Note on excitation theories

Offner's demonstration of the excitation time equivalence, for all currents, of the theories of Hill and Rashevsky is here extended to a more general case which includes both. It is found that any system of this general type may be replaced by an equivalent one of the Rashevsky type, thus effecting considerable simplification in the mathematical detail.The author is indebted to Mr. Alvin Weinberg of the Dept. of Physics, University of Chicago, for verifying the computations.     

A note on multidimensional psychophysical analysis

On viewing Thurstone's psychophysical scale from the point of view of the mathematical theory of one-parameter continuous groups, it is seen that a variety of different psychological or statistical assumptions can all be made to lead to a scale possessing similar properties, though requiring different computational techniques for their determination. The natural extension to multi-dimensional scaling is indicated.     

Familiarity decisions for faces presented to the left and right cerebral hemispheres

Right-handed subjects were asked to decide whether or not faces presented briefly in the RVF or in the LVF were familiar (familiar faces were those of famous people). This task avoids the need for extensive semantic processing or temporary storage involved in conventional naming or identification tasks, and thus eliminates the contribution of such factors to any observed asymmetry. The resulting finding of faster reaction times to LVF faces, with no overall visual hemifield difference in error rates, is taken to indicate a right-hemisphere superiority either in the processes used to construct facial representations or in the accessing of face recognition units, or both.     

Positive and negative patterning in human causal learning

Investigations of patterning discriminations by nonhuman animals have generally found that positive patterning is easier to learn than negative patterning. Studies of patterning discriminations in human causal learning tasks have failed to document any differences between positive and negative patterning. In the present study, human participants predicted an outcome on trials involving either a compound cue or its elements. Positive and negative patterning problems were successfully solved in a within-subjects design; negative patterning problems proved to be more difficult when an additional, 50% contingent cue was included (Experiment 2), but not when it was excluded (Experiment 1). Possible reasons for these results are discussed. The discussion concludes with an analysis of exemplar models (e.g., Pearce, 1994) of human causal learning and considers the conditions under which these models do and do not anticipate our results.     

A performance comparison between the two language versions of the Affective Go/No‐Go test: A randomised crossover study

The purpose of this randomised crossover study is to validate the Korean version of the Affective Go/No‐go (AGN) test. The Korean words for the AGN test were selected after careful evaluation of emotional valences, word length and frequency. Fifteen Korean advanced learners of English were administered both Korean and English versions, yielding 30 data points. The performance of both language versions was compared for each of the AGN test parameters (response latency, commission error and omission error) using two‐way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) were estimated to evaluate associations between the two versions. The ICCs were high for response latencies of all valences and commission errors of positive and neutral words, but not for that of negative words and omission errors of all valences. A similar pattern of test results, as revealed by the high ICCs and non‐significant interaction effects between language and word valence, suggests that the psychometric properties of the AGN test may be comparable over different language versions.