Convergence between attention variables and factors of psychometric intelligence in older adults

The purpose of the present study was to examine the hypothesis that individual differences on measures of attention would converge with select factors of psychometric intelligence, especially fluid intelligence and short-term acquisition and retrieval. A sample of 83 elderly adults $\text{(}\text{X}\text{= 71}\text{years}\text{)}$ was administered a battery of 17 psychometric ability tests. Tests were selected to mark four psychometric ability factors (Cattell and Horn's dimensions of fluid and crystallized intelligence, short-term acquisition and retrieval, and perceptual speed). Also, seven tasks representing four aspects of attention—decoding processes, selective attention, attention switching, and concentration—were administered. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to examine the relationships among the four psychometric ability factors and 11 variables obtained from the attention tasks. Results were only partially consistent with the hypothesized pattern of convergence. Two attention measures had significant loadings on a fluid-type intelligence factor, and one had a marginally significant loading on a short-term memory factor. In general, the greatest convergence occured between attention variables and the ability factor of Perceptual Speed. Results were discussed with respect to previous research on psychometric abilities and cognitive processes, the theory of fluid-crystallized intelligence, and their implications for understanding intellectual aging.     

Exploring and reexploring issues of integrality,perceptual sensitivity,and dimensional salience

Some observations that can be described conveniently by investigators in terms of dimensional sensitivity and dimensional salience actually need not implicate the psychological reality of the dimensions for the subjects. The developmental hypothesis that stimuli are perceived often as integral in early childhood can account for such phenomena only with the assumption that young children often apprehend objects as global wholes, related to one another by overall similarity. Classification data, recently presented by J. R. Aschkenasy and R. D. Odom (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1982, 34, 435–448) can be reinterpreted in this way. On this reinterpretation, Aschkenasy and Odom's findings are exactly what the developmental form of the integrality-separability hypothesis predicts. Moreover, a variety of other findings and lines of inference converge on the conclusion that, in young children, the use of overall similarity relations to organize perception and cognition predominates over the use of dimensional relations (and that the relative balance between these stimulus relations changes in development). Examples are selected from the literature on the natural development of word meanings, as well as from the literatures on children's and adults' classification.     

Developments in infants' search for displaced objects

In an exploratory study of infants' search for displaced objects, 13-month-olds and 21-month-olds were tested on three kinds of displacement problems—visible displacements, invisible displacements, and transpositions—as well as singlehiding problems. Two aspects of performance on the displacement problems were distinguished: (1) searching within the locations involved in the displacement rather than at a control location, and (2) selecting between the displacement locations. Both the younger and the older infants were able to select the correct location on visible displacement problems and to search within the displacement locations on invisible problems. Neither age group was able to solve the transposition problems, but the older infants did at least search within the relevant locations on those problems. Age differences appeared to be due primarily to improved skill at identifying relevant locations rather than to improvements in selecting among those locations. Other factors contributing to the age differences in performance were a decrease in response biases and an increase in skills for coping with multiple possibilities.     

Factors affecting developmental changes in the speed of processing

Although many studies have found developmental changes in the speed of various processes, they have potentially confounded the subject's age with his knowledge of the task domain and use of strategies. In this study, the strategies used by the subject and his domain knowledge were independently assessed by a number of tasks. Subsequently, processing rate measures were obtained for a task (the “same/different” judgment task of simultaneously presented stimuli) in which domain knowledge was manipulated independently of age while controlling for strategy usage. It was found that the usual adult superiority in speed of processing could be markedly reduced if children possessed equivalent amounts of domain knowledge and this effect was domain specific. Further, it was found that differences in knowledge affected processing rates in both knowledgeable adults and children and to about the same extent. It was concluded that some part of the typical adult superiority in processing rate was due to knowledge differences.     

Effects of imaginal exposure to feared disasters in obsessive-compulsive checkers

The combined effects of imaginal exposure to feared catastrophes and in vivo exposure to external stimuli were compared with the effects of in vivo exposure alone in 15 obsessive-compulsives with checking rituals. The first group received 90 min of uninterrupted exposure in imagination, which concentrated mainly on disastrous consequences, followed by 30 min of exposure in vivo to stimuli-situations which triggered rituals. The second group was given 2 hr of exposure in vivo only. Both groups were prevented from performing rituals. Treatment consisted of 10 daily sessions within a 2 week period.Assessments were conducted before and after treatment and at follow-up ranging from 3 months to 2.5 yr with a mean of 11 months. At post-treatment both groups improved considerably and did not differ. But at follow-up those who received imaginal and in vivo exposure maintained their gains, whereas the group who were treated by exposure in vivo alone evidenced partial relapse on four of the six dependent measures. The results tend to indicate that a closer match between a patient's internal fear model and the content of exposure enhances long term treatment efficacy.     

Kindergartners' reasoning in simple problems

Three experiments assessed kindergartners' performance on simple conceptlike problems in which the correct solution could be selected from a specified set of possible solutions by using the information provided by a single positive or negative stimulus. For both positive and negative instances, performance was accurate when all stimulus attributes were logically informative, but performance was impaired when stimuli included an additional, logically uninformative, attribute. This impairment could not be attributed simply to increased information processing load. Children seemed to realize that uninformative attributes provided no basis for choosing among possible solutions, but did not seem to understand how to interpret this fact in order to make appropriate inferences. It was suggested that children's inferential deficit may result from a failure to understand how the relationships that exist between two sets of information are coordinated with the relationships that exist among the parts of each set. Implications were discussed for kindergartners' performance on more complex concept problems.     

The word order problem in agrammatism : II. Production

This study demonstrates that agrammatic aphasics have difficulty describing relations that are signified by the order of noun phrases around verbs or prepositions. The word order deficit is found in a Sentence Order Task, in which written words must be arranged linearly to form a sentence, as well as in oral production. Ordering tendencies reflect factors like animacy or potency, rather than the systematic use of syntactic rules. These results point to a fundamental syntactic disorder in agrammatism.     

Juror decision making: A case of attitude change mediated by authoritarianism

For a jury to reach a unanimous decision, certain individuals must change their attitudes with regard to the defendant's guilt during deliberations. Because these changers are the key to the group decision-making process, they were carefully scrutinized to ascertain demographic or personality characteristics which might be mediating their behavior. In three experiments, two using college students as subjects and one using Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas jury pool members, it was found that authoritarians changed their attitude with regard to the defendant's guilt more than equalitarians. Further, most of these “changers” were aware they had changed their attitude. There was no generalizable evidence for the proposition that authoritarians are more likely to favor a guilty verdict.     

Habituation of subjective anxiety during flooding in imagery

Patterns of habituation of subjective anxiety during flooding in fantasy are delineated for eleven obsessive-compulsive and six agoraphobic patients. The majority showed a curvilinear pattern of subjective anxiety response, while three patients showed a linear decelerating pattern. Habituation was found both within and across sessions. The results are compared with habituation patterns in physiological responses during flooding in fantasy and in vivo.