Antecedents to Fechner's law: the astronomers J. Herschel, W. R. Dawes, and N. R. Pogson

The history of the stellar magnitude scale is briefly traced from the second century b.c. until the middle of the nineteenth century. It becomes clear that astronomers formulated "Fechner's Law" by about 1850. While Fechner is credited with the grander view of things, the contention is made that the astronomers John Herschel, W. R. Dawes, and N. R. Pogson have not been given their due by historians of psychology.     

Cross-modal matching and association under sodium amytal

Anatomical and theoretical considerations, as well as experimental findings, have yielded conflicting points of view regarding the abilities of the right hemisphere in man to accomplish cross-modal transfer of information. Auditory—visual cross-modal matching (CMM) and association (CMA) abilities of the left and right hemisphere (LH and RH) were tested, using the Wada intracarotid sodium amytal technique. It was found that the RH performed slightly better on these tasks than the LH. These findings contrast with results of other techniques which indicate that the RH cannot perform CMM and CMA.     

Developmental changes in conditional reasoning: Linguistic or logical?

This study investigated reasoning with abstract conditional sentences as a function of age. Subjects from third-grade to eleventh-grade were required to evaluate the conclusion of several conditional arguments. The results confirmed the previously established finding that performance improves with age, particularly between 11 and 15 years. This finding could be interpreted to indicate that individuals become more logical as they get older. However, another possible interpretation is that the meaning of a conditional sentence like pthenq for naive Ss may not always be given by the truth function pq true, $\text{p}\text{q}$ false, $\text{p}\text{q}$ true, and $\text{p}\text{q}$ true. Further analysis suggested that at 9 years individuals treat the connective in the sentence, ifpthenq, as if it were either a conjunctive or a biconditional, that the conjunctive meaning disappears with increasing age and after 13 years is gradually superceded by the conditional.     

Syntactic facilitation of children's associative learning: An instructional effect

An experiment is reported in which connective recall, as well as noun recall, was obtained in a pair-associate learning, syntactic facilitation paradigm. Dfferences in the pattern of noun and connective recall, and a partial independence in the two types of recall, were obtained. These results were interpreted as consistent with the hypothesis that experimenter-supplied verb links facilitate noun pair learning by serving an instructional role, indicating to the subject how a pair might be coded.     

The effect of a low rate of regular signals upon the reaction times of introverts and extraverts

In an RT (reaction time) task involving responding to infrequent, regular signals, extraverts produced higher proportions of missed signals and lengthened RT's than introverts did. This result was only obtained after some time on task and is evidence that inhibitory states are formed more rapidly in extraverted subjects under low stimulation conditions. In a more extended version of the task, mean RT was found to be longer in extraverted than introverted subjects in the second half of the experiment though there was no significant difference between the groups in the first half. These findings are complementary to data from previous studies showing that extraverts generate stronger inhibitory potential in continuous responding tasks, or that their characteristic arousal level may be lower than that of introverted subjects. The need to distinguish between the different explanatory constructs is discussed and a simple model amalgamating the major theoretical positions is outlined.     

Concerning Hunt's new ways of assessing intelligence

Hunt envisions the automation of intelligence testing (Intelligence, 1982, 6, 231–240), but he appears to be overly optimistic. He neglects to mention conceptual and practical difficulties at the interface of measurement and theory that place psychometry not in the dawn of microcomputerization, but rather more nearly in its primordium.