Is preparation of responses precluded by choice reaction time testing?

Choice reaction times for short (Dit) and long (Dah) Morse key presses were measured using a number of different left hand/right hand Dit/Dah 2-response combinations. When Dit and Dah responses were made with the same hand, Dits were initiated significantly faster, which confirms the finding of Klapp et al. (1974). The absolute sizes of Dit and Dah CRT's, however, varied significantly from one test situation to another; and the Dit:Dah difference was shown to be intransitive. Such context effects cast doubt on the extrapolative power of CRT findings, and on the usefulness of CRT as a measure of movement complexity. Latencies were reduced when subjects knew in advance which hand would be used; but the usefulness of response duration pre-knowledge was not unambiguously demonstrated. Preparation of responses is, therefore, not precluded by CRT testing; and possible explanations for these savings in terms of response selection and motor preprogramming were discussed. On balance, the hypothesis that the longer reaction times of Dah responses are due to their greater movement complexity (Klapp et al. 1974) was rejected, in favour of the explanation that subjects adopt a strategy of preferentially preparing Dit responses.     

Task instructions and strategy transfer in the directed forgetting performance of mentally retarded adolescents

The influence of task explanation on strategy transfer was studied in educable mentally retarded adolescents (13 to 15 years old). A directed forgetting task was used in which the person was required to recall short sequences of picture names. In some sequences there was a cue to forget the first few pictures (irrelevant information) and to remember only the subsequent pictures (relevant information). During the first session the amount of explanation given the directed forgetting task was varied, and during the second, some of the subjects were trained to rehearse in a simple sequential memory task. Transfer of training was then examined on a retest of the directed forgetting task. The majority of subjects trained to rehearse and given a minimal explanation of the directed forgetting task maintained the strategy on trials which were identical to those used during rehearsal training, but failed to generalize the strategy on other trials. The results indicate that providing a full explanation of the task requirements does not assure strategy generalization, but providing only a minimal explanation makes strategy generalization unlikely.     

Piaget's logical formalism for formal operations: An interpretation in context

Two interpretations of the equations used by B. Inhelder and J. Piaget in The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958) are discussed, with implication as the central example. The expression (p ? q) (p implies q) is said to be equal to $\text{(p · q)}\text{V}\text{(}\text{p}\text{· q)}\text{V}\text{(}\text{p}\text{·}\text{q}\text{)}$ (i.e.,p and q, or not p and q, or neither p nor q). According to one, (p ? q) asserts the existence of each case mentioned. According to the other, (p ? q) only asserts that current knowledge allows the possibility of each of the cases. Neither interpretation makes sense of all the relevant passages. Both can be combined in a consistent interpretation when attention is paid to the functional context of the subject's use of logical operations in this book: the “operations” describe the knowledge states which the subject can differentiate and relate, on his way to solving Inhelder's tasks. The logical notation used to represent these states is not a representational format attributed to the subject and manipulated by his cognitive processes, but part of a structuralist account of the subject's reasoning capacities.     

Cognitive complexity and career maturity among college students

The role of cognitive complexity in the career maturity of college students was investigated. Simple and multiple correlational analyses were performed upon data from 99 college students who were administered the Attitude Scale and Competence Test of the Career Maturity Inventory, the Bieri Repertory Test, and the Bodden Cognitive Differentiation Grid. Results generally supported the prediction that career maturity would be found to be positively associated with cognitive complexity.     

The validity of the Holland and Basic Interest scales of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank: Leisure activities versus occupational membership as criteria

This study compared leisure activities with occupational membership as criteria for determining the concurrent validity of the Holland and Basic Interest scales of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank (Form T399). Subjects were 89 thirty-six-year-old males representing a variety of occupations. R. H. Dolliver's (Journal of Counseling Psychology, 1975, 22, 199–203) two methods for assessing validity were used: highest single scores on relevant scales and scores above established cutoff points on relevant scales. Results indicated greater congruence between interest scales and occupations than interest scales and leisure activities, except when Basic Interest scale cutoff scores were used. After chance factors were taken into account, Holland scales were found to be more accurate than Basic Interest scales in identifying occupations and in identifying leisure activities when highest scale scores were used. Using cutoff scores, Basic Interest scales were more accurate than Holland scales in identifying leisure activities. Supplementary analyses indicated that the validity of the Holland and Basic Interest scales increases when they are presumed to reflect either current occupation or preferred leisure activity. Results of this study were compared with Dolliver's (1975) findings.     

The impact of education and selected traits on sex-role related goals and attitudes

Questionnaires that assessed educational goals, career goals, preferred and expected career commitment, sex-role attitudes, age, college class, height, and weight were completed by 884 male and female undergraduates representing two racial groups and two age groups. Age, size, and college class were unrelated to women's goals and attitudes, whereas men chose more traditional careers as their education progressed. Technical college students tended to be more traditional than university students. Implications for related research are discussed.     

Levels of processing, encoding strategies, and memory development.

In three experiments, memory for intentionally encoded words was compared with memory for encodings induced by asking semantic, phonemic, or surface questions. Subjects were second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade, and junior and senior high school students. Semantic encodings were more often recalled and recognized than were phonemic and surface (which did not differ). Intentional encodings were as likely to be recalled as semantic but were no more likely than phonemic and surface to be recognized, and this was true whether intentional learning was in anticipation of a recall test or a recognition test. Age trends occurred for recall, for intentional learning, and for induced processing which required subjects to generate word attributes. Age trends were attenuated for recognition and for induced processing which required subjects to verify whether a give attribute applied to the target word.     

The differential reinforcement of reward-produced and response-produced stimuli

In two experiments, groups received successive large-reward trials on odd-numbered days and successive small-reward trials on even-numbered days in the same gray alleyway. This produced a discrimination problem in which the memory of large reward (S^L) was reliably discriminative of large reward and the memory of small reward (S^S) was reliably discriminative of small reward. Intertrial interval (ITI) was varied both between and within groups. In the within-groups manipulation, ITI separating S+ trials differed from that separating S- trials. Experimental groups learned the discrimination, running slower to S^S (S- cue) than to S^L (S+ cue), and showed a negative contrast effect, running slower to S- than a small-reward control group. Discrimination was somewhat faster at massed than at spaced trials. The within-groups manipulation of ITI suggested that the effects of ITI were mediated by time-dependent changes in internal cues produced by reward events and by the instrumental response. The control exercised by internal cues was shown to be associative rather than nonassociative, e.g., motivational. Similarities with, and implications for, conventional brightness differential conditioning were discussed.