中国大学生的记忆的自我参照效应

记忆的自我参照效应是指记忆材料与自我相联系时的记忆效果优于其它编码条件的现象,这种优势主要体现在以回忆经验为特征的R反应(“记得”)上。西方一些研究表明,自我参照的记忆成绩优于参照母亲的记忆。本研究以中国大学生为被试,得到参照父亲和母亲的记忆与自我参照有同样好的成绩,显著优于参照名人的记忆,并且父母之间无差异。这支持了独立型／依赖型自我概念模型中的东方文化下的自我概念包括父母的观点。     

Parenting and Family Stress Treatment Outcomes in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): An Empirical Analysis in the MTA Study

Parenting and family stress treatment outcomes in the MTA study were examined. Male and female (579), 7–9-year-old children with combined type Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), were recruited at six sites around the United States and Canada, and randomly assigned to one of four groups: intensive, multi-faceted behavior therapy program alone (Beh); carefully titrated and monitored medication management strategy alone (MedMgt); a well-integrated combination of the two (Comb); or a community comparison group (CC). Treatment occurred over 14 months, and assessments were taken at baseline, 3, 9, and 14 months. Parenting behavior and family stress were assessed using parent-report and child-report inventories. Results showed that Beh alone, MedMgt alone, and Comb produced significantly greater decreases in a parent-rated measure of negative parenting, Negative/Ineffective Discipline, than did standard community treatment. The three MTA treatments did not differ significantly from each other on this domain. No differences were noted among the four groups on positive parenting or on family stress variables. Results are discussed in terms of the theoretical and empirically documented importance of negative parenting in the symptoms, comorbidities and long-term outcomes of ADHD.     

Generalizability of carry-over effects in the emotional Stroop task

The emotional Stroop task has been the most widely used task to examine attentional bias to emotionally salient stimuli. In one format of this task, words are presented to participants in a mixed randomized or quasi-randomized sequence. Using a mixed smoking Stroop task, we have previously demonstrated that smokers are slower to respond to words which follow smoking-related words than words which follow neutral words. Here we show that this carry-over effect is present in heroin addicts-but not control subjects-in a heroin Stroop task, and in normal subjects in a stress Stroop task. Thus, the effect generalizes to other populations. In addition, an examination of the studies that have collected data from both mixed and blocked formats provides converging evidence for the presence of carry-over effects. We discuss the implications of the carry-over effect for research using the emotional Stroop task.     

Attention capacity and task difficulty in visual search

When a visual search task is very difficult (as when a small feature difference defines the target), even detection of a unique element may be substantially slowed by increases in display set size. This has been attributed to the influence of attentional capacity limits. We examined the influence of attentional capacity limits on three kinds of search task: difficult feature search (with a subtle featural difference), difficult conjunction search, and spatial-configuration search. In all 3 tasks, each trial contained sixteen items, divided into two eight-item sets. The two sets were presented either successively or simultaneously. Comparison of accuracy in successive versus simultaneous presentations revealed that attentional capacity limitations are present only in the case of spatial-configuration search. While the other two types of task were inefficient (as reflected in steep search slopes), no capacity limitations were evident. We conclude that the difficulty of a visual search task affects search efficiency but does not necessarily introduce attentional capacity limits.     

Young infants' expectations about hidden objects

Infants aged 3-5 months (mean of approximately 4 months) were given a novel anticipatory looking task to test object permanence understanding. They were trained to expect an experimenter to retrieve an object from behind a transparent screen upon hearing a cue ("Doors up, here comes the hand"). The experimenter then hid the object behind one of two opaque screens and after either 2 or 8s gave the "doors up" cue. Infants looked to the correct location after the two-second delay, but not after the eight-second delay. This indicates a brief memory that the object is present behind the occluder. The study provides converging evidence that infants grasp object permanence by a young age. The novel anticipatory looking paradigm helps rule out counter-explanations applied to violation-of-expectation tasks.     

Effects of domain-specific knowledge on memory for serial order

Knowledge concerning domain-specific regularities in sequential structure has long been known to affect recall for serial order. However, very little work has been done toward specifying the exact role such knowledge plays. The present article proposes a theory of serial recall in structured domains, based on Bayesian decision theory and a set of representational assumptions proceeding from recent computational and neurophysiologic research. The theory suggests that the accuracy with which a target sequence will be recalled is influenced by two interacting factors: (1) the 'goodness' of the sequence, i.e. its fit with the sequencing constraints that characterize its source domain, and (2) the sequence's neighborhood relations, i.e. the degree to which it resembles other sequences in the source domain. A specific prediction of the theory is that recall will be relatively poor for target lists with high-goodness near neighbors (the good neighbor effect). This prediction was tested and confirmed in an experiment evaluating recall for sequences based on an artificial grammar.     

Age changes in the missing-letter effect revisited

When participants search for a target letter while reading, they make more omissions if the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. Reflecting developmental changes in component language and literacy skills, the size of this effect increases with age. With adults, the missing-letter effect is due to both word function and word frequency. With children, it is unclear whether the growing size of the missing-letter effect across development is due to a larger effect of word function, word frequency, or both because previous studies with children seeking to isolate the influence of word frequency and word function suffer from important methodological limitations. With these methodological limitations eliminated (Experiments 1 and 2), performance in a letter detection task was assessed for children in Grades 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 as well as for undergraduate students. The results revealed that the influence of word function increases with age, whereas the effect of frequency is fairly stable across ages. Furthermore, normative predictability data collected in Experiment 3 revealed that third graders and undergraduate students were equally good at predicting function slots in a sentence.     

Simultaneous visual discrimination in Asian elephants

Two experiments explored the behavior of 20 Asian elephants (Elephas aximus) in simultaneous visual discrimination tasks. In Experiment 1, 7 Burmese logging elephants acquired a white+/black- discrimination, reaching criterion in a mean of 2.6 sessions and 117 discrete trials, whereas 4 elephants acquired a black+/white- discrimination in 5.3 sessions and 293 trials. One elephant failed to reach criterion in the white+/black- task in 9 sessions and 549 trials, and 2 elephants failed to reach criterion in the black+/white- task in 9 sessions and 452 trials. In Experiment 2, 3 elephants learned a large/small transposition problem, reaching criterion within a mean of 1.7 sessions and 58 trials. Four elephants failed to reach criterion in 4.8 sessions and 193 trials. Data from both the black/white and large/small discriminations showed a surprising age effect, suggesting that elephants beyond the age of 20 to 30 years either may be unable to acquire these visual discriminations or may require an inordinate number of trials to do so. Overall, our results cannot be readily reconciled with the widespread view that elephants possess exceptional intelligence.     

On the effects of signaling reinforcer probability and magnitude in delayed matching to sample

Two experiments examined whether postsample signals of reinforcer probability or magnitude affected the accuracy of delayed matching to sample in pigeons. On each trial, red or green choice responses that matched red or green stimuli seen shortly before a variable retention interval were reinforced with wheat access. In Experiment 1, the reinforcer probability was either 0.2 or 1.0 for both red and green responses. Reinforcer probability was signaled by line or cross symbols that appeared after the sample had been presented. In Experiment 2, all correct responses were reinforced, and the signaled reinforcer durations were 1.0 s and 4.5 s. Matching was more accurate when larger or more probable reinforcers were signaled, independently of retention interval duration. Because signals were presented postsample, the effects were not the result of differential attention to the sample.     

Memory for action events: findings in neurological patients

Encoding action phrases by enacting leads normally to better memory performance than verbal encoding. In order to gain additional insight into the representational basis of the enactment effect, neurological patients are contrasted with healthy participants. Persons suffering from Parkinson's disease, which primarily impairs the motor system, and patients suffering from Frontal Lobe Syndrome, which primarily affects action-related planning processes, were involved. We investigated whether the enactment effect would be differentially affected by these disorders. In addition, the characteristics of information processing after encoding by enacting was analyzed by varying memory material (unrelated versus clusterable actions) and by adding an encoding condition that included obligatory action planning (director condition). The findings indicate that the impact of motor information for the enactment effect is not dominant compared to the role of action-related cognitive and motivational processes, in particular planning processes. The findings of the two experiments are explained within traditional conceptual memory theories.