Discriminability of brightness change for infants

Four-month-old human infants who were habituated to a 490-nm stimulus of 3.5 cd · m^?2 luminance did not show recovery when the stimulus was increased or decreased in luminance by a factor of 2 but not changed in hue. A fourfold luminance increase produced a recovery in looking time. When compared with earlier results on simultaneous discrimination of brightness change, the results imply that infants differ from adults more in ability to code or retrieve than in ability to detect intensive differences. The implication is further supported by the differentiating response of infants to changes in hue.     

The impact of education and selected traits on sex-role related goals and attitudes

Questionnaires that assessed educational goals, career goals, preferred and expected career commitment, sex-role attitudes, age, college class, height, and weight were completed by 884 male and female undergraduates representing two racial groups and two age groups. Age, size, and college class were unrelated to women's goals and attitudes, whereas men chose more traditional careers as their education progressed. Technical college students tended to be more traditional than university students. Implications for related research are discussed.     

Intimacy in response to direct gaze

Believing that they were participating in a study of encounter groups, male and female subjects were encouraged to deliver a personally revealing monologue to a same-sex listener whose visual behavior had been “programmed” by the experimenter. In the four experimental conditions, designed to explore the role of gaze as a stimulus, as a potential reinforcer, and as a source of feedback, the listener provided (a) continuous direct gaze; (b) direct gaze contingent upon intimate statements; (c) continuous gaze aversion; or (d) gaze aversion contingent upon intimate statements. The intimacy of the speaker's monologue was rated by a “blind” observer, the listener, and the speaker himself. Direct gaze, whether constant or contingent, appeared to promote intimacy between females and reticence between males, while gaze avoidance had the opposite effects. The only raters who disagreed with this assessment were the male speakers, who felt that they had been most intimate in the two direct gaze conditions. Positive feelings including liking for the listener and task satisfaction also were associated both with self-revelation and with direct gaze among females but not among males.     

Some attributes of adjectives used by young children

Analysis of 24 spontaneous speech samples from children at 24 and 30 months revealed a correlated progression in the form, function and meaning of modifiers used with increased language development. Predicate adjectives were used to comment on transitory states of objects and predominated in the early speech samples. Attributive adjectives were used to subdivide classes or to specify among particular instances within classes on the basis of physical characteristics such as size, by use of a conventional type name, or by use of a possessive. Attributives predominated in the later speech samples. Differential use of a particular form appears to be a function of its cognitive and communicational usefulness rather than its syntactic derivation.     

Interaction of stimulus dimensions in concept and choice processes

Four major types of interaction of stimulus dimensions based on perceptual research are described: integral, configural, separable, and asymmetric separable. Implications of these interactions for concept and choice processes are discussed. With regard to concept learning, it is argued that integral or configural interactions are desirable within the set of relevant and within the set of irrelevant dimensions used to generate stimuli, but that relevant dimensions should be separable from irrelevant dimensions. With regard to choice processes, integral or configural dimensions produce choices based on ordinary distance relations or equivalent parallel processing of dimensions. With separable dimensions, however, serial processing is at least possible; and such processing can lead to choices in which the subset of stimuli and the order of processing of dimensions affects the choice outcomes.     

Effects of uncertainty,delay, and focus of attention on reactions to an aversive situation

The hypotheses of informational cognitive control, based on the idea that being able to predict the occurrence of an unpleasant event facilitates a reduction of its impact, has not received clear support in previous research. The present experiment investigated the effects of three variables on subjective reactions to mild electric shock: (1) temporal uncertainty about when the shocks would occur, (2) the period of delay before the shock, and (3) attention to either the sensory properties of the shocks or emotional reactions to them. The results showed that low temporal uncertainty and short periods of delay led to reduced anxiety during the period preceding the shock but did not reduce the reported intensity of the shocks themselves. Higher ratings of both shock intensity and distress were obtained when the focus of attention was on the sensory properties of the stimuli rather than on the affective reactions to them. It was concluded that (i) the attentional focus of the subject is an important determinant of rated stimulus effects, and (ii) prediction, though it may reduce prestimulus anxiety, has no real effect on the impact of the stimulus itself.     

Density,perceived choice,and response to controllable and uncontrollable outcomes

Two experiments were designed to consider the effects of chronic high residential density on responses to choice and controllable and uncontrollable outcomes. In the first study, children responded to obtain candy as reinforcement and, during certain phases of the procedure, were able to select a schedule, if they chose, which allowed them to pick their own candy rather than having the experimenter select candy for them. Children who lived in high residential density were significantly less likely than children from less dense homes to try to control the administration of available outcomes. In the second study, children were preexposed to a solvable or unsolvable cognitive learning task and tested for how well they subsequently learned a solvable problem. Children from high density homes did significantly more poorly than less crowded children when the first problem was unsolvable. It was suggested that chronic density limits prediction and control in the home environment and consequently leads to the development of decreased expectancies for contingency between response and outcome in other control-relevant situations.     

Cognition in music

A cognitive/constructive view of music is put forth that diverges from traditional conceptions of music (e.g., music as sound; music as behavior; music as communication). The present view attempts to be compatible with the evidence of historic style changes that have occurred in the notated repertory of Western music. Two levels of cognitive processing are proposed: processes on the level of particular styles (germane to a certain period, culture, or community) and processes that are generic, universal, or cross-stylistic. Twelve such generic processes are described in detail. Several problems in the research stemming from earlier definitions of music are explored. In particular, attention is given to the artifacts of theoretical analysis (e.g., scales, chords, and discrete pitches) and their influence on music-psychological research.     

Natural, unnatural, and supernatural concepts

Five experiments investigating information-processing consequences of concept naturalness and unnaturalness are reported. In particular, an attempt is made to examine the separate and joint effects of simplicity and entrenchment upon reasoning with natural and unnatural concepts. The experiments employed four variants of a concept-selection task in which subjects characterized the state of an object at some future time on the basis of information about the object at that time and at some earlier time. In all five experiments, both simplicity and entrenchment affected ease of information processing. The last two experiments showed that the effect of simplicity was greater than that of entrenchment. An informationprocessing model of task performance provided a very good account of the latency and error data. Scores from the concept-selection task correlated with scores from a set of psychometric inductive-reasoning tests; indeed, the correlations were higher than those usually found between cognitive task performance and psychometrically measured intelligence. Processing of nonentrenched concepts may provide a useful means for studying the nature of intelligent performance.     

Isolating the components of intelligence

In a recent volume (Sternberg, 1977b), I proposed a method called componential analysis that provides a means to isolate the components of intelligent performance. The method was described in detail, and then tested in a series of experiments. But an important question was left unanswered by this early work: Is componential analysis generalizable to tasks other than analogies? More recently, I have been investigating the generalization of the methodology to other tasks, and have also been engaged in extending the methodology in order to increase its flexibility of application. The present article (a) briefly summarizes the structure of a componential analysis, (b) describes the method of precuing, the method originally used for isolating the components of intelligence, and (c) describes new methods that have also been successful in isolating these components in a variety of reasoning tasks.