may be influential in the dream content of schizophrenic youngsters.     

Practice effects on fractionated response time related to age and activity level

Two days of practice on simple and choice reaction (RT) and movement time (MT) were studied using 60 males placed into four groups based upon age and physical activity level. Practice effects upon simple and choice RTs were different for young and old groups. Only the two inactive groups improved on simple and choice MT, with greatest improvement occurring on simple MT. Old Actives had true-score variance than the Old Inactives, but much greater than the two young groups. Intraindividual variability was greater for the two older groups even in the absence of practice effects. Results support the claim that a life style or regular physical activity may lessen aging effects upon RT and MT as well as attenuating interindividual variability.     

Interference with short-term visual memory produced by concurrent central processing

Double-letter memory and test stimuli were used in two experiments on a speek comparison task. Faster decision times were found when memory and test stimuli were physically identical than when they were the same in name only. This finding was true even with retention intervals as long as 12 sec and even when difficult tasks filled the retention intervals. However, the decision-time advantage of physically identical comparisons was greatest when the interval was not filled with a task likely to interfere with rehearsals. High verbal subjects had a smaller advantage for the physically identical comparisons than did low verbal subjects but were affected in the same way as low verbal subjects in terms of which conditions raised the overall correct comparison times, raised the error rates, and reduced the advantage of physically identical comparisons.     

The Situational Context <Emphasis Type="Italic">on the Nature of Political Philosophy</Emphasis>

Rationalism in political philosophy is the view that politics should be governed by moral principles and that those principles can and should be justified independently of the situations and circumstances that make up political reality. This traditional view of political philosophy implies that the meaning of right political action is determined by moral principles the rational authority of which derives from abstract philosophical reasoning, not from the situations and circumstances that are the substance of political reality. In this essay I argue that rationalist moralities must presuppose the understanding of particular situations and circumstances for their meaningful and correct interpretation. This means, I argue, that the rightness of political judgement and action is immanent in particular situations, not in abstract moralities. And this, I argue, suggests a shift from the traditional view of political society as the embodiment of abstract principles, towards a view of political society as the embodiment of the activity of situational judgement. A society worth hoping for, then, is one in which we can live in the light of our understanding of the situations and circumstances that are the substance of everyday life, rather than in the shadow of abstract moralities. Such a society would be sensitive to the particularities and complexities of political reality, but at the same time it does not succumb to moral relativism and skepticism.