The general causality orientations scale: Self-determination in personality

This paper describes the development and validation of a general causality orientations scale. Causality orientations are conceptualized as relatively enduring aspects of people that characterize the source of initiation and regulation, and thus the degree of self-determination, of their behavior. Three orientations—autonomy, control, and impersonal—are measured by the three subscales of the instrument. Individuals are given a score on each orientation, thus allowing the use of the theoretically appropriate subscale (or, in some cases, a combination of subscales) to predict affects, cognitions, and behaviors. The scale was shown to have internal consistency and temporal stability. The orientations were shown to fit appropriately into a nomological network of constructs and to relate to various behaviors that were hypothesized to be theoretically relevant.     

An assessment of the accuracy of self-assessment for career decision making

During the past few years, there has been a marked increase in the number of publications which focus on advice for individuals engaged in the process of career decision making. Most of these publications rely on self-assessment as the major input to the decision making process. This study compared the accuracy of self-assessment to expert assessment based on an assessment center procedure for a sample of potential college graduates. Significant discrepancies were found between the student's and assessor's ratings on 10 of the 13 dimensions assessed. Implications of these results are discussed and suggestions for further study are made.     

Why versus how often: Causal reasoning and the incidence of judgmental bias

When faced with the task of making a prediction or estimating a likelihood, it is argued that people often reason about the presence or absence and relative strength of possible causal mechanisms for the production of relevant outcomes. In so doing people rely on “causal cues” or properties of an inferential problem which indicate the nature of the particular causal processes which give rise to specific outcomes. It is hypothesized that causal cues, precisely because they focus attention and thought on specific causal mechanisms, can obscure the relevance of mathematical laws of probability and lead to statistically biased judgment. Two experiments were conducted. Their results support the hypothesis, showing that the incidence of the conjunction fallacy and the base rate fallacy depend on task-specific cues for causal reasoning.     

Children's numerical skill and judgments of confidence in estimation

This study investigated how children's fluent use of a basic numerical skill is related to their perceptions of confidence on a task of quantitative estimation. One hundred four 10th graders (age 15.7 years) were categorized according to level of numerical fluency as assessed by timed tasks of counting in various nonunity increments. They then made estimates of large numbers of dots and rated how confident they were on each trial. The estimation task varied according to two within-subject factors of task difficulty. It was found that counting skill was related not only to accuracy in estimating, but also to the appropriateness of the children's confidence in their responses. Skillful children made judgments that corresponded with actual task difficulty. A derived calibration score corroborated ANOVA findings of the interaction of skill level and task difficulty on confidence ratings. It also revealed that while girls were less confident than boys, they were actually more realistic in their judgments. Findings are discussed in terms of (a) the effect of stimulus knowledge on awareness of task difficulty and (b) sex differences in achievement-related expectancies.     

Spontaneous translation and language mixing in a polyglot aphasic

The literature on language mixing in polyglot aphasics is reviewed and a case report of a patient with spontaneous translation is presented. A microgenetic model of language processing provides an interpretive framework for language mixing and spontaneous translation as symptoms of polyglot aphasia. It is suggested that language mixing reflects a deficit at the linguistic level while spontaneous translation reflects a deficit at the prelinguistic level of language processing. A hypothesis about the organization of multiple languages in a single speaker is proposed.     

The ambiguity of recognition memory tests of schema theories

The majority of theories about the effects of schemata (or generic knowledge structures) on information processing share two fundamental assumptions. It is assumed, first, that schema-based inferences about unobserved features of an event are generated, and, second, that such inferences are stored in long-term memory and thereby confused with traces of observed features of that event. To test these assumptions, researchers rely heavily on recognition memory measures of hit and false alarm rates. In the present paper, it is observed that schema theoretic interpretations of recognition memory measures are inconsistent with an interpretation jointly derived from the theory of signal detection and Mandler's (1980, Psychological Review, 87, 252–271) subjective familiarity theory of recognition memory; from the latter's perspective, recognition memory measures are considerably more ambiguous than schema researchers realize and do not necessarily support the typical schema theoretic interpretations. Data from four experiments are analyzed from the perspective of the theory of signal detection/ subjective familiarity model and demonstrate the ambiguity of recognition memory measures for testing hypotheses about the function and consequences of schemata for information processing.     

Stimulus intrusion on fixed-interval responding in the rat: The effects of electric shock intensity,temporal location,and response contingency

After a scalloped lever-press response pattern had developed under a fixed-interval food reinforcement schedule, a 15-sec electric shock was intruded for different groups of rats in the first, second, third, or fourth quarter of each inter-reinforcement interval. Shock intensity was systematically increased for individual rats over 70 sessions, from 0.05 to 1.6 mA. Additional between-groups comparisons involved response-dependent versus clock-dependent fixed-interval schedules, and response-dependent versus response-independent electric shock intrusion. Response rates within each fixed interval prior to, during, and following electric shock intrusion showed regular and reproducible increases and decreases under systematic application of the experimental variables. These results provide further evidence that the functions of a stimulus are determined in part by the parameters of intensity, response contingency, and temporal location with respect to reinforcement.     

On processing chinese ideographs and english words: some implications from Stroop-Test results.

When Chinese subjects tried to name the color of characters which represented conflicting color words, they showed markedly greater interference than did English speaking readers performing an English version of the same task. This effect cannot be attributed to bilingualism among the Chinese subjects since bilinguals in other languages show smaller Stroop-interference than monolingual controls. Instead, there may be some fundamental differences in the perceptual demands of reading Chinese and English which can have widespread implications for human information processing.     

Semantic organization in the young child: Evidence for the development of semantic feature systems

In two experiments, 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children and college students were presented on each trial with a sentence followed by a probe word. Their task was to indicate whether the probe was in the sentence or not. Of primary interest were the false recognitions and the correct latencies that occurred when the probe word was a synonym or antonym of one of the words in the sentence (Experiment I) or when the probe was a subordinate, superordinate, part, or whole (Experiment II). The younger children were more affected by synonymy than antonymy, although the older children and adults were not. At all ages, the categorical relationships caused more recognition confusion than the partwhole relationships. Subjects were more affected when the probe was a superordinate than when it was a subordinate, and somewhat more affected when the probe was the whole than when it was the part. These results suggest that children as young as 5 years of age have well-organized conceptual systems based on shared meaning components.     

Infants' intermodal perception of events

Four-month-old infants viewed two sound motion picture films of simple, natural events. The films were projected side by side, as one of the two sound tracks was played through a centrally placed speaker. Infants' visual attention to the films was consistently influenced by what they heard: They looked primarily at the event specified by the sound track. The experiment demonstrates that infants are able to perceive relations between sights and sounds in the absence of spatial cues. They respond to a perceived intermodal invariance with increased attention to the event reaching them over two modalities.