Alcoholic Korsakoff patients' retrieval from semantic memory

Alcoholic Korsakoff patients' rate of retrieval from semantic memory was investigated. It was found that their rate of retrieval from “lexical” semantic memory was nearly normal, but their rate of retrieval from “conceptual” semantic memory was impaired. In addition, an attempt to “prime” their lexical semantic memory by requesting the same category to be searched on adjacent trials met with failure. It was concluded that Korsakoff patients' lexical storage is probably organized normally, but their conceptual organization is not. Parallels with these patients' episodic memory impairments are discussed and possible interactions between episodic and semantic memory are proposed.     

Immediate and delayed recognition of visual stimuli in poor and normal readers.

The present study investigated the hypothesis that specific reading disability is attributable to inadequate visual memory. Previous research had demonstrated that poor readers sustain no basic dysfunction in visual perception, but there was need to evaluate the possibility that deficiencies in letter and word recognition result from disorder in long-term visual storage. Adopting a format employed in a previous study, randomly arranged Hebrew letters were presented to poor and normal readers unfamiliar with Hebrew, and both groups were asked to demonstrate retention for these stimuli on three separate occasions: immediately after initial presentation, 24 hours later and 6 months later. As a control measure, the performance of the non-Hebrew subjects was compared with that of normal readers familiar with Hebrew letters. It was found that retention in the non-Hebrew groups was equivalent under all of the temporal conditions, but the performance of both was poorer than the Hebrew groups under the immediate and 24-hour conditions. However, none of the reader groups differed in the case of retention after a 6-month delay period. It was concluded that deficient visual memory is an unlikely source of specific reading disability, and alternative explanations of the disorder were considered.     

Reconstructive retrieval deficits in Broca's aphasia

Anterior aphasic patients' ability to utilize the phonemic and/or semantic features of verbal material for retention purposes was investigated. In the first experiment, patients were asked to either detect word repetitions, phoneme repetitions, or rhymes in a list of items. The aphasics performed well on word and phoneme repetition detection but below both normals and amnesic Korsakoffs on rhyme detection. In the second experiment the patients were instructed to analyze either the physical, phonemic, or semantic features of words they were later asked to recognize. Aphasics were differentially affected (as were normals) by these instructions: semantic feature analysis resulted in the best performance, followed by phonemic feature analysis. It was concluded that anterior aphasics can analyze, recirculate, and even store the phonemic features of words, but find difficulty in reconstructing the originally presented item from these features.     

Projective drawings and children who stutter

Five young stutterers (aged 5–10 yr) and a matched group of five nonstuttering children completed five projective drawings and a scale for assessing communication attitudes of children at the beginning and at the end of a 3-mo treatment period. While the attitude scale failed to indicate differences between stuttering and nonstuttering children, performances on selected drawings did distinguish between experimental and control subjects. In addition, significant changes were observed in selected drawings over the treatment period for the young stutterers.     

Processing of visually presented vowels in the cerebral hemispheres

The respective efficiency of the cerebral hemispheres in processing visually presented vowels is discussed and examined in a tachistoscopic experiment with normal subjects. It is suggested that results from dichotic listening experiments cannot be used to predict performance on the same material in the visual modality. The physical characteristics of the stimulus, in both modalities, contribute to the pattern of hemispheric advantage and cannot be ignored in the interpretation of results from dichotic listening and tachistoscopic experiments.     

Does everybody like a liker?

The primary hypothesis examined was that people giving positive evaluations are themselves regarded as more attractive than when they give negative evaluations. This research tests whether this holds when reciprocity is not at issue. Subjects in six experiments were presented with stimulus persons who varied in the proportion of positive to negative evaluations they gave of various attitude objects (political figures, cafeteria workers, cities, movies, and college courses). Giving predominantly positive evaluations did in fact lead to greater liking of the stimulus person in each experiment. This finding held over (1) audio or written interviews with the stimulus persons, (2) a variety of classes of attitude objects, and (3) both within-subject and between-subject designs. Greater liking for likers occurred even controlling for attitude similarity.     

Associations in Pavlovian conditioned inhibition

Two experiments with rat subjects used a variety of transfer tests to examine the associations learned when Pavlovian inhibition is established by an A+, AX− paradigm. Experiment 1 found in a conditioned suppression situation that inhibition conditioned to X with one exciter (A) readily transferred to another exciter (B) which had been paired with the same shock US. Transfer occurred even when the response to A had been extinguished prior to testing with B. However, X did not inhibit a general activity response produced by a B which had been subsequently paired with a food US. Experiment 2 employed a Pavlovian conditioning situation in which A and B, when separately paired with the same food US, evoked dissimilar responses. Nevertheless, an inhibitor trained in an A+, AX− paradigm successfully inhibited the different response evoked by B. However, such an X did not inhibit the behaviors acquired by A or B when they were subsequently paired with a shock US. The transfer of Pavlovian inhibition across conditioned stimuli and responses but not across unconditioned stimuli is consistent with the notion that a conditioned inhibitor acts to prevent activation of a US representation which would normally be activated by conditioned exciters.