The development of same and different judgments

Junior kindergarten children, third-grade children, and college students were given a simultaneous pattern discrimination task, with simple and complex patterns, under either unlimited or limited (150 msec) viewing time. Under unlimited viewing, RTs to same patterns were faster than to different patterns for younger children and older males. Under limited viewing, same and different RTs were equivalent, but more errors were made in judging different patterns by all age groups. The RTs were longer to complex than to simple patterns, but the increase was differentially less for the youngest Ss, especially on same pairs. Since this age difference was found under both limited and unlimited viewing, it was not attributable to age differences in perceptual scanning strategies. The same-different asymmetry in RT under unlimited viewing and in error rate under limited viewing confirms across a wide age range previous findings with adults using codable stimuli. A two-process model for same and different judgments appears to be required, although young children may have had a response bias for same in Expt II.     

Stimulus control over sex-typed play in cross-gender identified boys.

Discriminative stimulus control over masculine and feminine sex-typed play behaviors was investigated in five boys, aged 5–8 yr, with “childhood crossgender identification.” Reliable observational measures of play were obtained with two sets of toys: (a) “dress-up toys” (girls' apparel vs boys' apparel), and (b) “affect toys” (maternal-nurturance play vs masculine-aggression play). With an ABA reversal intrasubject design, certain stimulus conditions (e.g., presence of father, mother, male, or female stranger) were found to be discriminative for reliable changes in sex-typed play. Sex-typed play was found to vary as a function of the social stimulus situation and as a function of the type of play response required. All children played predominantly feminine while alone in the playroom. While no single environmental stimulus was consistently discriminative for masculine play across children, at least one stimulus condition was found for each subject under which he played predominantly masculine.     

The effects of exemplary and cognitive models and self-rehearsal on children's interrogative strategies

Children aged 6, 8, and 10 years were exposed to three types of training procedures aimed at increasing their use of constraint-seeking questions and enhancing their problem-solving efficiency. One group observed an exemplary model who merely illustrated several constraint-seeking questions. Another group observed a cognitive model who, prior to asking each of her constraint-seeking questions, verbalized her strategy for formulating constraint-seeking questions and integrating the information gained from such questions. A third group received a combination of cognitive modeling and self-rehearsal training in which the children repeated statements representing key features of the constraint-seeking strategy before asking questions on a series of training items. Cognitive modeling alone was the most successful training procedure, effecting changes in both constraint-seeking questioning and problem-solving efficiency for children of all three age groups. Differences between cognitive and exemplary models were most notable among the youngest children, who appeared to require the additional guidance afforded through the verbalizations of the cognitive model.     

Selective attention and the breadth of learning: A developmental study

Nursery school and second-grade subjects were trained on an optional intradimensional/extradimensional shift task with (1) no overtraining, (2) overtraining on the initial problem only, (3) overtraining on the shift problem only, or (4) overtraining on both the initial and the shift problems. Predictions concerning the effects of age and training conditions on the type of solution and the breadth of learning for the shift problem were derived from selective attention theory. However, the results were not consistent with the one-look assumption of such models. Instead, a multiple-look theory in which the breadth of attention varies with task demands seems most tenable.     

Dogmatism and information gathering in personality impression formation

Subjects were assigned the task of forming an impression of another person with information being gathered from two conflicting sources. One half were given a positive first impression, and one half were given a negative first impression before allowing them to select additional information. Final ratings were made when Ss indicated that they had taken sufficient information. Dogmatic Ss took in less information before passing “final judgment,” gave more extreme stability ratings, expressed greater liking for their agreed-with source, and showed a trend toward a preference for explaining away impression-discrepant information rather than to withhold judgment.     

Uncertainty and social comparison

Two experimetnal tests were conducted of a model which predicts social comparison choices of extreme scores on a personality inventory. In groups of nine, subjects completed a bogus personality inventory that ostensibly measured a desirable or undesirable trait, and were told that either the highest or the lowest obtained score was a positive instance of the trait. The highest score was located for the subjects either with certainty or uncertainty, and the two experiments employed different manipulations of this factor. In both experiments the pattern of subjects' social comparison choices of other subjects' scores was fit best by a model comprising main effects of each factor and interactions between desirability and positive instance and between desirability and certainty.     

Individual differences in the game motives of Own,Relative, and Joint gain

Two hundred and eighteen undergraduates (94 males and 124 females) made decisions in same-sex dyads across four types of 3-choice decomposed games. An analysis of each subject's choices was performed to see if he or she consistently pursued one of the three motives of Own (Individualism), Relative (Competition) or Joint (Cooperation) gain across all four decomposed games. Sixty-six percent of the subjects manifested such consistency, and sex of subject was unrelated to which goal was pursued. Of the remaining 32%, a sizable subgroup ($\text{1}\text{3}$) was shown to be making its choices in an Altruistic fashion, attempting to maximize the outcomes of the other subject. An analysis of variance of the F scale scores of subjects in these motivational categories yielded an effect (p < .025), with the Competitive group having the highest, and the Altruistic group having the lowest mean authoritarianism score. Correlational analyses indicated negative r's between degree of Competition and F score, positive r's between degree of Altruism and F, but no apparent relation between F and either Individualistic or Joint gain choice.     

Individual differences in cognition: Some relationships between personality and memory

Individual differences in cognition were studied in the form of the hypothesis that arousal, as indexed by personality measures of extraversion and neuroticism, affects the way in which verbal material is organized in memory. Subjects pretested on measures of these personality variables participated in either a paired-associates learning or a free-recall experiment. On the paired-associates task, subjects who were thought to be high on arousal made fewer errors when response terms were semantically similar than low arousal subjects. On the other hand, subjects thought low on arousal made fewer errors when response words were phonetically similar than high arousal subjects. On the free-recall task, low arousal subjects were found to cluster words together on the basis of semantic category at a higher rate than high arousal subjects. These results were taken to support the view that high arousal (as indexed by personality measures) leads to a focus on the physical aspects of verbal material, whereas low arousal leads to a memory organized around semantic aspects. The implications of these findings for other views of memory are discussed.     

Women's reactions to discrimination from members of the same or opposite sex

The effects upon women's self-evaluations of experiencing varying severity of failure in interpersonal competition against male vs. female opponents were explored. The results supported the hypothesis that self-esteem in women is more vulnerable to interpersonal rejection from men as opposed to other women. Specifically, subjects reported lower self-esteem when severe failure was due to the actions of alleged, male opponents rather than female ones. Also, severe failure elicited less favorable self-evaluations than mild failure only when the female subjects confronted male opponents. Finally, contrary to a defensive self-presentation hypothesis, subjects did not respond to discrimination from men by presenting themselves as being discrepant from the stereotype of women. Instead, subjects who interpreted their failure as reflecting prejudice on the part of men evaluated themselves more favorably on positive traits underlying the female stereotype.     

Sensitivity and responsivity measures for discrimination learning

The present report considers alternative measures of sensitivity and response bias for the discrimination learning paradigm. The classical signal detection measures, d′ and β, were compared with their nonparametric equivalents, A′ and B″, with theoretical measures derived from threshold theory and with empirical measures derived from the ROC graph. Differential rabbit eyelid conditioning data from three experiments were analyzed with these measures, and the results of these analyses were used along with other information to determine which measures of sensitivity and response bias are most useful for the analysis of discrimination learning data.