The executive control of mnemonic activity

The present study focused on the executive monitoring of a rehearsal strategy by sixth (11 years 5 months), tenth (15 years 8 months), and twelfth (17 years 9 months) graders and adults (27 years 4 months). The results showed that all of the adults spontaneously adopted an “optimal” strategy and generalized it to a second task. However, none of the sixth graders and only two tenth and three twelfth graders did so. All of the school subjects subsequently trained to rehearse, maintained the strategy without prompting, and showed evidence of transfer. In comparison to adults, the trained subjects' generalized routines became more similar to the adults' as grade increased. This study supports the notion that efficient executive functioning includes the case where continued use of a mnemonic routine is a reasonable response to an objective change in an information-processing task.     

The interactive effects of facial expressions of emotion and verbal messages on perceptions of affective meaning

The influence of facial expressions of emotion on perceptions of affective sentence meaning was investigated by pairing happy, angry, suprised, and sad faces of “teachers” with sentences of varying affective tone. Ninety-five students judged the overall meaning communicated by these paired stimuli. The design allowed exploration of unique facial-verbal combination effects, overall cue integration effects, and sex differences. Clear effects of cue combinations emerged. Perceived sincerity was found to be a function of the consistency of evaluative (positivity) but not dominance cues. Perceived positivity was an interactive function of both evaluative cues and dominance cues. Perceived dominance was affected by the interaction of evaluative cues. The subtleties of cue combination were clarified through open-ended dependent measures. Also, as expected, females were found to be more sensitive than males to verbal-nonverbal cue conflict in perceptions of sincerity. However, no other sex differences were found. The findings were discussed with regard to the need for a firm empirical base upon which to integrate verbal and nonverbal research traditions in the communication of affective meaning.     

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.     

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.     

A cusp catastrophe: Hysteresis, bimodality, and inaccessibility in rabbit eyelid conditioning

Three properties of the cusp catastrophe: bimodality, inaccessibility, and hysteresis were evaluated in rabbit eyelid conditioning. Bimodality was evidenced by the fact that responding tended to occur at either very low or very high levels, and inaccessibility by the fact that intermediate levels of responding were rarely encountered. Hysteresis was demonstrated when: (a) levels of responding attained under a continuous schedule of reinforcement were largely maintained by a schedule which was too lean to promote conditioning by itself; and (b) levels of responding attained with a high intensity unconditional stimulus were largely maintained by a lower intensity unconditional stimulus which was too weak to promote conditioning in its own right. These results are consistent with the model of conditioning suggested by P. W. Frey and R. J. Sears (Psychological Review, 1978, 85, 321–340) which postulates response-mapping rules based on the cusp catastrophe.     

Dissociative effects of different types and amounts of nonreinforced CS exposure on avoidance extinction and the CER

Two experiments examined the effectiveness of two amounts of flooding or response-prevention on hastening avoidance response extinction and on reducing CS-produced suppression of bar-pressing for food. In Experiment 1, 20 and 30 flooding trials were both shown to be effective in hastening the extinction of a well-learned shuttlebox avoidance response. In Experiment 2, rats trained under comparable conditions to those in Experiment 1 were tested following flooding for the CER in a different apparatus. The results indicated that 30, but not 20, flooding trials were sufficient to reduce the CER. In each experiment the results of additional control groups equated with the flooded groups for nonreinforced CS exposure also revealed a dissociation between the effectiveness of this CS time control procedure in hastening avoidance response extinction and in reducing the CER. Further comparisons showed that although 30 flooding trials did reduce the CER, the same total duration of nonreinforced CS Exposure in the form of avoidance extinction trials did not. Thus the context in which CS exposure occurs may affect the dynamics of extinction of the CER. The experiments are discussed in the broader context of dissociation of various indices of fear in humans.     

Cognitive flexibility-rigidity, repetition effects, and memory

This experiment examined the role of cognitive flexibility-rigidity in memory. On the basis of several personality tests, subjects were classified as flexible, intermediate, or rigid, using a postexperimental blocking procedure. All subjects were given a perceptual grouping task, which masks the meaningful structure of the material. Subjects have the option of discovering the more meaningful structure consisting of word pairs, or alternatively, processing less meaningful chunks of letters. Results were that flexible subjects recalled substantially more items than intermediate and rigid subjects, in that order. In addition, subjects given different (varied) groupings of the letter chunks recalled substantially more than subjects given repeated presentations of the same grouping structure. Transfer tests indicated that subjects acquired different coding strategies under varied and constant input. Repetitious input led subjects to adopt inefficient strategies in processing the material to be remembered, whereas varied input led subjects to adopt efficient encoding strategies.     

Through the looking glass: Sex differences in memory for self-facial poses

This study investigated recognition memory of photographs of the subject's own face. Male and female subjects were photographed as they projected sociable faces, trustworthy faces, and intelligent faces. After deciding which face of 10 best represented each characteristic, and judging which photograph best represented their “real self,” a recognition memory test of poses was given. Half of each sex were tested under intentional learning conditions and the remainder were tested under incidental learning conditions. Females demonstrated superior recognition memory of their own facial projections and, in particular, recalled photographs of their “real self” and “most sociable” self most easily. No differences were found between the two learning conditions. Subjects' recognition performance was not related to their confidence of judgments. The results were discussed in terms of sex differences and the role of self in memory.     

Skill-set,success outcome,and mania as determinants of the illusion of control

The illusion of control, the tendency for individuals to approach chance tasks with skill-appropriate strategies, was studied. Subjects premeasured on a mania scale were classified as either high (HM) or low (LM) in mania. In the first phase of the study, HM and LM subjects performed 30 trials on either a skill (verbal associates) or chance (coin-toss) task and were given either 20, 50, or 80% success feedback. After Task 1 was completed, subjects filled out an attribution questionnaire. In the final phase of the study, subjects anticipated 30 more trials either on a skill or chance task. Subjects' predicted successes were measured. It was hypothesized that predicted successes on anticipated skill and chance tasks would be affected more by outcomes on a previous skill task than by outcomes on a previous chance task. The results for the anticipated skill task directly supported the hypothesis. On the anticipated chance task, the hypothesis was confirmed for HM subjects only. The results are discussed in terms of how previous skill experiences may induce a set to control ungovernable situations for individuals with manic reactions.     

Factors affecting judgments of fluency: I. interjections

Six speech samples containing varying amounts of schwa interjections were tape-recorded and presented to 36 male and 36 female listeners. For each sample, listeners were asked to make judgments of fluent, disfluent, and stuttered speech, and to answer the question “Would you recommend speech therapy?” Results indicated that speech samples containing 5% or more interjections evoked a judgment of disfluent speech by a majority of listeners. The sample containing 20% interjections, however, was found to evoke judgments of disfluent and stuttered speech about equally. Varying numbers of listeners recommended clinical services for disfluent speech. In general, the results indicated that (1) the presence of interjections in connected speech is not normal regardless of frequency, (2) fluent speech may not contain interjections in excess of 5%, and (3) with 20% interjections in speech, the distinction between disfluency and stuttering may be blurred.