Career stages: A partial test of Levinson's model of life/career stages

This study purports to test a theory of life and career stages developed by Daniel Levinson and his associates. The theory suggests four distinct stages between ages 20 and 45 each with their own developmental tasks and related behaviors and attitudes. Subjects (759 managerial, professional, and technical employees) were selected randomly from levels and departments of a major public sector employer in the midwest United States. The measure of career stage asked respondents to indicate whether they had passed through, were still in, or had not yet reached each stage as operationalized by a short vignette. Attitudinal and behavioral measures were abstracted from previously developed instruments. Only moderate support for the theory was found with little or no evidence to support the age-linked notion of these stages. Stages were found to be discriminable in terms of certain attitudes (upward mobility, career and overall job satisfaction, and job commitment) as predicted. Suggestions are given for improvements in measurement, research design, and theory refinement.     

Attention demands of movements as a function of their duration and velocity

The attention demands of initiating and controlling discrete movements were examined as a function of their movement time (MT) and average movement velocity. Experiment 1 showed that the attention required to execute a movement decreased as MT decreased, although Experiment 2 through independently manipulating MT and movement velocity, revealed that movement velocity is the key determiner of attention demands rather than MT. The attention demands of preparing a high velocity movement are greater than during its execution with the reverse being the case for relatively slow velocity movements. The results are compatible with the view that it is the initiation of error corrections that are attention demanding (Keele 1973).     

Development of comprehension of sentences with “because” or “if”

The comprehension of sentences with “because” or “if” was investigated in children aged 2;9–11;11. Imitation, comprehension (choosing one of two picture sequences to go with a sentence), recognition (judging sentences with connective or structure differences as heard before or not), and synonymy (judging equivalence of meaning in sentences with different connectives or structures) tasks were administered, along with logical ordering, reversibility, and classification tasks. Above-chance responding in the comprehension task occurred by age 8, and in recognition and synonymy by age 10. Cognitive performance predicted 28.4% of the variance in the linguistic scores and cognitive success was concurrent with or preceded linguistic success. Comprehension of “because” and “if” appears to develop gradually, and is related to the development of certain operative rules.     

Meditation,personality and arousal

A questionnaire survey of people who had learned a technique of meditation was carried out to assess persistence with practice, perceived effects of meditation practice and subjective experiences during meditation. The results suggested that a significant proportion give up meditating (42.9%) and that the subjective experience of meditation was similar to that of the hypnagogic state. Reported effects of meditation were generally physiological and psychological benefits related to relaxation.A personality questionnaire was also distributed and the results suggested that those attracted to meditation are significantly more neurotic and introverted than the general population but that those who continue with meditation are significantly less neurotic than those who give up their practice.These findings are discussed in terms of regression effects and in relation to a theory of personality and arousal.     

The effect of set size on hemifield asymmetries in letter recognition

Single letters were presented tachistoscopically in the left or right hemifield to right-handed observers. Superior recognition of letters on the right was found for letters chosen from subsets containing four items, but no differences were found when any letter, or any symmetrical letter, could appear. In a second experiment, the right hemifield advantage was found under conditions requiring the subject to determine the subset only when the subset chosen was appropriate. Results were discussed in terms of the adequacy of language-based explanations of hemifield asymmetries in letter recognition.     

The development of discourse mapping processes: the on-line interpretation of anaphoric expressions

The present research focuses on how children integrate the antecedent of different kinds of anaphor into their on-going interpretation of an utterance, and on the kinds of cues they use to help them to do this. These issues were studied by examining the on-line processing of three types of anaphoric devices—repeated noun phrases, general terms and pronoun anaphors. The data showed that by the age of five, anaphoric mapping processes in general are well-mastered, although all age-groups (5, 7, 10 year olds and adults) found general term anaphors more difficult to interpret. The major developmental differences concerned the processing of anaphoric pronouns. For five year olds, pronouns were primarily interpreted as devices which maintained the thematic subject of the discourse, but when there was no thematic subject they relied primarily on pragmatic plausibility in their assignment of pronominal co-reference. As children get older, they are able to take advantage of the lexical properties of pronouns and all three sources of information—lexical, pragmatic inference and the thematic structure of the discourse—play contributory roles in the assignment of reference to a pronoun.     

Discrete dynamic choice: An extension of the choice models of thurstone and luce

The present paper deals with the extension of two well-known static discrete choice theories to the dynamic situation in which individuals make choices at several points in (continuous) time. A dynamic version of Luce's Axiom, “independence from irrelevant alternatives”, is proposed and some of its implications are derived. In the static case Yellott (J. Math. Psych. 1977, 15, 109–146) and others have demonstrated that an independent random utility model generated from the extreme value distribution exp(?e^?ax?b) becomes equivalent to Luce's Axiom. Yellott also introduced an axiom called “invariance under uniform expansions of the choice set”, and he proved that within the class of random utility models with independent identically distributed utilities (apart from a location shift) this axiom is equivalent to Luce's Axiom. These results are extended to the dynamic situation and it is shown that if the utility processes are expressed by so-called extremal processes the corresponding choice model is Markovian. A nonstationary generalization is proposed which is a substantial interest in applications where the parameters of the choice process are influenced by previous choice experience or by time-varying exogenous variables. In particular, it is demonstrated that the nonstationary model is Markovian if and only if the joint choice probabilities at two points in time have a particular form. Thus, the paper provides a rationale for applying a specific class of Markov models as the point of departure when modelling mobility processes that involve individual discrete decisions over time.     

The effects of distributed training on retention of operant conditioning in human infants

Long-term retention of operant footkicking acquired in the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm was assessed as a function of the distribution of training time. In the first study, 3-month-old infants were trained for either one 18-min session or for two 9-min or three 6-min sessions separated by 24-hr intervals. All infants exhibited retention during a test administered immediately after training, but only those trained in a single session continued to perform the conditioned response during cued-recall tests 7 or 14 days later. Infants trained in three sessions showed no evidence of remembering the contingency even after a week. A warm-up decrement, seen in the day-to-day performance of infants in the distributed conditions, was eliminated in the second study by the interpolation of a nonreinforcement period at the outset of daily sessions. This procedure also enhanced long-term retention such that infants trained in three 6-min session now remembered the contingency for 14 days and did not differ from infants who had received a single 18-min session. Whether distributed training facilitates or impairs long-term retention appears to depend on the opportunity for infants to acquire a sufficient number (or kind) of effective retrieval cues during original learning.