Young children's attention to global magnitude: evidence from classification tasks

Young children often compare objects holistically and not in terms of separate dimensions such as size and color. One holistic relation that often governs young children's object comparisons is overall similarity. Two experiments were conducted to examine the possibility that a holistic magnitude relation might also govern children's object comparisons. Objects varying on two dimensions of magnitude-size and saturation--were classified by 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. The results indicated that the younger children were sensitive to global magnitude as well as overall similarity. They grouped together large and saturated objects or small and desaturated objects more often than they did large and desaturated (or small and saturated) objects and thus appear to have been classifying by combined magnitude across both dimensions. This new finding that young children classify by a global relation of magnitude refines the understanding of perceptual development and provides information about the structure of perception. Young children's use of global magnitudes in classification also fits well with recent findings about children's acquisitions of dimension words.     

Bound morpheme loss errors in normal and agrammatic speech: One mechanism or two?

Loss errors involving bound morphemes in normal and agrammatic speech are examined to determine if all errors can be due to a single processing problem. It is concluded that two problems are present. First, there is a general problem with accessing bound morphemes (or forms containing bound morphemes), leading to the production of the base form. Second, there is a syntactic problem involving agreement. In agrammatism, the first problem is differentially exacerbated. Implications for normal and agrammatic speech are examined.     

Resistance to satiation: Reinforcing effects of food and eating under satiation

It has been shown previously that rats which have learned a response when hungry will continue to make that response when tested satiated, a phenomenon labeled resistance to satiation. Here we showed that rats which were previously trained hungry will learn a new response for the opportunity to consume pellets in a new situation when tested satiated. In four experiments various groups received each of the components of the training given when rats learn an instrumental response when hungry. Rats were placed in the goalbox of a straight alley and given food pellets when hungry or were hungry only in their home cages prior to running a straight alley in the satiated test in Experiment 1. In Experiments 2, 3, and 4 learning of a differential conditioning problem for pellets in S+ (nonreward in S?) was measured in the satiated test. Groups given pellets in their home cages when hungry with or without alley exposure learned to run more rapidly in S+ than in S? in the satiated test phase. The tendency to eat pellets in the apparatus and the reinforcing effect of eating the pellets was larger for rats which ate the pellets when hungry in their home cage than for rats which ate the pellets when satiated in their home cage. Being hungry in the home cage with no pellets was not sufficient to produce eating or running for pellets in the satiated test, indicating that any inherent reinforcing effect of the pellets is not sufficient to produce eating or running, and that incomplete satiation cannot account for the learning. These data indicate that a reinforcing effect of eating pellets under satiation is an important determiner of resistance to satiation.     

Functional similarity and interpersonal attraction

A pair of related experiments examined the relationship of functional similarity (i.e., the degree of similarity between two interactants in assessing mutually known others on personal construct dimensions) to interpersonal attraction. In Experiment I, 10 previously unacquainted college students of both sexes participated in 10 hours of dyadic disclosure exercises over a 5-week period. As predicted, members of high functional similarity dyads evidenced greater attraction to one another than did members of low functional similarity dyads. Experiment II investigated the relationship of functional similarity to level of acquaintance (i.e., friends, nominals) and type of assessment (i.e., physical, interactional, psychological) in a 2 × 3 factorial design. As hypothesized, “friendship” pairs of male undergraduates displayed greater functional similarity than did “nominal” pairs from the same population, particularly at the deeper level of “psychological” assessment. Results are discussed in relation to classical conditioning (D. Byrne, In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 4. New York. Academic Press, 1969), affect-reinforcement (G. L. Clore, In S. W. Duck (Ed.), Theory and practice in interpersonal attraction. New York/London: Academic Press, 1977) and information processing ( I. Ajzen, In S. Duck (Ed.), Theory and practice in interpersonal attraction, New York/London: Academic Press, 1977) models of interpersonal attraction, and are interpreted as supporting and extending (S. Duck's Theory and practice in interpersonal attraction, New York/London: Academic Press, 1977) filtering theory of friendship formation.     

Pretty pleases: The effects of physical attractiveness,race, and sex on receiving help

The major purpose of this study was to investigate whether favoritism for the physically attractive, a phenomenom demonstrated amost exclusively on the basis of rating scales, generalizes to nonreactive, behavioral helping responses. Four hundred and forty-two males and 162 female white adult callers in public phone booths in a large metropolitan airport found a completed graduate school application form, a photograph of the applicant, and an addressed, stamped envelope. The picture was used to convey information as to the physical attractiveness (attractive vs. unattractive), race (black vs. white), and sex of the applicant. As predicted, delivery of the application was facilitated more for attractive than unattractive persons. There was also a significant race effect, with whites receiving more help than blacks. Implications of these findings for the physical attractiveness literature are discussed.     

Clogs in the bogus pipeline: Demand characteristics and social desirability

Jones and Sigall (1971) have advocated the use of a pseudophysiological monitoring device (the bogus pipeline) as a procedure to measure the “true” feelings of experimental subjects. A comparison of the bogus pipeline and a paper-and-pencil scale as measures of attraction indicated that the monitoring device is affected by experimenter demands among high social desirability (SD) subjects (p < .03) while the simple rating scale is not. Attraction to a stranger was determined solely by attitude similarity for high SD subjects using the paper-and-pencil measure and for low SD subjects in both measurement conditions. Use of the bogus pipeline in the typical attraction experiment thus would seem to be contraindicated. These results were discussed with respect to Ostrom's (1973) criteria of relative sensitivity and functional comparability of measurement techniques.     

Contrast effects and their relationship to subsequent behavior

The present study attempted to apply social judgment theories to the effects of context on judgments of the importance of a social issue and on subsequent issue-related behavior. Subjects judged the importance of a target issue (recycling) in the context of either important or unimportant social issues and were subsequently asked in a separate setting for help on a local recycling project. Context produced contrast effects on rating scale judgments of the importance of recycling. These judgments, if salient, were then used as a basis for subsequent support of the recycling project. When either the initial judgment was not salient or no prior judgment of recycling was made, the importance of the context had a positive effect on amount of support for recycling, such that more help was given in the important context conditions. Results indicate that contrast effects on the ratings are response base rather than perceptual in nature, but that the rating, if salient, can serve as subsequent behavior and attitudes.     

Viewer's moral sanction of retribution in the appreciation of dramatic presentations

An audiovisually presented fairy tale, which involved provocation and retaliation as the central theme, was created in three versions. Relative to the provocation, retaliation was too mild, equitable, or too severe. Children at the developmental stages of expiatory retribution (4-yr olds) and equitable retribution (7- and 8-yr olds) served as subjects. Appreciation of the presentation was measured in facial displays, in structured interviews, and in ratings. Consistently across measures, it was found that for children at the stage of expiatory retribution, appreciation increased with the severity of the retaliatory acts. Children at the stage of equitable retribution, in contrast, appreciated equitable retaliation the most. At this stage, inequitable retaliation (too mild or too severe) was found to impair appreciation significantly. The findings were interpreted as consistent with the proposal that the depiction of punitive, retaliatory activities will be enjoyed the more, the closer they approximate the viewer's moral expectations.     

Stimulus control of responding in the early trials of differential conditioning

In Experiment 1 two groups of rats were given 12 differential conditioning trials, seven to the rewarded alley (S+) and five to the nonrewarded alley (S?), prior to being extinguished in both alleys. Group S?S+ received S+ trials, following S? trials in acquisition, while Group S+S? did not receive S+ trials following S? trials in acquisition. In extinction S+ and S? trials were presented according to a quasi-random sequence for both groups. Running on the last 3 trials of acquisition was found to be faster following S+ than following S? trials. Group S?S+ showed greater resistance to extinction and less discriminative responding in extinction than Group S+S?. These results suggest that responding in differential conditioning is controlled not merely by S+ and S? but by the memories of reward (S^R) and of nonreward (S^N) as well. When the joint effects of both classes of cues were considered, e.g., S^R+S+, responding in the early trials of differential conditioning was shown to be highly orderly. Experiment 2 was highly similar to Experiment 1 except that Groups S?S+ and S+S? were equated along dimensions not equated in Experiment 1. The results obtained in Experiment 2 were highly similar to those obtained in Experiment 1.     

Prosodic disturbance in aphasia: Vowel length in Thai

The aim of this study is to determine to what extent a phonologically contrastive function of the prosodic feature of length is resistant to impairment in aphasia. The language chosen for investigation is Thai, a language which contrasts short and long vowels. Subjects included two Broca aphasics, one transcortical motor aphasic, one Wernicke aphasic, one conduction aphasic, one nonaphasic right-brain-damaged patient, one nonaphasic cerebellar dysarthric patient, and five normal controls. The subjects read a list of words containing short and long vowels. Vowel durations were measured from spectrograms. The results showed that the timing of vowel duration for signaling the contrast between short and long vowels remains relatively intact in nonfluent as well as fluent aphasic patients. These data are brought to bear on issues concerning the specialization of the left hemisphere for temporal processing, the contribution of the right hemisphere to the processing of nonaffective components of prosody, the nature of prosodic disturbance in Broca's aphasia and cerebellar dysarthria, and the separate disruption of prosodic features.