On the measurement of storage and retrieval contributions to memory development

We report two free recall experiments and a cued recall experiment in which a new two-stage model was used to obtain numerical measurements of age changes in various aspects of storage and retrieval. The subjects in all three experiments were 7-year-olds (second graders) and 11-year-olds (sixth graders). The major findings in the free recall experiment were that getting a trace into storage posed less of a problem for elementary schoolers than learning how to get it out on test trials, that retrieval development is more rapid during the elementary school years than storage development, and that the superiority of older children's storage and retrieval abilities tends to become more pronounced as learning progresses. A similar pattern of results was obtained under different conditions in the cued recall experiment.     

Race,Religion, and Global Solidarities: W. E. B. Du Bois and “The Black Church” as a Contested Category

W.E.B. Du Bois was thoroughly ambivalent about the political significance of American Black churches regarding their role in challenging racial inequality. He saw them as integral to Black social life, but also as failing to live up to their potential as drivers of liberation. And, while he focused primarily on Black churches within the United States, Du Bois was also committed to Black liberation on a global level. This suggests great potential for applying DuBois’ analyses of Black religion to the question of transnational religious and racial solidarities and the global political salience of “the Black Church” as a category. In this context, this article explores the significance of DuBois’ work for analyzing the category of “the Black Church.” It does so through a comparative case study of African American Christian engagement with the issue of Israel and Palestine, with four case studies ranging from African American Christian Zionists to Palestinian solidarity activists. Across these cases, the analysis highlights the ways that the history, identity, and mission of “the Black Church” are invoked in the context of Palestine and Israel. It argues that “the Black Church” is best understood as a contested category of collective religious and racial identity.     

Personality correlates of retrieval processes in intentional and unintentional forgetting

Early accounts of intentional forgetting relied exclusively on mechanisms that operate at encoding. The results of more recent experiments indicate that memory-retrieval inhibition also is involved, thus linking waking intentional forgetting with hypnotic amnesia. The present Experiment 1 was designed to provide further support for the retrieval-inhibition hypothesis by testing four alternative explanations for some of the recent results. Experiment 2 examined the role of word affect in both intentional forgetting and unintentional forgetting to evaluate theoretical interpretations of the retrieval mechanisms thought to be involved. Unintentional forgetting of negative words was consistent with a repression-like interpretation, whereas intentional forgetting of negative words appeared to be limited by sensitization. Personality correlates of the recall results were identified and were found to be in support of these interpretations.     

Laterally induced impedance effects in vision

A linear integral equation for a system of mutually impeding points is developed and solved explicitly. Particular solutions are shown to be subharmonic functions for a large class of stimuli. Specialized forms of the general equation presented in this paper occur within a number of mathematical models of Mach bands. In addition to these known spatial properties, our results also show that the time course of this basic equation may be useful in developing models of transient neural activity as well as of temporal psychophysical phenomena, such as the Broca-Sulzer effect. Further, a spatial transfer function much like the low-frequency cutoff of empirically derived modulation transfer functions follows directly from our basic integral equation if the additional assumption of spatial homogeneity is imposed.     

Neuropsychological significance of phonetically accurate and phonetically inaccurate spelling errors in younger and older retarded spellers

The performances of two groups of retarded spellers (who were equated with respect to the level of deficient performance in spelling, but who differed in the level of phonetic accuracy of their misspellings) at two different age levels were compared to those of normal spellers who had been matched for age and WISC Performance IQ with the retarded spelling groups. The results indicated very marked differences in a number of linguistic skills between the normal spellers and the retarded spellers whose misspellings were characterized by phonetic inaccuracy. The performances of the retarded spellers who produced a preponderance of phonetically accurate misspellings differed markedly from those of the normal spellers only when the task demands involved fairly complex linguistic-cognitive operations. For the most part, the differences among the three groups were in evidence only at the older age level studied.     

The relative effectiveness of alternative job sources

Vocational research has focused on the occupational choice process and the individual's adjustment to work. Very little research has examined the job search process in which the individual must engage in order to implement occupational choices. This study examines one dimension of the job search process: the relationship between job source and subsequent work experiences. The data reveal that when the respondents initially entered the labor market, those relying on formal job sources tended to work in higher-level occupations and in jobs more closely related to their training than their counterparts who used other job sources. In the longer run, the labor market advantages associated with the use of formal job sources dissipated for the engineering majors but tended to persist for the business alumni.