Ambiguity,cubist works of art,and preference

Number of one sec views and verbal judgements of interestingness and pleasingness of Cubist paintings were found to be a function of subjective ambiguity, defined in terms of the Shannon-Wiener average information measure, especially when an expectancy had been established regarding the identity of the main object or person in the paintings. Viewing behaviour was found to increase with subjective ambiguity; verbal judgements were found to decrease. Titles corresponding to varying degrees to the content of the paintings or instructions involving guessing were used to manipulate expectancy. An attempt was made to explain these findings and those involving recall of titles by making reference to Berlyne's point of view and the experimental literature.     

The effects of cue distinctiveness on infants' manual search

Nine- and sixteen-month-old infants were repeatedly presented a manual search problem in which a toy was hidden in one of two containers, which were then moved into reach. The distinctiveness of the containers or their closeness during the movement was varied in different conditions. Overall, the older infants performed better than younger infants, performance improved across trials, and there were more correct searches when the containers or trajectories were distinctive. Analyses of visual orienting indicated that infants learned to restrict their looking to the hiding place. The ability to maintain attention to discriminative cues may be instrumental to progress in delayed-reaction and object permanence tasks.     

Stimulus control of information processing in pigeon short-term memory

Six pigeons were trained initially on a delayed successive matching-to-sample task using red and green fields as sample and test stimuli. Following acquisition, each sample was followed either by a vertical line (“remember” cue), which indicated that sample memory would be tested, or by a horizontal line (“forget” cue), which indicated that sample memory would not be tested. During the experiments, sample memory on forget trials was tested occasionally. A series of five experiments revealed: (a) better retention on remember trials than on forget trials, (b) increased effectiveness of a forget cue when it followed closely sample offset, (c) more rapid forgetting over a retention interval ranging from 3 to 6 sec on forget trials than on remember trials, (d) a “cancellation” effect in which a remember cue which followed immediately the offset of a forget cue attenuated markedly the effectiveness of the forget cue, and (e) an “insulation” effect in which the effectiveness of a forget cue was reduced considerably when presented after a remember cue. It was concluded that pigeons actively process or rehearse the sample memory during the retention interval.     

Nonverbal communication of couples in conflict

This article examined the rates, contextual meanings, and attributional meanings of nonverbal behavior occurring during role-played conflict between dating couples. Eighty couples reported perceptions of their own behaviors and their partners' behaviors and were observed in a laboratory setting by trained raters. The nonverbal channel was used significantly more by females than by males and to express approval rather than disapproval. However, the nonverbal-disapproval summary category demonstrated weak validity. Eye contact had the most complex, unexpected contextual meanings. Reduced eye contact appeared to variously convey disapproval, cues of lower interpersonal power, and a reduction of intimacy to compensate for accompanying increases in other approval behaviors. Despite significant correlations between nonverbal and verbal behaviors, dating partners rarely based their perceptions of their behavior or their partners' behavior upon their rates of nonverbal behaviors.     

Speech production mechanisms in aphasia: A delayed auditory feedback study

Data collected from a delayed auditory feedback (DAF) study conducted by F. Boller, P. B. Vrtunski, Y. Kim, and J. L. Mack (1978, Cortex, 14, 212–226) were reanalyzed to determine if speech quality measures which were significantly affected during DAF could be operationalized and to ascertain which type of errors are responsible for the judgement. A second goal of this study was to determine if Conduction aphasics were relatively spared under conditions of DAF, as has been shown in previous studies. Twenty aphasic patients and ten controls were presented with several speech production tasks under two delay conditions and two simultaneous feedback conditions. Results indicated that only the category of vowel length produced a significant number of errors, suggesting that DAF affects articulatory implementation. Conduction aphasics showed the least effect of all the groups. These results support Wernicke's and Geschwind's model, in which Conduction aphasics have a disconnection between the sensory and motor images of words. In contrast, Broca's aphasics were the most affected group under DAF, suggesting that a major component of their disorder is phonetic in nature.     

Developmental dyslexia: Electrophysiological evidence of clinical subgroups

Event-related potentials (ERPs) to word and to musical-chord stimuli were recorded in 13 dyslexic boys and 13 age-matched normal readers. Normal readers and dyslexics whose reading handicaps involved visual-spatial processing deficits had greater word versus musical-chord ERP waveform differences over the left as compared to the right hemisphere. Dyslexics whose reading difficulties were related to auditory-verbal processing deficits did not exhibit this asymmetry. These results are interpreted as supportive of the hypothesis that the latter group of dyslexics has failed to develop normal left hemisphere specialization for processing of auditory-linguistic material.     

Solving deductive-reasoning problems after unilateral temporal lobectomy

The possible functional role of mental imagery in solving deductive-reasoning problems was investigated. Patients with left or right temporal lobectomies and normal control subjects had 32 different solvable three-term series problems read to them. Almost all subjects in the control and in the right-temporal-lobe groups reported consistent use of imagery in solving these problems, whereas less than half the left-temporal-lobe group reported using such a strategy. Overall, the left-temporal-lobe group was impaired relative to both the right-temporal and control groups. The right-temporal-lobe group was impaired only when the form of the question asked was not congruent with the form of the information in the premises. It was concluded that either (a) the left-temporal-lobe group had an unexpectedly large verbal comprehension deficit, or (b) the form of imagery utilized in solving deductive-reasoning problems is based upon verbal symbolic information, and as such is mediated by the left hemisphere.     

A case of adult onset of stuttering

A 36-yr-old adult male was treated for stuttering after a “sudden onset” of disfluency according to the client, 3 yr before. The treatment method and results are described and the “awareness” feature of stuttering onset is discussed.     

A validation of the Worker Trait Groups in the DOT

An empirical validation of the 114 Worker Trait Groups (WTG) of the Third Edition of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) was performed by comparing the factor structure of the worker trait components of the 114 WTG's with the factor structure of a random sample of 800 of the 4000 jobs used as the basis for the DOT, Third Edition. Six factors were compared and cosines between .8997 and .9657 obtained on the matched factors, thus providing a measure of empirical validity for the 114 WTG's based on the worker trait components.