Surprise but not coherence: Sensitivity to verbal humor in right-hemisphere patients

Verbal humor deficits were investigated in right-hemisphere-damaged patients. It was hypothesized that the appreciation of jokes presupposes two elements: sensitivity to the surprise element entailed in the punch line of a joke and apprehension of the coherence which results when the punch line has been integrated with the body of the joke. The possible dissociation between these elements was tested by asking subjects to select from four alternatives the appropriate ending to a joke. Right-hemisphere patients exhibited a selective attraction to endings which contained an element of surprise but which were not otherwise coherent with the body of the joke. This finding suggests that right-hemisphere patients have difficulty in integrating content across parts of a narrative and confirms the psychological reality of the proposed distinction between the surprise and coherence elements of humor processing.     

Profiles of symbol-reading skills in organic patients

One (unitary) school of thought views all symbolic competences as closely related, while a rival (pluralistic) approach underscores the relative differences among modes of symbolic processing. To secure information on the plausibility of these competing hypotheses, matched groups of left- and right-hemisphere patients were given a visual symbol-recognition test. Subjects were required to choose the correctly depicted symbol among a set of four. The results challenge a strong version of the “unitary” hypothesis. What emerges instead is a view of symbol systems as a continuum: relatively linguistic symbol systems prove challenging for left-hemisphere patients, relatively nonlinguistic systems pose comparable difficulties for right-hemisphere patients. Contrary to hypothesis, the processing of numerical symbols poses special difficulty for right-hemisphere patients. Performance on trademarks—items which can be processed by linguistic or nonlinguistic strategies—suggests that organic patients with contrasting pathologies may adopt different processing strategies when confronting identical physical stimuli.     

Semantic field,naming, and auditory comprehension in aphasia

The status of semantic fields for 16 target nouns was compared in high and low comprehension aphasics, brain damaged, and normal controls, by measuring latency and miss rate for recognition of six classes of associates, which were presented orally on tape. The ability to name each target was also examined as a function of the integrity of the subject's semantic field for that word. Low comprehension aphasics showed both quantitative and qualitative changes in semantic fields, while milder aphasics showed only mild quantitative impairment, as compared to controls. Both latency and miss rate measures indicated that failure to name a word is associated with reduced semantic field for that word. This result is interpreted as supporting the view that nameing is, in part, determined by the convergence of associations.     

Rehearsal strategies of Alcoholic Korsakoff patients

An overt rehearsal procedure was used to monitor the rehearsal strategies that Alcoholic Korsakoff, Chronic Alcoholic, and Normal Control patients used when learning a 20-item list. It was found that Korsakoff patients spontaneously rehearse only one word at a time, that word being the one currently presented, regardless of the organizational salience of the list of words. Alcholics and Control patients, on the other hand, tended to rehearse several words in addition to the one being currently presented, and they demonstrated increasing ability to rehearse semantically related words together as the organizational salience of the list increased. This ability to rehearse in an enriched manner placed the two control groups at a distinct advantage over the Korsakoff patients at the time of recalling the list.     

Relationships between college performance and success as an Army officer

This study investigated the relationships between both academic and nonacademic indices of college success and four indices of occupational success of Army officers. Subjects were 103 U.S. Military Academy graduates from the Class of 1962. Criteria were gathered 6 and 10 years after graduation, and multiple regression results indicated that three of the four criteria were significantly predicted. Results also showed that a leadership rating received the most weight in the equations, and that academic grades can contribute significantly to the prediction of officer success. Grades in physical education and tactics received nonsignificant weights in all but one case.     

When three is not always two against one: Coalitions in experimental three-person cooperative games

Four models of coalition formation are tested in a computer-controlled experiment in which three players negotiated to form coalitions in order to gain rewards for themselves. Formation of the grand coalition of all three players as well as any of the three possible 2-person coalitions is permitted. The results indicate that the grand coalition is the most likely to form, followed by the coalition between the two strongest players. The individually rational bargaining set model of coalition formation is supported over an egalitarian model, the Shapley value, and the coalitionally rational bargaining set model. Various measures of the progress of negotiations are introduced, examined, and discussed in an effort to provide an increased data base for the establishment of a behavioral theory of bargaining and coalition formation.     

Verbal retention deficits in aphasic and amnesic patients.

Five different groups of patients (aphasics, alcoholic Korsakoffs, nondominant hemisphere patients, alcoholics, and control patients) were asked to detect either repeated letters, repeated words, rhyming words, or words from the same category during the reading of a list. It was discovered that the number of intervening words had a greater effect on the aphasics for all conditions than it did for the other groups. However, when the rate of presentation was slowed, the aphasics showed considerable improvement while the other groups maintained their same level of performance. The Korsakoff patients were impaired only on the semantic task (same category inclusion) and did not improve at the slower presentation rate. An interpretation based on speed and level of information processing abilities is given.     

Distraction effects in tasks of varying difficulty: Methodological issues in measuring development of distractibility

Effects of distraction on 5- and 8-year-old children's performance on a short-term memory task were examined. Tasks at three difficulty levels were employed to determine whether a floor effect could account for the lack of an age difference reported in an earlier study. A floor effect does not appear to be a key factor; the absolute amount of performance decrement was roughly equal for the two ages here regardless of task difficulty, and performance was well above chance under all conditions. The children adapted somewhat to the presence of distraction as shown in greater performance impairment for the first trial under distraction than for remaining trials. Use of a proportional, rather than an absolute, decrement index was considered, and the relevance of the present data to this issue was discussed.     

The relation between gesture and language in aphasic communication

Effective communication in aphasia depends not only on use of preserved linguistic capacities but also (and perhaps primarily) on the capacity to exploit alternative modalities of communication, such as gesture. To ascertain the capacity of aphasic patients to use gesture in their spontaneous communication, informally structured interviews were conducted with two Wernicke's aphasics and two Broca's aphasics, as well as with four normal controls. The performances of the patient groups were compared on the physical parameters of gesture, the points in the communication where gestures occurred, and several facets of the semantics and pragmatics of gesture. Generally speaking, the gestures of the aphasics closely paralleled their speech output: on most indices, the performance of the Wernicke's aphasics more closely resembled that of the normal controls. Wernicke's aphasics differed from normals in the clarity of their language and gestures: While individual linguistic units were often clear, the relation among units was not. In contrast, the Broca's aphasics equaled or surpassed the normal controls in the clarity of their communications. The results offer little support for the view that aphasic patients spontaneously enhance their communicative efficacy through the use of gesture; these findings can, however, be interpreted as evidence in favor of a “central organizer” which controls critical features of communication, irrespective of the modality of expression.