“None of the above” as a correct and incorrect alternative on a multiple-choice test: Implications for the testing effect

Both positive and negative testing effects have been demonstrated with a variety of materials and paradigms (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006b). The present series of experiments replicate and extend the research of Roediger and Marsh (2005) with the addition of a “none-of-the-above” response option. Participants (n=32 in both experiments) read a set of passages, took an initial multiple-choice test, completed a filler task, and then completed a final cued-recall test (Experiment 1) or multiple-choice test (Experiment 2). Questions were manipulated on the initial multiple-choice test by adding a “none-of-the-above” response alternative (choice “E”) that was incorrect (“E” Incorrect) or correct (“E” Correct). The results from both experiments demonstrated that the positive testing effect was negated when the “none-of-the-above” alternative was the correct response on the initial multiple-choice test, but was still present when the “none-of-the-above” alternative was an incorrect response.     

Having a “senior moment”: Induced aging phenomenology, subjective age, and susceptibility to ageist stereotypes

The current research develops methods to experimentally manipulate subjective age in midlife and older adulthood to test whether subjective age moderates the effects of ageist stereotypes on a person’s well-being and expression of age-stereotypic social attitudes. Study 1 manipulates experiences of visual disfluency to test whether participants feel older when they experience unexplained visual disfluency. Study 2 crosses this fluency manipulation with a manipulation of the valence of primed aging stereotypes to test whether participants feel worse about themselves when they are primed with negative aging stereotypes and given an experience of unexplained visual disfluency. Study 3 tests whether participants express more age-stereotypic social attitudes when they are made to feel older through an experience of generation gaps and they are presented with evidence confirming the stereotype linking older age with psychological rigidity. These findings illuminate the phenomenological sources of variation in subjective age and suggest that subjective age influences adults’ susceptibility to ageist stereotypes.     

Incentivizing education: Seeing schoolwork as an investment, not a chore

Most American children expect to attend college but because they do not necessarily spend much time on schoolwork, they may fail to reach their imagined “college-bound” future self. The proposed identity-based motivation model helps explain why this gap occurs: Imagined “college-bound” identities cue school-focused behavior if they are salient and feel relevant to current choice options, not otherwise. Two studies with predominantly low-income and African American middle school students support this prediction. Almost all of the students expect to attend college, but only half describe education-dependent (e.g., law, medicine) adult identities. Having education-dependent rather than education-independent adult identities (e.g., sports, entertainment) predicts better grades over time, controlling for prior grade point average (Study 1). To demonstrate causality, salience of education-dependent vs. education-independent adult identities was experimentally manipulated. Children who considered education-dependent adult identities (vs. education-independent ones) were eight times more likely to complete a take-home extra-credit assignment (Study 2).     

Dispositional and induced optimism lead to attentional preference for faces displaying positive emotions: An eye-tracker study

The aim of this study was to examine whether dispositional optimism and induced optimism are associated with an attentional bias for positive stimuli. Fifty-six healthy participants performed an eye-tracking task twice, while their gazing time at faces displaying joy, anger, pain, or a neutral expression was measured. Participants scoring high on dispositional optimism tended to gaze longer at joy faces during the first face-presentation trial compared to participants scoring lower on optimism, and this correlation became significant during the second face-presentation trial. In between the two presentations, participants received either an optimism manipulation or a control manipulation. There was no effect of type of manipulation on gazing behavior but post hoc analyses demonstrated that participants showing an increase in state optimism displayed a significant decrease in gaze duration for anger faces and a nearly significant increase in gaze duration for joy faces.     

Modal fictionalism and possible-worlds discourse

The Brock-Rosen problem has been one of the most thoroughly discussed objections to the modal fictionalism bruited in Gideon Rosen’s ‘Modal Fictionalism’. But there is a more fundamental problem with modal fictionalism, at least as it is normally explained: the position does not resolve the tension that motivated it. I argue that if we pay attention to a neglected aspect of modal fictionalism, we will see how to resolve this tension—and we will also find a persuasive reply to the Brock-Rosen objection. Finally, I discuss an alternative reading of Rosen, and argue that this position is also able to fend off the Brock-Rosen objection.     

Everyday Life Reasoning, Possible Worlds and Cultural Processes

Discussing Faiciuc’s paper, I first tackle the problem of fallacies in deductive reasoning showing how, in a possible world theory, non correct forms of reasoning can be useful strategies for discovery, providing these strategies remain at a hypothesis level. Secondly, everyday reasoning and its specificity in comparison to logical-normative one are analyzed. This topic stresses the notion of interpretation and, in this context, the role of the community and of cultural canons shared by the subject. From this point of view, reasoning does not occur, only, in the brain of a person but in everyday exchanges occurring between individuals and the history of their community.

Words and possible words in early language acquisition

In order to acquire language, infants must extract its building blocks—words—and master the rules governing their legal combinations from speech. These two problems are not independent, however: words also have internal structure. Thus, infants must extract two kinds of information from the same speech input. They must find the actual words of their language. Furthermore, they must identify its possible words, that is, the sequences of sounds that, being morphologically well formed, could be words. Here, we show that infants’ sensitivity to possible words appears to be more primitive and fundamental than their ability to find actual words. We expose 12- and 18-month-old infants to an artificial language containing a conflict between statistically coherent and structurally coherent items. We show that 18-month-olds can extract possible words when the familiarization stream contains marks of segmentation, but cannot do so when the stream is continuous. Yet, they can find actual words from a continuous stream by computing statistical relationships among syllables. By contrast, 12-month-olds can find possible words when familiarized with a segmented stream, but seem unable to extract statistically coherent items from a continuous stream that contains minimal conflicts between statistical and structural information. These results suggest that sensitivity to word structure is in place earlier than the ability to analyze distributional information. The ability to compute nontrivial statistical relationships becomes fully effective relatively late in development, when infants have already acquired a considerable amount of linguistic knowledge. Thus, mechanisms for structure extraction that do not rely on extensive sampling of the input are likely to have a much larger role in language acquisition than general-purpose statistical abilities.     

Focusing on Educational Outcomes

National education goals, content standards, and national tests are the hot topics of the day in educational reform. Special services personnel eventually will be faced with these issues, and can either be part of the discussion from the beginning, or wait and have to deal with someone else's decisions. In this article, we highlight some recent national and state educational reform activities and their probable implications for students with disabilities. We explain in brief the impetus behind the thrust toward an outcomesbased approach to education, and summarize the response of the National Center on Educational Outcomes for Students with Disabilities to this push. Possible ways in which special service providers can act to influence the focus on outcomes are described.     

Reconsidering the “aspiration–expectation gap” and assumed gender differences among urban youth

The present study investigated the relevance of the “aspiration–expectation gap” and traditional gender differences among urban youth in middle school and high school (N = 294). Results failed to indicate a significant difference between the occupational prestige levels of aspired and expected careers, but did indicate a significant difference between aspired and expected levels of education. In general, the proportion of girls significantly outweighed the proportion of boys in traditionally “masculine” occupations with high levels of prestige; girls also had higher levels of occupational prestige than boys in terms of careers they hoped and expected to obtain. Black and bi/multi-racial youth expected to have higher levels of education than White youth.     

Categories and Levels of Reality

The discussion of the relation of levels of reality to categories is important because categories have often been interpreted as constituting levels of reality. This article explores whether this view is correct, and argues it is not. Categories as such should not be understood to constitute levels of reality, although particular categories may. The article begins with a discussion of levels of reality and then turns to specific questions about categories and how they are related to these levels.