The relation of esteem and vocational counseling to range of incorporation scores

Range of incorporation scores is a potential outcome measure of vocational counseling. Post-test analysis was used to examine the relation of vocational counseling and esteem to 69 Vietnam veterans' ranges of incorporation scores. Measures of esteem and incorporation for eight professions were obtained from 36 veterans who had just completed 10 hr of group counseling and 33 who were just beginning counseling. ANOVA of the ranges of the incorporation scores indicated that high-esteem veterans had higher ranges than low-esteem veterans (p <.05), and suggested that counseled veterans had higher ranges than noncounseled veterans (p ? .10).     

Development of relational learning: Effects of instruction and delay of transfer

Preschool children were trained on a color relevant oddity problem by one of three methods: increased salience of the oddity relationship, instruction on the solution rule, or a combination of increased salience and rule instruction. The youngest Ss solved the training problem when the solution rule was provided but not under the salience procedure. The two older groups solved in all conditions and errors decreased with age. The generality of the solution was determined by performance on a form relevant transfer task. The youngest Ss made fewer errors on the transfer problem following rule instruction training than following training in the combined procedure. The intermediate age group made fewer errors when the transfer task was administered one week after training than one minute after training. The transfer problem was easily solved by the oldest Ss and performance was independent of training procedure and amount of delay. These results were interpreted as reflecting developmental differences in relational concept learning.     

Knowing when you don't know enough: Children's judgements about ambiguous information

Two experiments were carried out to find out whether young children's failure to realise when messages are ambiguous is specific to verbally transmitted information about a person's intended meaning. In Experiment 1, children judged whether they had been told/shown enough to identify which one of a set of cards the experimenter had chosen. In one game the experimenter gave verbal messages about her chosen cards, and in a second game, she gave visual messages. With ambiguous visual messages, relevant parts of cards were physically covered. We expected that this would make it more obvious that the speaker's intended meaning was not being fully conveyed. No difference was found between verbal and visual conditions: correct judgements about message ambiguity occured with the same frequency in both.In Experiment 2, children judged in one game whether they had been told enough about the experimenter's chosen card, as in Experiment 1. In a second game, visual information about a card was not conveyed by the experimenter, Rather, the child operated a pointer, set in a disc with windows, beneath which lay cards. The child judged whether the window showed enough for him/her to tell which card the pointer indicated. Again, correct judgments about ambiguity occured with the same frequency in both games.The results implied that children's failure to realise when verbal messages are ambiguous is but one aspect of a more general failure to realise when one has insufficient information at one's disposal to guarantee a correct interpretation of what the world is like.     

Developmental effects of typicality and superordinate property dominance on sentence verification

Second graders (mean age, 8 years 3 months), fourth graders (mean age, 10 years 4 months), and adults verified telegraphic sentences with typical or atypical subject nouns and high or low dominant property predicates. The hypothesis tested was that the similarity in the attribute structures of category members to their superordinate prototype should be related to degree of typicality. Adult reaction time and error data supported the prototype model of semantic category structure. Second and fourth graders showed comparable property knowledge to adults, but evidenced different organizational patterns than predicted by the adult model. The results suggest that with development children learn to simultaneously use many attribute dimensions and to abstract the family resemblance structure and relative importance of category properties.     

Let's pretend: The role of motoric imagery in memory for sentences and words

A number of theories suggest that for young children, concepts should have an important motoric (or sensory-motor) component. A levels-of-processing theory is proposed which predicts that processing on motoric imagery should facilitate memory for both isolated words and for sentences. Experiment 1 examined the effects of motoric enactment (viz., pretend play) of sentences on memory for the sentences. Motoric imagery facilitated memory for both children (5 to 7 years of age) and adults, though, contrary to expectations, the effects were weaker for the children than for the adults. Further, it was found that motoric imagery affected the initial acquisition, but was not important as a retreival cue. Experiment 2 examined the effects of motoric imagery on free recall of lists of unrelated words. Under these conditions, motoric imagery facilitated memory for both children (7 to 9 years of age) and adults equally; in contrast, visual imagery instructions had no effect on memory. These results indicate that motoric imagery may facilitate memory under conditions in which visual imagery has no effect. Theoretical implications are explored for previous experiments on pretend play which suggest that training for pretent enactment can facilitate cognitive development.     

Attention of 4-month infants to discrepancy and babyishness

A set of four facial stimuli derived from the Bolton standards of craniofacial development representing a human male at 6 months, 3, 8, and 18 years of age were used in a test of Lorenz's concept of babyishness and of the discrepancy hypothesis. Each 4-month-old subject was habituated to a criterion with one of the four stimuli and then presented with one of the four as a new stimulus. The design and analysis permitted the response to a new stimulus to be broken down into a component attributable to the physical characteristics of the new stimulus and a part attributable to its discrepancy from the familiar standard. The data revealed longer looking at the infant facial stimulus, but no difference in a rating of affect accompanying fixation. This lent partial support to the babyishness concept for infant subjects. Both fixation and affect increased monotonically with magnitude of discrepancy. The increasing rather than curvilinear result presumably derived from the failure of these stimuli (which were common to the infant's experience) to generate extreme levels of subjective uncertainty.     

Linguistic and other psychological aspects of paroxysmal aphasia

A case of paroxysmal aphasia is reported. Aphasic spells occurred, in this patient, without modification in consciousness and without involvement of behaviors others than those related to oral and written speech and language. Longer spells successively recapitulated the clinical pictures of global, Wernicke's, conduction, and amnestic aphasia. Besides aphasiological evaluations, neurological, psychometrical, electroencephalographical, and CT-scan documents were obtained. The discussion bears on four main points: the linguistic characteristics of paroxysmal aphasia as compared to those of aphasias of other etiologies; Pierre Marie's oneness doctrine of aphasia; the mutual relationships of language and thought (in aphasia); the affective experience lived by one with severe aphasia, with special reference to the notion of anosognosia.     

Task relevant effects on the assessment of cerebral specialization for facial emotion

Hemispheric specialization for processing different types of rapidly exposed stimuli was examined in a forced choice reaction time task. Four conditions of recognition were included: tacial emotion, neutral faces, emotional words, and neutral words. Only the facial emotion condition produced a significant visual field advantage (in favor of the left visual field), but this condition did not differ significantly from the neutral face condition's left visual field superiority. The verbal conditions produced significantly decreased latencies with RVF presentation, while the LVF presentation was associated with decreased latencies on the facial conditions. These results suggested that facial recognition and affective processing cannot be separated as independent factors generating right hemisphere superiority for facial emotion perception, and that task parameters (verbal vs. nonverbal) are important influences upon effects in studies of cerebral specialization.     

Varieties of frequency interference in children's recognition of sentence information

The memory of fourth-grade children (9 years, 10 months of age) for information contained in target sentences presented 24 hours earlier was tested by multiple-choice recognition items each consisting of a question about a target sentence followed by three response options. The options consisted of the correct word from the sentence, a new word, and an old, incorrect word that was contained in another sentence on the study trial. The results indicated that the amount of interference produced by old information depended upon the relationship between the sentence in which the old information occurred and the target sentence—being the least when the two were unrelated; the most when the two shared the same subject noun (which also occurred in the stem of the test item for the target sentence); and intermediate when the subjects of the two sentences were synonyms. The interference produced by these manipulations was moderated by instructional strategies and the distance between the target sentence and its variation. The experiment establishes the validity of contextual frequency accrual, a construct logically necessary in extending frequency theory to recognition of information contained in sentences.