The case of the disappearing disagreements: A reply to Yussen

S. R. Yussen (1984, Developmental Review, 4, 139–144) and I have few disagreements. The major one seems to be in what the purpose of my article (R. J. Sternberg, 1984, Developmental Review, 4, 113–138) should have been. I believe the article fulfills my own purpose, if not Yussen's.     

Sensitivity in spectral structures

Invariance of matching is shown to be necessary and sufficient for the existence of sensitivity functions that are unique up to multiplication by arbitrary positive real numbers. Examples from auditory and visual psychophysics are discussed.     

On the measurement of storage and retrieval contributions to memory development

We report two free recall experiments and a cued recall experiment in which a new two-stage model was used to obtain numerical measurements of age changes in various aspects of storage and retrieval. The subjects in all three experiments were 7-year-olds (second graders) and 11-year-olds (sixth graders). The major findings in the free recall experiment were that getting a trace into storage posed less of a problem for elementary schoolers than learning how to get it out on test trials, that retrieval development is more rapid during the elementary school years than storage development, and that the superiority of older children's storage and retrieval abilities tends to become more pronounced as learning progresses. A similar pattern of results was obtained under different conditions in the cued recall experiment.     

Semantic and visual memory codes in learning disabled readers

Two experiments investigated whether learning disabled readers' impaired recall is due to multiple coding deficiencies. In Experiment 1, learning disabled and skilled readers viewed nonsense pictures without names or with either relevant or irrelevant names with respect to the distinctive characteristics of the picture. Both types of names improved recall of nondisabled readers, while learning disabled readers exhibited better recall for unnamed pictures. No significant difference in recall was found between name training (relevant, irrelevant) conditions within reading groups. In Experiment 2, both reading groups participated in recall training for complex visual forms labeled with unrelated words, hierarchically related words, or without labels. A subsequent reproduction transfer task showed a facilitation in performance in skilled readers due to labeling, with learning disabled readers exhibiting better reproduction for unnamed pictures. Measures of output organization (clustering) indicated that recall is related to the development of superordinate categories. The results suggest that learning disabled children's reading difficulties are due to an inability to activate a semantic representation that interconnects visual and verbal codes.     

Trading relations in the perception of speech by 5-year-old children

Five-year-old children were tested for perceptual trading relations between a temporal cue (silence duration) and a spectral cue (F₁ onset frequency) for the “say-stay” distinction. Identification functions were obtained for two synthetic “say-stay” continua, each containing systematic variations in the amount of silence following the /s/ noise. In one continuum, the vocalic portion had a lower F₁ onset than in the other continuum. Children showed a smaller trading relation than has been found with adults. They did not differ from adults, however, in their perception of an “ay-day” continuum formed by varying F₁ onset frequency only. The results of a discrimination task in which the two acoustic cues were made to “cooperate” or “conflict” phonetically supported the notion of perceptual equivalence of the temporal and spectral cues along a single phonetic dimension. The results indicate that young children, like adults, perceptually integrate multiple cues to a speech contrast in a phonetically relevant manner, but that they may not give the same perceptual weights to the various cues as do adults.     

More precisely defining and measuring the order-irrelevance principle

R. Gelman and C. Gallistel (1978, Young Children's Understanding of Number, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press) use two definitions of the order-irrelevance principle interchangeably: (1) count tags do not have to be assigned in a fixed order and (2) the order in which elements of a set are enumerated does not affect the cardinal designation of the set. A study involving 107 kindergarten and first grade children indicates that the two are actually distinct concepts. Apparently, a willingness to arbitrarily assign tags is a developmentally less sophisticated ability than--and hence does not necessarily imply--an ability to predict that differently ordered counts produce the same cardinal designation. Thus it appears that evidence of the second ability is necessary to infer a full understanding of the order-irrelevance principle. The first ability alone implies what might better be termed an "order-indifferent tagging scheme." Suggestions for measuring and further researching the order-irrelevance principle are discussed.     

The effect of television-mediated aggression and real-life aggression on the behavior of Lebanese children

This study investigated the effect of television-mediated aggression and real-life aggression on the behavior of Lebanese children. The sample consisted of 48 boys and 48 girls of Lebanese origin who were students in an elementary school in Beirut, Lebanon. After controlling for pre-experimental aggression, the subjects were randomly assigned to one of the following treatment conditions: human-film aggression, cartoon-film aggression, neutral film, or real-life (act of war) aggression. The results indicated that boys as a group were more aggressive than girls and exhibited more imitative aggression after viewing both violent film and real-life violence. Girls were not more violent after viewing filmed aggression but were affected by the real-life violence. Comparisons of Bandura's work within the Lebanese culture are made.     

Behavioral consequences of song learning: Discrimination of song types by male white-crowned sparrows

The functional significance of learned population differences in male song in the white-crowned sparrow was explored in natural populations using playback tests. Laboratory results have shown that learning of the population-specific song seems to take place in early life and is strongly dependent upon the nature of the auditory experience at that time. However, the varied results of recent studies make it difficult to reach a confident conclusion about the ecological functions of song learning. The present research took advantage of naturally occurring variation in the differences between songs of adjacent populations to determine a function relating degree of difference in song to intensity of territorial singing elicited. Applying a typological evaluation of syllable structure to the four segments of the song allowed a crude quantitative ranking of the differences between local songs and playback stimuli. These results, together with those of other studies, suggest a unimodal aggressive response function of males to songs of other males. A maximum response to songs slightly different from the local song environment suggests that male exclusion based upon acquired song components may contribute to the maintenance of discrete and stable song dialects.     

The influence of flavor preexposure and test interval on conditioned taste aversions in the rat

The effects of flavor preexposure and test interval on conditioned taste aversions were examined in four experiments. In the first three experiments, prior experience with a flavor different from that used as a conditioned-stimulus (CS) produced attenuated aversions when testing occurred after a 1-day interval but not after a 21-day interval. Preexposure to the same stimulus used as a CS produced attenuated aversions at both 1- and 21-day intervals. In Experiment 4, a delay interval between flavor preexposure and conditioning eliminated the attenuating effect of preexposure, but only when different stimuli were used for preexposure and conditioning. These data could not be easily accounted for by contemporary interpretations of preexposure as an event that interferes with subsequent acquisition of a conditioned aversion. An alternative retrieval interference hypothesis was outlined.     

Investigations of the reinstatement of extinguished fear

In two experiments, fear was conditioned to the situational cues in one compartment of a hurdle-jumping apparatus and was then extinguished. Subsequently, either one shock (Experiment 1) or three or nine shocks (Experiment 2) were given in a situation distinctively different from that in which conditioning and extinction had taken place. Although some associative strength between the situational cues and fear was shown to have remained after extinction, in neither experiment did the postextinction-shock treatment increase the fear elicited by these cues: Escape-from-fear performance was no better in the shocked groups than in control groups given no additional shock. Thus, the nonassociative hypothesis which postulates that inflating the value of the representation of the UCS with shock-alone presentations can reinstate the extinguished fear of a stimulus was not supported. Rather, the results showed that, after extinction, an increase in fear of a simulus depended on further conditioning to that stimulus. The data also indicated that the nonvisual components of the situational cues predominated over the visual component.