The role of elaborations in memory for prose

In two experiments, subjects read stories and were asked to make plausibility judgments about statements with respect to the stories. The inherent plausibility of the queried statements, the amount of attention subjects focused on information necessary for making a judgment, and the interval between presentation of the relevant story information and the test probe were varied orthogonally. The pattern of latencies obtained to make these judgments cast strong doubt on the notion that question answering is typically accomplished by searching for a single fact in memory. Rather, people seem to retrieve any relevant, available information and then use this to compute whether a statement seems true. The independent variables in these experiments can be interpreted according to whether they affect the retrieval or the judgment phase.     

Same-sex imitation of and reported agreement with parents and unfamiliar adults

Children aged 7, 10, and 14 were shown sets of photographs of human figures for each of which they made judgments of age or attractiveness. Randomly determined responses appeared under each set of photographs. Half the children were told the responses represented choices of parents and the other half that they represented choices of unfamiliar adults. After the opportunity to imitate, children were asked whom they thought they agreed with the most. Findings indicated only a small, borderline-significant effect for same-sex imitation, but a large, highly significant effect for reported agreement, particularly in the unfamiliar adult condition (p < .001). Discussion centered on two issues: (1) Same-sex effects appear strongest when the act of choosing between adults and the adults' gender are accentuated; and (2) differences between present and previous findings regarding same-sex effects for parents vs unfamiliar adults may relate to the ages of the children investigated.     

Imaging,empathy, and causal attribution

Three studies were conducted to test whether imagery accounts for the effects of empathy on attributions, that is, whether attributers construct and scan a mental image of social scenarios the same way that actual participants scan a real environment. According to this interpretation, attributers “see” the world as the participant does and make vicarious attributions. An alternative interpretation holds that subjects base vicarious attributions on recreating the motivations and affect of the actor, so that imaging is irrelevant to empathy and attributions. In the first study, subjects who imagined a story from the perspective of a particular character later showed differential recall of story details as a function of role, but not differential attributions. In Experiment 2, role-taking subjects showed clear effects of imaged perspective on recall for story details, but no effects on attributions of causality for an accident. Further, recall and attribution were uncorrelated. In the last study, empathy and imagery role-taking instructions produced independent effects: imagers showed pronounced perspective-relevant recall and empathizers did not. Neither showed unambiguous vicarious attributions. Recall and attribution were again uncorrelated. These studies suggest that the imagery explanation of empathy effects is untenable, and imply that the recall of perspective-relevant details is unlikely to mediate attributions of causality in imaginary scenarios.     

Self-consciousness, self-awareness, and self-attribution

Self-awareness was either manipulated by a mirror (experimental) or not (control). Subjects were selected for being high or low in private self-consciousness (disposition to attend to one's thoughts, feelings, motives). Private self-consciousness had a stronger effect on self-attributions than did self-awareness. These findings have implications for attribution, self-consciousness, and the relationship between manipulations and dispositions.     

Sensitivity to grammatical structure in so-called agrammatic aphasics

Comprehension failures in agrammatic aphasics, as well as their difficulties in sentence construction, have been attributed to an underlying deficit involving the retrieval of syntactic structure. In this study we show that four agrammatic patients display a remarkable sensitivity to structural information, as indicated by their performance on a grammaticality judgment task. These results indicate significant sparing of syntactic knowledge in agrammatism, and suggest that the sentence comprehension disturbances in these patients do not reflect loss of the capacity to recover syntactic structure. In particular, accounts of the comprehension deficit in agrammatism that implicate a failure to exploit information carried by the closed class (function word) vocabulary are called seriously into question. Alternative explanations of the comprehension problem in agrammatism are explored.