The effects of cueing and constraint instructions on children's free recall performance

The performance of nursery school children was investigated in two experiments involving cued and constrained free recall. Under constrained instructions, subjects were required to recall items by category. Under cued instructions subjects could recall items in any order they wished but the organized nature of the lists was identified and subjects were told that they would remember more if they recalled things from the same category together. No effects of cueing instructions were obtained in either Experiment I or Experiment II. Constrained recall instructions led to enhanced recall and category clustering. However, the beneficial effects were not maintained on later trials with the same list or on a transfer list when the constraints on recall were dropped. In addition, the introduction of constrained recall instructions had identical effects whether they were introduced early or late in practice. The results were discussed in terms of the influences of variables which affect the subjects' use of retrieval strategies and the development of memory.     

On the inconclusiveness of “crucial” cognitive tests of dissonance versus self-perception theories

Several recent experiments are claimed to have tested conflicting predictions of cognitive dissonance and self-perception theories. It is argued that these claims fail to take into account the capacity of each formulation to account adequately for results “predicted” by the other. This argument is then continued, at a metatheoretical level, to reach the conclusion that the two theories are not capable of producing unequivocally contradictory predictions of cognitive consequences of experimental procedures.     

The partial punishment effect following minimal acquisition training: Sodium amobarbital and the stimulus properties of early punished trials

In a runway investigation, six groups of rats received limited runway training such that partial punishment, partial reinforcement, or continuous reinforcement was accompanied by sodium amobarbital or saline. Following an interpolated phase of continuous reinforcement without injections, all groups were given punished extinction. The entire experiment was conducted under widely spaced conditions (ITI = 24 hr). It was found that partial punishment increased resistance to punished extinction relative to partially and continuously reinforced controls when acquisition was given under saline. When partial punishment training was accompanied by amobarbital this effect was eliminated. The drug was observed to have no effect on the punished extinction performance of the partial reinforcement and continuous groups, respectively. Moreover, the partial reinforcement effect (PRE) did not generalize to punished extinction. These data provide information concerning the difference between the stimuli associated with the early trials of punishment and nonreward and indicate that the former but not the latter contain emotional elements.     

Verbal-vocal integration as a function of sex and methodology

The process by which persons appear to combine content and intonation to form an impression of a speaker's friendliness may be a function of sex and the analytical techniques used to evaluate the models. Sixty subjects (half male, half female) from the campus population were asked to rate the content, tone, and total message of short sentences from male speakers. Analysis of variance and regression analysis were used to evaluate Linear, Multiplicative, Minimum, and Maximum models. Responses were essentially linear, although the multiplicative component was significant in some results, and the Minimum model received some support for males. More weight was given to tone than content, especially by females and for inconsistent messages. Idiographic analysis proved superior to normative analysis, and the ignored content method provided greater reliability and explanation than previously used filtered speech.     

The effects of cue reliability on infants' manual search.

Nine-month-old babies were presented a manual search problem in which toys were hidden in one of two containers, and then the containers were transposed. Over a series of training trials either two, one, or no cues were perfectly correlated with the location of the toy. The infants' first searches became more accurate over training trials in conditions with consistent container and/or position cues. In the final training trial block search performance was best with two cues, intermediate with one cue, and least accurate in the no-cue condition. In a subsequent reversal procedure, in which the toy was placed in the previously unused hiding place, the number of correct first searches also differed according to the nature of cues available across hidings. The implications for learning the concept of object permanence are discussed.     

Predicting career performance of physicians using the biographical inventory approach

Two critical problems face professional and technical schools and their admissions committees: (1) the criterion problem of defining what constitutes a “good” career practitioner, and (2) the predictor problem of assessing in advance which applicants to the various schools are most likely to become these “good” career practitioners (and not just good students). The present project, working with a 333 physician sample, was designed to establish such criteria and predictors in the field of medicine. Seven important composite and summary criteria were established and five of them were successfully predicted with cross-validities at levels beyond .40 and ranging as high as .56 by a 351-item biographical inventory. A triplecross validation item-analysis design was used.     

Reading abilities of school-age stutterers

The reading abilities of 20 school-age stutterers and their matched normally fluent controls were assessed by means of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests. Results indicate that the reading abilities of school-age stutterers are not significantly different from those of school-age normals. Similarly, knowing whether a subject was classified as a stutterer or normally fluent speaker was of minimal assistance in predicting the subject's reading performance. These findings suggest that school-age stutterers' reading abilities are within normal limits. An individual stutterer, just like an individual normally fluent speaker, may exhibit “reading problems”; however, caution should be employed in extrapolating from one individual stutterer's reading performance to the reading abilities of all stutterers.     

Causes of racial and socioeconomic differences in cognitive tests

Correlations among profiles of means based upon 75 cognitive variables from Project TALENT are presented for groups defined by race, socioeconomic status, sex, area of the country, and grade in high school. Sex makes by far the largest contribution to differences in shape of profiles. Race and socioenconomic status, in turn, make much larger contributions to differences than grade and area. Sex differences in shapes of profiles are a function primarily of race and, to a lesser extent, of social class. Race differences are larger than socioeconomic differences and the former, in particular, are also a function of sex. Black males differ more from white patterns than black females. There is lack of substantial overlap in the causes of race and socioeconomic differences in shape of cognitive profiles.     

Predicting compliance behavior from moral judgment scales

Two experiments with college males examined the relationship between moral judgment and compliance in a modified Asch paradigm. In Experiment 1 moral judgment was assessed with the written form of Kohlberg's dilemmas. Stage of moral judgment interacted with type of compliance, with Stage 4 subjects showing a compromise response between their own perceptions and the responses of others. In Experiment 2 moral judgment was assessed with Rest's Defining Issues Test. Compliance was found to be negatively related to level of moral judgment. The relationship found between moral judgment and compliance in the two experiments was interpreted in terms of a trend away from external standards and toward internal standards with higher levels of moral judgment.