信息量和明显度对规则可获得性的影响

该研究探索了规则的信息量与明显度对规则可获得性的影响。采用改编后的2-4-6任务, 70名大学生参加了两个实验。实验1发现, 规则可获得性除了受到信息量的影响外, 还受到明显度的显著影响; 实验2增加了规则的探测, 发现信息量大、明显度高的规则更容易用语言陈述出来, 而信息量小、明显度低的规则更不容易陈述出来。实验结果启示：信息量大、明显度高的规则可能是一种外显规则, 而信息量小、明显度低的规则可能是一种内隐规则。初步提出了“计算和感知的双加工”模型。     

Effects of Interspersing Additional Brief Math Problems on Student Performance and Perception of Math Assignments: Getting Students to Prefer to Do More Work

Three experiments were conducted to assess the effects of the interspersing procedure on students' mathematics performance, perceptions of mathematics assignments, and preference for mathematics assignments when more work was added. In Experiment I, college students worked computation problems from two assignments. The control assignment contained 15 three-digit by two-digit problems (3 × 2) and the experimental assignments contained 18 3 × 2 problems and 6 additional interspersed one-digit by one-digit problems (1 × 1). Students then rated the assignments and chose one for homework. Results showed significantly more students preferred (i.e., chose it for homework) the experimental assignment with the additional target (i.e., 3 × 2) and interspersed problems. Furthermore, significantly more students rated this experiment as requiring less effort and being less difficult. Moreover, students' mathematics performance was not affected by the procedure. Experiment II strengthened the internal validity by showing that students did not prefer the experimental assignment because it contained more target problems. Experiment III showed that the interspersing procedure was not powerful enough to extend findings beyond the 20% level (i.e., 40 and 60% more conditions). Results showed how the interspersing procedure could be used to encourage students to choose to do more target computation tasks. Discussion focuses on the applied value of the interspersing procedure and plausible causal mechanisms that may account for current and past findings related to student choice and interspersing brief tasks.     

A dialogue on Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise

The five participants in this dialogue critically discuss Zeno of Elea's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. They consider a number of solutions to and restatements of the paradox, together with their philosophical implications. Among the issues investigated include the appearance-reality distinction, Aristotle's distinction between actual and potential infinity, the concept of a continuum, Cantor's continuum hypothesis and theory of transfinite ordinals, and, as a solution to Zeno's puzzle, the distinction between infinite and indeterminate or inexhaustible divisibility.     

The effects of delayed reinforcement on free-operant responding

In previous studies of delayed reinforcement, response rate has been found to vary inversely with the response-reinforcer interval. However, in all of these studies the independent variable, response-reinforcer time, was confounded with the number of reinforcers presented in a fixed period of time (reinforcer frequency). In the present study, the frequency of available reinforcers was held constant, while temporal separation between response and reinforcer was independently manipulated. A repeating time cycle, T, was divided into two alternating time periods, t^D and t^Δ. The first response in t^D was reinforced at the end of the prevailing T cycle and extinction prevailed in t^Δ. Two placements for t^D were defined, an early t^D placement in which t^D precedes t^Δ and a late t^D placement in which t^D follows t^Δ. The duration of the early and late t^D was systematically decreased from 30 seconds (i.e., t^D = T) to 0.1 second. Manipulation of t^D placement and duration controlled the temporal separation between response and reinforcement, but it did not affect the frequency of programmed reinforcers, which was 1/T. The results show that early and late t^D placements of equal duration have similar overall effects upon response rate, reinforcer frequency, responses per reinforcer, and obtained response-reinforcer temporal separation. A stepwise regression analysis using log response rate as the dependent variable showed that the obtained delay was a significant first-step variable for six of eight subjects, with obtained reinforcer frequency significant for the remaining two subjects.     

Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Attitude Salience, and Beliefs about Matters of Fact

Previous investigations have demonstrated a relationship between endorsement of right-wing authoritarian (RWA) ideology and attitudes toward social and societal issues (e.g., abortion, drug use, affirmative action, and homosexuality). By contrast, the present studies examined the relationship between RWA and beliefs about matters of fact bearing on such issues (e.g., estimates of the prevalence of third trimester abortions, AIDS, concealed weapons). Studies 1 and 2 supported the propositions that high-RWA and low-RWA participants would show differences in their informational beliefs about sociopolitical matters consistent with differences in their respective ideologies and consistent with their putative differential cynicism about human nature. Study 3 demonstrated that the relationship between RWA and informational beliefs is amplified by the heightened salience of attitudes toward the targets of those beliefs.     

音高模式加工的大脑偏侧化研究

作为一种超音段成分,音高在言语的理解和产生过程中承担着重要作用,这些作用主要包括:区别不同声调的词汇意义,区别陈述、疑问等不同的语调,标志话语的情绪色彩等。音段、语义和句法信息的加工具有左脑优势,但音高模式加工的单侧优势及其机制还存在很多争论,本文从音高模式加工的两个主要理论———功能假设和声音信号假设出发,对相关研究加以评述。     

Silent letters and phonological priming

Many written English words contain silent letters. Omitting them produces nonwords pronounced identically to the original words, for example, SALM for PSALM and COLUM for COLUMN. We report two naming and two lexical decision experiments in which targets of 4–11 letters followed primes exposed for 100 ms in mask-prime-mask-target sequences. Priming in SALM-psalm and COLUM-column pairs exceeded priming in orthographic control pairs such as ASTA-pasta and COUSI-cousin, pairs in which pronounced letters are omitted to form the primes. SALM and COLUM, however, were less effective primes than PSALM and COLUMN. Results were discussed in terms of the phonological coherence hypothesis, the role of orthographic codes in filtering phonologically activated representations, and graphemes as reading units.     

Prosodic phrasing and attachment preferences

The attachment of a relative clause (RC) has been found to differ across languages when its head noun is a complex NP. One attempt to explain the attachment differences is the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) proposed by Fodor (1998, 2002). The goal of this paper is to show how the default phrasing of a sentence (explicit prosody), defined phonologically, differs across seven languages (English, Greek, Spanish, French, Farsi, Japanese, and Korean), and how the prosodic phrasing of a sentence in each language, both default and nondefault, matches the interpretation of RC attachment by individual speakers. Observed tendencies show that there is a direct relationship between the prosodic phrasing and the interpretation of RC attachment, strongly supporting the IPH. In addition, the paper discusses the status of default phrasing and the factors affecting the default phrasing, including rhythmic and syntactic factors and their interactions.     

Conditioned reinforcement by conditional discriminative stimuli.

A concurrent-chains schedule was used to examine how a delay to conditional discriminative stimuli affects conditioned reinforcement strength. Pigeons' key-peck responses in the initial link produced either of two terminal links according to independent variable-interval 30-s schedules. Each terminal link involved an identical successive conditional discrimination and was segmented into three links: a delay interval (green), a color conditional discriminative stimulus (blue or red), and a line conditional discriminative stimulus (vertical or horizontal lines). Food delivery occurred 45 s after entering the terminal link with a probability of .5, but its conditional probability (1.0 or 0) depended on the combination of the color and the line stimuli. One of the color stimuli occurred independently of further responding, 5 s after entry into the right terminal link, but it occurred 35 s after entry into the left terminal link. One of the line stimuli occurred independently of responding 40 s after entry into either terminal link, synchronized with the offset of the color stimulus. The initial-link relative response rate for the right was consistently higher in comparison with a control condition in which the color stimuli occurred 20 s after entry into either terminal link. The preference for the short delay to the color conditional discriminative stimuli suggests the possibility of conditioned reinforcement by information about the relation between the line conditional discriminative stimuli and the outcomes.