The response of day and night wetting children and children who wet only at night to retention control training and the enuresis alarm

Forty-five children with night wetting only (NW) and 30 children with day and night wetting (DNW) were randomly assigned to 2 treatment groups: alarm only and alarm preceded by 4 weeks of retention control training (R.C.T.). Fewer children became dry at night in the DNW group than the NW group and DNW children relapsed earlier following treatment. The enuresis alarm was far superior to R.C.T. in reducing night wetting in both enuretic groups. It also reduced day wetting in some of the DNW children. Children who became dry in the NW group did not show significant changes in functional bladder capacity. Although changes in functional bladder capacity were seen in the DNW children who became dry, changes were only noticeable once dryness had been achieved.     

Posthypnotic amnesia for recently learned material: Interactions with “episodic” and “semantic” memory

In two experiments, posthypnotic amnesia was suggested for a word list memorized during hypnosis. After an initial test of amnesia the subjects gave word associations (Experiment 1) or category instances (Experiment 2) to stimuli intended to elicit the critical (word list) items covered by the amnesia. The extent of initial amnesia observed was strongly associated with measured hypnotic susceptibility. Even among the most hypnotizable subjects, however, the dense amnesia did not prevent the critical items from being elicited by the semantic memory tasks, nor did it modulate the priming which these associations received by virtue of the prior learning experience. Moreover, production of the critical items did not, in general, remind the amnesic subjects of those items which they had previously learned, but could not now remember. Full memory was restored after the amnesia suggestion was canceled by a prearranged cue. Posthypnotic amnesia appears to represent a temporary dissociation of episodic features from memory traces, so that the subject has difficulty in reconstructing the context in which the target events occurred.     

Selective attention by children and adults to pictures specified by color

Four conditions were used to investigate developmental trends in the ability to establish and use a color set to direct the selective processing of pictures. In three conditions, 6-year-old, 9-year-old, and adult subjects viewed a series of pairs of pictures, with one red and one black line drawing in each pair. Subjects were asked to look either at the red pictures only, the black pictures only, or both pictures. In a fourth condition, subjects viewed a series of singly presented red and black pictures. Pictures of both colors were included in a subsequent recognition memory test. At all ages recognition memory was comparable for pictures of each color in the both and single conditions but was higher for pictures of the specified color in the selective red and selective black conditions. There was no evidence at any age that memory for pictures of the specified color was decreased by the presence of the second picture. These results, showing roughly comparable selectivity at all ages, were discussed in relation to findings of developmental trends in selective attention on more “traditional” central-incidental learning tasks.     

Development of comprehension of sentences with “because” or “if”

The comprehension of sentences with “because” or “if” was investigated in children aged 2;9–11;11. Imitation, comprehension (choosing one of two picture sequences to go with a sentence), recognition (judging sentences with connective or structure differences as heard before or not), and synonymy (judging equivalence of meaning in sentences with different connectives or structures) tasks were administered, along with logical ordering, reversibility, and classification tasks. Above-chance responding in the comprehension task occurred by age 8, and in recognition and synonymy by age 10. Cognitive performance predicted 28.4% of the variance in the linguistic scores and cognitive success was concurrent with or preceded linguistic success. Comprehension of “because” and “if” appears to develop gradually, and is related to the development of certain operative rules.     

Statistical significance tests for binormal ROC curves

Statistical significance tests are derived and evaluated for measuring apparent differences between an obtained and an expected binormal ROC curve, between two independent binormal ROC curves, and among groups of independent binormal ROC curves. A binormal ROC curve is described by two parameters which represent the spread of the means and the ratio of the standard deviations of the two underlying Gaussian decision variable distributions. To test the significance of apparent differences between or among ROC curves, approximate χ² statistics for each of the three tests were constructed from maximum likelihood estimates of the two parameters defining the binormal ROC curve. The performance of each test statistic was evaluated by simulating five-category rating scale data with equal numbers of noise and signal-plus-noise trials (set at 50, 250, and 500) for each of three typical ROC curves. For the significance test involving only one ROC curve, rating scale data were generated from the chance diagonal of the ROC space also. Although test performance was found to be somewhat dependent on the number of trials and on the location of the ROC curve in the ROC space, comparisons of the obtained and expected fractions of (falsely) significant results at various α levels showed the proposed statistical significance tests to be reliable under practical experimental conditions.     

Right hemisphere comprehension of verbs in patients with complete forebrain commissurotomy: Use of the dichotic method and manual performance

The paradigm of dichotic listening was used to investigate verbal comprehension in the right, so-called “nonverbal,” hemisphere. Verbal commands were presented to the right and left ears in the simultaneous (dichotic) paradigm. There were striking instances, especially when the left hemisphere was occupied with some extraneous task, in which the right hemisphere understood the verbal command and executed the appropriate motor responses. In those instances the left hemisphere gave no overt response. Although the left hemisphere was usually dominant, it can be nevertheless concluded that not only can the right hemisphere understand verbal commands but can also express itself manually by executing actions more complex than object retrieval or pointing. As has been known for some time, the blockage of the ipsilateral pathway seems so complete during dichotic listening in the commissurotomy patient that there is no report of the words in the left ear—only of those presented to the right. At the same time there is normal report when words are presented to the left ear alone. It was found in the present study, however, that this model is too simple and only applies to the verbal response paradigm of dichotic listening. Under circumstances of dichotic presentation where the stimulus in the left ear (ipsilateral pathway) is necessary or important to the left hemisphere for completing a task, words from both pathways are reported. One may conclude that there exists a gating mechanism in each hemisphere that controls the monitoring of each auditory pathway and the degree of ipsilateral suppression.