Development of the appearance-reality distinction

Young children can express conceptual difficulties with the appearance-reality distinction in two different ways: (1) by incorrectly reporting appearance when asked to report reality (“phenomenism”); (2) by incorrectly reporting reality when asked to report appearance (“intellectual realism”). Although both phenomenism errors and intellectual realism errors have been observed in previous studies of young children's cognition, the two have not been seen as conceptually related and only the former errors have been taken as a symptom of difficulties with the appearance-reality distinction. Three experiments investigated 3- to 5-year-old children's ability to distinguish between and correctly identify real versus apparent object properties (color, size, and shape), object identities, object presence-absence, and action identities. Even the 3-year-olds appeared to have some ability to make correct appearance-reality discriminations and this ability increased with age. Errors were frequent, however, and almost all children who erred made both kinds. Phenomenism errors predominated on tasks where the appearance versus reality of the three object properties were in question; intellectual realism errors predominated on the other three types of tasks. Possible reasons for this curious error pattern were advanced. It was also suggested that young children's problems with the appearance-reality distinction may be partly due to a specific metacognitive limitation, namely, a difficulty in analyzing the nature and source of their own mental representations.     

Blocking of inhibitory conditioning within a serial conditioned stimulus-conditioned inhibitor compound: Maintenance of acquired behavior without an unconditioned stimulus

Well-trained classically conditioned stimuli, presented unreinforced, were protected from extinction when they were followed by a signal of the omission of the reinforcer (conditioned inhibitor Konorskian type) in eight cats. An aversive classical conditioning paradigm with shock as the reinforcer was used. Of several behavioral (leg flexion, vocalization) and organismic arousal (heart rate, respiration rate, respiration amplitude) measures of conditioned responses, the respiration amplitude changes were found to be most informative for the continuous assessment of elicited arousal of low and medium intensity. In all subjects conditioned stimuli presented during extinction in serial compound with the conditioned inhibitor elicited larger responses than did conditioned stimuli presented alone during extinction. The mechanism of protection from extinction in a paradigm in which the elicitor of learned behavior occurs prior to the conditioned inhibitor provides the organism with the mechanism for the maintenance of learned behavior in the absence of a reinforcer.     

Central auditory processing : II. Effects of anterior temporal lobectomy

Ear dominance for the pitch of dichotically presented tonal stimuli was measured in nine patients before and after a unilateral anterior temporal lobectomy. Four subjects had a left and five had a right lobectomy. Every patient exhibited a change of ear dominance consistent with the hypothesis that a unilateral lobectomy decreases the perceptual salience of the tone presented to the ear contralateral to the lesion. Depending on the direction and magnitude of the subject's preoperative ear dominance and the side of the lobectomy, the postoperative results either increased or decreased the strength of ear dominance in a predictable fashion. The results support the idea that within each temporal lobe lie physiological mechanisms which can enhance the perceptual salience of the acoustic signal emitted by one sound source when other, concurrent, spatially separated sound sources are present. It is also argued that the same mechanism operates on speech, melodic, and tonal signals.     

Critical flicker frequency and intelligence

Tests of verbal intelligence (Concept Mastery Test) and nonverbal intelligence (Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices) showed nonsignificant zero-order correlations and a nonsignificant multiple correlation with critical flicker frequency (CFF), in 100 university students. Age-partialled correlations were even lower, and corrections for attenuation and restriction of range yielded unimpressive results. It was concluded that CFF has a negligible relationship to psychometric intelligence and is probably a poor tool in the investigation of the nature of g.     

“Masculinity,” “femininity,” and adjustment in college men

The regression of adjustment—indexed by measures of anxiety and depression— on “masculinity” (instrumentality) and “femininity” (expressiveness)—as assessed by the BSRI, PRF ANDRO, and the Short BSRI—was studied in 122 college men. The findings revealed that: (a) anxiety and depression marked a single adjustment factor; (b) self-esteem mediated the relationships between instrumentality, expressiveness, and adjustment, such that when the variance due to it was removed, neither instrumentality nor expressiveness accounted for significant variance in Anxiety-Depression; (c) the Short BSRI index of expressiveness behaved differently from the other indices and more like that of the PAQ; (d) instrumentality and expressiveness interacted significantly, such that instrumentality was positively associated with adjustment for those with low or average expressiveness and expressiveness was positively associated with adjustment only for those with low or average instrumentality; and (e) men high in instrumentality and low in expressiveness reported slightly higher adjustment than “androgynous” men.     

Distance estimation from cognitive maps

Four experiments investigated map clutter as a source of distortion in subjects' estimates of distance. In Experiments 1 (incidental learning) and 2 (intentional learning), subjects estimated distances between pairs of points on a memorized map. In both experiments, estimates increased as a linear function of the number of intervening points along the route. In Experiment 3, subjects estimated distances while viewing the map. The effect of clutter was reduced but not eliminated. In Experiment 4, the clutter effect was demonstrated using subjects' preexperimental knowledge of United States geography. Psychophysical power functions relating true to estimated distance provided a good fit to both memory and perception data. These results suggest an analogy between perceptual and memorial processes of distance estimation. A model proposed to account for the data assumes that subjects perceptually scan a route (or image of a route) from start to destination and use scan duration to determine path distance.     

The clinical validity of the process for assessment of effective student functioning

This report presents the results of a study of the clinical validity of A Process for Assessment of Effective Student Functioning. A clinical team composed of social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists saw 300 representative second and fifth grade children, rated them on interview and test protocols, and summarized the evaluation by single and summary qualitative judgments. The clinical validity criteria were established on the basis of independent evaluations of the home environment, the intellectual and emotional status of the child, and the child's ego functioning. Finally, a clinical criterion score was derived from the overall evaluation of the effectiveness of each subject by each member of the team. The multiple correlations of the three screening measures with the clinical criterion score ranged from .49 to .55 for second grade and fifth grade boys and girls. The clinical criterion scores of children who were screened by the recommended multiple cut-off procedure showed that none of the screened group was rated by the clinicians to have better than average adjustment. The multiple correlation and multiple cut-off procedure showed that the Process was valid for predicting independent clinical judgments of the status of these children. Furthermore, the Process was far more efficient in locating potentially handicapped children than either a carefully designed teacher nomination procedure or teacher referral.