Measuring the visual angle of the mind's eye

People in these experiments claimed to be able to imagine moving only a given distance toward some imaged object before it seemed to “overflow,” not remaining all visible at once in their mental images. In addition, the larger the imaged object, the further away it seemed at the point of overflow. Although the angle subtended by the imaged objects at the point of overflow did not vary systematically with the size of the object, it did vary with different stimuli and instructions. These disparities in the size of the angle estimated seemed partly due to differences in criterion of “overflow”: Images seem to fade off gradually toward the periphery and not to occur in a spatial medium with sharply defined edges. When subjects were given a relatively strict definition of “overflow,” similar estimates of the “visual angle of the mind's eye” were obtained with three distinct methods: (1) Asking subjects to estimate the apparent distance at which an imaged horizontal ruler began to overflow; (2) Measuring how much time subjects required to scan across each degree of an imaged line, and then inferring the maximal angle from the time required to scan an image of a longest nonoverflowing line; and, (3) Simply asking subjects to hold up their hands to indicate the subjective size of an image of the longest possible nonoverflowing line. Finally, the maximal subjective size of images seemed related to the scope of “focal” vision, and images tended to be constructed spontaneously at about the maximal size.     

Social judgments of spurious and causal relations between attributes and outcomes

People can learn about relations between attributes and outcomes by observing the attributes and outcomes of others, but, as this experiment indicates, such learning is not always veridical. Each subject received information about the ages, educations, and salaries of groups of employees in a fictitious corporation. Within a group, either age or education was related to salaries and the two attributes were either orthogonal or correlated. In each case, subjects judged the strength of the causal relation between each attribute and salaries. The results confirmed our hypothesis that observers are more likely to view a causally relevant attribute as irrelevant, and a causally irrelevant attribute as relevant, when relevant and irrelevant attributes are correlated. However, this tendency seemed to be mediated by subjects' bias to prefer education as an explanation of salary differences: That is, when age and education were correlated, subjects tended to view education as relevant even when it was irrelevant and age as irrelevant even when it was relevant. The results suggest that when attributes are correlated, factors extraneous to observed data may have a major influence on inferred attribute-outcome associations.     

Effects of eye contact and social status on the perception of a job applicant in an employment interviewing situation

The present study examines the independent and joint effects of variations in eye contact and social status on the way in which job applicants tend to be perceived in employment interviewing situations. The key dependent variable in the analysis is the interviewer's perception of how well the applicant is suited for a job requiring or involving self-confidence. The results, based on a laboratory analogue of an employment interview, show statistically significant main effects for eye contact and social status, as well as a significant two-way interaction effect. Effects of the manipulations on job-specific ratings are also reported, and implications of the research for biases in employment interviewing are discussed.     

Repetition in the transcortical aphasias

Transcortical aphasic patients were assessed on a repetition task comprised of both well-formed and deviant sentences. The patients faithfully repeated those sentences that were factually incorrect but grammatically well formed, and those sentences that were ungrammatical because of selection restriction violations. In contrast, presented with sentences featuring only minor syntactic violations (e.g., lack of number agreement), the patients spontaneously, and without awareness, resisted exact repetition; moreover, the resultant changes most often served to correct the syntactic deviations. Repetitions of sentences of this latter type also revealed a difference between the patients as a function of level of comprehension. The transcortical motor aphasic patient was influenced by semantic factors in his alterations of the minor syntactic violations, while the transcortical sensory aphasic was not. These findings are discussed in relation to the notion of autonomous syntactic processing. They are taken to suggest that syntactic facts such as number agreement are represented at a level in the processing chain that is distinct from that of semantic representation.     

The influence of attention upon anticipatory arousal,habituation, and reactivity to a noxious stimulus

Forty subjects were assigned to four groups, an External-attending Group, an Internal-attending Group, a Control Group, and a Distracted Group. All groups were presented with six trials of a 0.5-sec 110-db white noise. A measure of heart rate deceleration verified the experimental manipulation of attention. During the anticipatory period, the Internal-attending Group exhibited the greatest and the Distracted Group exhibited the least reactivity among the four groups. The two specially attending groups exhibited greater galvanic skin-response conditioning during the anticipatory period than the other groups. There was no support for the hypothesis that heightened attention facilitates habituation. Two measures were differentially sensitive to direction of attention during the anticipatory period. The External-attending Group exhibited reliably greater anticipatory deceleration of heart rate than the Internal-attending Group, while the Internal-attending Group exhibited reliably more nonspecific electrodermal responses than the External-attending Group. This latter finding, along with other evidence, suggests that an inward direction of attention tends to exacerbate anticipatory anxiety as well as reactivity to the impact of a noxious stimulus.     

A study of spelling in aphasia

To secure systematic information on spelling abilities following damage to the dominant hemisphere, a test probing performance in three modalities of response was administered to a group of aphasic patients. Except for a predictable deficit among anterior aphasics in oral spelling, anterior and posterior aphasics exhibited comparable performances on the measures of spelling. However, anterior and posterior aphasics differed from one another on the kinds of words they most accurately spelled, the errors they were prone to make, and certain strategies which they characteristically adopted. These results suggest two alternative approaches to spelling: one approach, common in posterior aphasics, entails choosing letter combinations on the basis of their customary sounds; a second approach, common among anterior aphasics, appears to rely on a partially preserved image of the word's appearance.     

Long-term memory and retrieval at ages 2, 3, 4

Two experiments are reported examining the contents and accessibility of a subset of the knowledge represented in long-term memory by very young children. In Experiment 1, children aged 2 to 4 were asked in a production task to name items commonly found in particular rooms in a house, and then to verify the appropriate locations of a set of miniature replicas of household items in a dollhouse. In Experiment 2, object context was manipulated to observe if further external context improves or changes production. Children 3 and 4 years old were asked to produce appropriate room items under one of three conditons: either presented no room objects as in the first experiment, or given room objects highly- or less-frequently associated in the first study.Very young children revealed considerable knowledge in this domain, and even at the youngest ages, core defining information was retrieved. It was equally clear, however, that young children know much more than they can produce, that there is noticeable improvement in ability to retrieve information over this age range, and that additional external object context does not necessarily facilitate retrieval from long-term memory.     

Learning disability and hyperactivity: Deficits in selective attention

Differences in performance on a variety of cognitive measures and differences in patterns of ability between learning disabled (LD) and nonlearning disabled (non-LD) children were examined. Younger and older LD and non-LD children were administered tests of central and incidental learning and selective attention. Teacher ratings of classroom hyperactivity were also examined. LD children, particularly the younger ones, performed significantly more poorly than non-LD children on both attention/memory tasks. Performance on the two tasks was consistently interrelated for the non-LD children and less consistently so for the LD subjects. Hyperactivity was also related to poorer performance on the cognitive measures. Results are discussed in terms of components of selective attention.