Individual differences in speed of phonemic analysis, visual analysis, and reading.

College student subjects (Ss) classified phrases as making sense or not according to sound in one condition, according to visual appearance in another, and in abasic task in which either strategy would yield right answers. Ss who were relatively fast in the visual condition were faster at the basic task than Ss who were relatively fast in the sound condition. Other results suggested that the former Ss used a visual strategy in the basic task while the latter used a phonemic strategy.     

Modality-specific interference with overt mediation by pigeons in a delayed discrimination task

Pigeons were trained on a delayed discrimination task in which they were rewarded for pecking a white terminal stimulus (TS) presented 5 sec after a green initial stimulus (IS) and for not pecking the white TS when it followed a red IS. Each bird bridged the memory interval (MI) with overt mediational behaviors. Nevertheless, sustained retroactive interference (RI) effects were produced by houselight illumination (Experiments 1 and 3), and mild shock pulses (Experiment 5) but not white noise (Experiment 2) presented during the MI. Although the magnitude of the light-induced RI effect was proportional to the duration of houselight illumination (Experiment 4), the beginning-end effect described by W. A. Roberts and D. S. Grant (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 1978, 4, 219–236) was not observed. These results not only attest to the between-task robustness of both light-induced RI and modality-specific effects with pigeons, but also support the hypothesis that RI effects result from the disruption of mediational activities possibly analogous to rehearsal. The results further demonstrate that an event interpolated within the MI need not be unexpected or novel to produce RI. Furthermore, the interpolated event can produce modality-specific RI effects even though it effects a different sense than do the IS and TS.     

“in”, “on”, and “under” revisited

The present study presents evidence that young children's comprehension of the locatives ‘in’, ‘on’, and ‘under’ is, at least in part, contextually determined. Children aged 1;6–3;0 were given tasks with verbal instructions which were either contextually congruent or incongruent. The results were interpreted in terms of the non-linguistic as well as linguistic strategies apparently used to interpret speech. The results and interpretation are in contrast to those of earlier research.     

A developmental study of attribute encoding in free recall

In two studies, subjects from second-grade, sixth-grade, and college were presented lists of unrelated words for single-trial free recall. Embedded in the list were critical items that were either semantically or phonemically related or else were completely unrelated. The sets of related items were either massed or distributed in the longer list. For second-graders, recall of Phonemic words was better than recall of Semantic words while the reverse was true for sixth-graders. Recall of Semantic distributed words by second-graders and of Phonemic distributed words by sixth-graders did not differ from recall of unrelated words. College students recalled Phonemic and Semantic words equally well and all related words better than unrelated words. Developmental trends were seen in the salience of particular attributes and in the utilization of low salient attributes.     

Relationships among measures of visual imagery

As a step toward the development of an objective measure of visualization ability, five tasks which yielded seven separate measures were administered to 74 Ss and intercorrelated. The tasks were: paired associate recall improvement (RI), recognition memory (RM), the Bett's Questionnaire on Mental Imagery (QMI) as revised by Sheehan (1967a, b), a task calling for the production of visual images (PVI) where rated vividness and latency of image attainment were measured, and a task requiring the imagining of emotional scenes (ES) where rated vividness and rated anxiety were measured. The results indicated that although paired associate learning scores per se were related to RM, neither of the memory measures of visualization (RI and RM) were related to any of the other visualization measures. A cluster of intercorrelations was obtained among self-ratings of image vividness on the QMI, PVI and ES tasks. This cluster also included a measure of latency of report of “best image” attainable derived from the PVI task. None of the measures correlated with anxiety ratings on the ES task. These findings were discussed in relation to previous studies and the potential value of the latency measure as an adjunct measure of visualization ability was noted.