Relative influence of sincere,insincere, and neutral symbolic models

The study investigated how the sincerity of models affects their influence, using a delay-of-reward paradigm. Subjects were 40 fifth and sixth graders (ages 9 and 10 years, respectively), selected for delayed gratification patterns. In the experimental manipulation, sincerity or insincerity was explicitly attributed to the model or, in a neutral-model condition, no information about the model's sincerity was given. Subjects then observed the symbolically presented model's immediatereward choices, opposed to their own preferences. Immediately after treatment, children in all model conditions and in a fourth, no-model control group responded to a second delay-preference test. It was found that the influence of models varied substantially as a function of experimentally attributed sincerity. Insincere models had considerably less effect than sincere and neutral models, who provoked substantial and equivalent changes. Insincere models did not evoke significantly different change than occurred in the control group. A postexperimental inquiry showed the experimental manipulation had affected perceptions of the model's sincerity and liking for the model, with the insincere model rated considerably lower than the sincere and neutral models. The relevance of cognitive appraisal in observational learning was discussed.     

Factors affecting hypothesis testing in kindergarten children

In a previous experiment, the authors demonstrated that kindergarten and first-grade children can be trained to test hypotheses sequentially within the context of a discrimination learning task. The present experiment is concerned with delineating various aspects of the pretraining that contribute to the improved hypothesis-testing strategies of kindergarten children (mean CA = 71.6 months). It was found that children who have learned to anticipate an invariant cue-reward relation in such tasks manifest improved hypothesis-testing behavior, as well as improved discrimination performance, whereas children who have been trained to identify and name the various stimulus components of the discriminanda do not perform better than those without such training. It was also found that children who have had practice in shifting from an irrelevant to a relevant dimension perform better than those who have not had such experience. Moreover, children who have been given explicit instruction and training in the use of win-stay and lose-shift rules, as well as in the use of valid hypotheses, manifest strategies superior to those without such training. Finally, extensive pretraining over two sessions, administered on separate days, resulted in a marked reduction in the proportion of children who were dimensionally fixated while solving discrimination problems with two genuine dimensions.     

Children's strategy preferences for resolving contradictory story information under two social conditions

This paper attempted to examine how children, when confronted with a literary implicature, resolve this implicature under two types of social conditions. More specifically, this paper identified five types of strategies which people employ to resolve text anomalies arising when old information in a story setting is incompatible with new information in a story ending. Two experiments demonstrated that third graders (8.4 and 8.6 years) and sixth graders (12.5 and 12.8 years) consistently selected certain strategies for resolving old and new, empirical and value, contradictory information. Although third and sixth graders demonstrated a similar strategy preference for resolving contradictory old and new information in formal conditions, the principal difference was that third graders modified old information to fit new information while sixth graders modified new information to fit old information. In contrasting the formal and informal conditions, third graders shifted their strategy preferences so as to minimize the amount of text restructuring in the formal condition; sixth graders, on the other hand, shifted their strategy preferences so as to maximize the amount of text restructuring in informal conditions. These findings suggest that story schema structures are more interpretive than story grammar psychologists presently assume.     

Development of cerebral dominance: dichotic listening asymmetry in normal and learning-disabled children

The magnitude of the dichotic right-ear advantage was assessed in 48 normal and 48 learning-disabled children representing an age range of approximately 5 years. All subjects were matched according to age, sex, and handedness. An analysis of results indicated a significant right-ear advantage in both the normal and learning-disabled children, but revealed no developmental trends for either group. Differences observed in the performance of the learning-disabled and normal children may reflect variability in selective attention rather than differences in the degree of cerebral lateralization. These results suggest a need for a reconceptualization of the causative factors affecting children with learning disorders and lend support to the notion that cerebral lateralization is not a developmental phenomenon.     

Reward and number of choices in children's probability learning: An attempt to reconcile conflicting findings

Five event schedules (75:0, 75:25, 75:0:0, 72:25:0, 75:12.5:12.5) were examined in a size discrimination task with penny rewards and plastic token markers. The subjects were 100 fourth graders (mean age = 9.4 years) and 100 undergraduates of both sexes. Whether or not the event probabilities summed to unity proved to be a more important determiner of terminal performance than the number of response alternatives in the task (p < .01). Females maximized more than males (p < .001) and college students more than fourth graders (p < .001). Greater maximization was exhibited by fourth graders in the reward condition (p < .01). These reward effects appeared to be more consistent with a detrimental-effects-of-reward interpretation than either utility or expectancy interpretations.     

Same-sex imitation of and reported agreement with parents and unfamiliar adults

Children aged 7, 10, and 14 were shown sets of photographs of human figures for each of which they made judgments of age or attractiveness. Randomly determined responses appeared under each set of photographs. Half the children were told the responses represented choices of parents and the other half that they represented choices of unfamiliar adults. After the opportunity to imitate, children were asked whom they thought they agreed with the most. Findings indicated only a small, borderline-significant effect for same-sex imitation, but a large, highly significant effect for reported agreement, particularly in the unfamiliar adult condition (p < .001). Discussion centered on two issues: (1) Same-sex effects appear strongest when the act of choosing between adults and the adults' gender are accentuated; and (2) differences between present and previous findings regarding same-sex effects for parents vs unfamiliar adults may relate to the ages of the children investigated.     

Evaluation of infant vocal conditioning.

The use of the operant conditioning paradigm, as it has been applied to infant social, vocal behavior, reflects a failure to take into account the social nature of human infants over and above the rigid theoretical rationale of the paradigm. It is argued that: (1) the baseline procedure used in operant conditioning studies is methodologically and conceptually invalid; (2) the reinforcing stimulus used in social conditioning studies elicits the very response that it is assigned to reinforce; and (3) the effect of the response-reinforcer relationship is not the reinforcement (strengthening) of vocal response rate.     

Discriminative infant smiling to orientations of talking faces of mother and stranger.

Thirty-two infants aged 14 and 20 weeks were presented with a live face in each of eight conditions, which consisted of all combinations of (a) a 0° or 90° orientation; (b) familiar face (the infant's mother) or distinctively unfamiliar face; and (c) talking or silent context. The previous findings that younger infants smile longer at 0° than at 90° faces and that this differential responsiveness to orientation wanes with increasing age were replicated; the hypothesis that older infants would smile longest at their mothers' talking faces in the 0° orientation was confirmed. In addition, infants of both ages smiled more at their mothers than at the stranger, although this effect interacted with orientation and sex of the infant.     

Dissonance theory revised again: Comment on the paper by Fazio,Zanna, and Cooper

Fazio, Zanna, and Cooper (Dissonance and self-perception: An integrative view on each theory's proper domain of application. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1977, 13, 464–479) specified mutually exclusive domains of application for dissonance and self-perception theory and used a misattribution-of-arousal procedure to distinguish between dissonance reduction and self-perception processes. Because their proposed limitations of the domains of the two theories and their use of the misattribution procedure are not directly derivable from earlier statements of either theory, it may be best to regard their analysis as a new theory, rather than as a conciliation of the parent theories. New analyses based on the Fazio et al. results indicate that their data provide an insufficient basis for preferring their theory to earlier versions of dissonance and self-perception theories. Dissonance and self-perception: An integrative view of each theory's proper domain of application. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1977, 13, 464–479.     

Imaging,empathy, and causal attribution

Three studies were conducted to test whether imagery accounts for the effects of empathy on attributions, that is, whether attributers construct and scan a mental image of social scenarios the same way that actual participants scan a real environment. According to this interpretation, attributers “see” the world as the participant does and make vicarious attributions. An alternative interpretation holds that subjects base vicarious attributions on recreating the motivations and affect of the actor, so that imaging is irrelevant to empathy and attributions. In the first study, subjects who imagined a story from the perspective of a particular character later showed differential recall of story details as a function of role, but not differential attributions. In Experiment 2, role-taking subjects showed clear effects of imaged perspective on recall for story details, but no effects on attributions of causality for an accident. Further, recall and attribution were uncorrelated. In the last study, empathy and imagery role-taking instructions produced independent effects: imagers showed pronounced perspective-relevant recall and empathizers did not. Neither showed unambiguous vicarious attributions. Recall and attribution were again uncorrelated. These studies suggest that the imagery explanation of empathy effects is untenable, and imply that the recall of perspective-relevant details is unlikely to mediate attributions of causality in imaginary scenarios.