Memory for companions in preschool children

Memory of preschool children (4 years of age) for companions was investigated by comparing interview data using a picture sociometric technique with observational data on actual play companions. Accuracy decreased with successive nominations, and length of recall period. However children were able to name companions played with today, yesterday, last week and at the beginning of term, at well above chance levels. Accuracies improved during the term. The relevance of friendships and social experience for memory and cognitive processes in young children is discussed.     

Are there developmental differences in reality-monitoring?

The question addressed by the present experiment is whether the ability to distinguish between veridical and imaginal memory representations changes with age. Second-grade, fourth-grade, and sixth grade children (8, 10, and 12 years old) and college students were shown pictures of familiar objects. Each picture was presented one, two, or three times and, interspersed with these presentations, subjects were asked to imagine each picture zero, one, or three times. Subsequently they were asked to judge the presentation frequency of each picture. For all groups, imagining the pictures resulted in inflated estimates of event frequency. However, contrary to the idea that children have a particularly difficult time discriminating externally generated from internally generated memories, one analysis indicated adults were actually somewhat more affected than children by the imagination trials.     

A critical review of a recent decade of stuttering research

The purpose of the present investigation was to catalogue and evaluate portions of the literature on stuttering from 1967 to 1977. Of particular interest was the identification of the research literature. Of 287 articles located and evaluated, 181 were research reports. These reports were categorized according to topics, subject selection, subjects' characteristics, type of research designs and use of randomization, reliability, and statistical methods. Unhappily, many of the faults identified in reviews ten to twenty years earlier tended to persist, and many of the deficiencies recently cited by authorities in the field were found to characterize this literature.     

Masculinity-femininity perceptions of job requirements and their relationship to job-sex stereotypes

Perceived sex appropriateness of the work situation is believed to constrain work opportunities, particularly for women. However, sex appropriateness may be defined either with respect to the entire job or with respect to the tasks which comprise the job. In this study sex appropriateness of job tasks was examined by obtaining subjective estimates of the masculinity-femininity of the job requirement dimensions defined by the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT). Results indicate that interacting with things is perceived as masculine, interacting with people is perceived as feminine, and interacting with data is perceived as falling between the other two. There is less agreement on the masculinity-femininity of specific types of interactions with data, people, and things. Sex appropriateness of specific requirements was found to be only moderately associated with the DOT's assessment of the complexity of those requirements. Further, sex appropriateness of job requirements was not highly related to the job sextypes established by Shinar (Shinar, E. H. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 1975, 7, 99–110) and Krefting et al. (Krefting, L. A., Berger, P. K., and Wallace, M. J. Jr. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 1978, 13, 181–191). This suggests that sex appropriateness of a job and sex appropriateness of the tasks which comprise the job are distinct, separate concepts.     

Career satisfaction and role harmony in a sample of young women physicians

In a sample of young women physicians, self-ratings of Career Satisfaction and Role Harmony were correlated with a group of situational, achievement, and personality variables. Career Satisfaction was extremely high with about 88% reporting they are satisfied or very satisfied. However, over half experienced at least a moderate amount of strain in integrating professional and sex roles. In addition women who were high on both Career Satisfaction and Role Harmony were compared with the others in the sample and individual differences were apparent: These women were exceptionally confident, intellectually resourceful, and tolerant; they tended to have clear priorities with either family or work coming first. Overall their current level of personality adjustment was superior to the others who, as a group, were very well-functioning women.     

The efficacy of auditory and visual conjugate reinforcers in infant conditioning

The effectiveness of the separate auditory and visual components of a combined auditory-visual conjugate reinforcer was assessed in 273-month-old infants. All conditions of contingent reinforcement were equally effective in promoting acquisition, but only the removal of the singly presented auditory component resulted in significant response diminution. Although noncontingent stimulation in all conditions was ineffective in altering operant footkicks, it did sustain visual attention at a high level equivalent to that produced by contingent stimulation over the major portion of acquisition. The results were discussed in terms of the reinforcing properties of varied stimulation.     

Newborns' central vision: Whole or hole?

We studied visual detection in 150 infants, 1- to 7-days old, by presenting single lines varying in width and location. We found that newborns detected a line only 8′ wide in the central visual field. Peripherally, they appeared to detect lines of 33′, 33′, and 1°6′ at 10°, 20°, and 30°, respectively. Thus, both the central retina and the peripheral retina appear to function at birth.     

Defensiveness, intimacy, and heterosexual attraction

A previous study by Dion and Dion (1975) revealed that highly defensive individuals were less likely to report having experienced romantic love than less defensive persons. The hypothesis that this finding might reflect differential reactions to interpersonal intimacy was directly examined in the present study using a self-disclosure paradigm. To assess subjects' defensiveness, undergraduate women first completed the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale. In a second session, subjects were exposed to high and low disclosing targets of the same and opposite sex and chose discussion topics for each target. On intimacy of self-disclosure, a “reciprocity effect” occurred: subjects chose more intimate topics for high vs low-disclosing targets. However, highly defensive women gave a less favorable self-presentation to male vs female targets. They also expressed less liking for high compared to low intimate targets and males vs females than less defensive subjects. The implications of these results for heterosexual attraction were discussed.     

Evoked potential correlates of visual selective attention

Two experiments are reported in which the relationship is explored between the N1 and P2 components of the visual evoked potential and visual selective attention. In both experiments, channels were defined in terms of stimulus attributes (experiment 1 — intensity; experiment 2 — shape) with all stimuli being presented at a common spatial locus in order to preclude fixation shifts. Under these circumstances, P2 was found in both experiments to correlate with visual selective attention whereas N1 did not. It is concluded from the null result for N1 that a precortical gating mechanism for visual inputs within a single spatial channel is not a component of the visual system. The P2 correlate of visual selective attention, because of its long latency, is attributed to the differential post-perceptual processing inevitably received by task-relevant and task-irrelevant inputs.