The morphological asymmetry of the hemispheres and cerebral dominance for speech: A possible relationship

The asymmetry of the posterior Sylvian branches of the middle cerebral artery was examined on the carotid angiograms of 59 patients in whom the lateralization of speech representation was known from sodium amobarbital (Amytal) studies. The usual asymmetry of these vessels was found to be present in the group of patients with left-hemisphere speech representation but significantly reduced in patients with atypical cerebral dominance for speech. A model of the inheritance of handedness and cerebral dominance is extended to take account of these results.     

Teaching awareness of strategic behavior in combination with strategy training: Effects on children's memory performance

The present study examined the effectiveness of two components (rehearsal training and strategy awareness) of an instructional package designed to train the developmentally young in the use of mature information processing techniques. Two groups of children of equivalent developmental age (MA = 8), one mildly retarded and the other of average intelligence, participated. Rehearsal training was effective in improving recall scores on the training task; however, neither rehearsal training, memory awareness, nor their combination significantly altered memory performance on the generalization tasks. There was evidence, however, that the combination of rehearsal training and strategy awareness did increase the likelihood of strategy transfer on the generalization task (recognition) which most closely resembled the training task. Post-task questioning revealed that instructions concerning memory awareness did improve subjects ability to verbalize appropriate strategic behavior; however, these improvements were not consistently translated into either actual use of a rehearsal strategy or improved performance. Discussion centered on the implications of these results and on the need for increased research on the metamnemonic skills involved in strategy generalization.     

Imposed latencies,interruptions and dyadic interaction: Physiological response and interpersonal attraction

This study explored the impact of paralinguistic phenomena on interpersonal attraction and physiological measures during dyadic interaction. Conversations between undergraduate subjects and same-sex experimenters were either synchronous or asynchronous, with half the asynchronous conversations including imposed long latencies and the remainder frequent interruptions. Results showed that imposed latencies were associated with decreased positive attributions and greater physiological arousal, but interruptions had a moderately positive effect. The findings were discussed in terms of Chapple's theory of interaction, and their implications for psychotherapy and other interviews.     

The role of Canadian school psychologists: Perceptions of a sample from the general public

A sample of 77 subjects responded to a questionnaire designed to collect information about their perceptions of the role of school psychologists. The results indicate that overall the respondents had a fairly accurate sense of what a school psychologist does, although they overestimated the importance of psychotherapy as one of the school psychologist's functions. It is recommended that school psychologists more clearly specify their function when dealing with members of the general public.     

Context, categorization, and recall: The “change-of-standard” effect

A psycholinguistically based conception of the relation among context, categorization, and memory is tested by examining what happens to people's memory of an object when the object is initially categorized in terms of the context in which it appears, but, when the object is later recalled, this context is no longer salient. Subjects read about the sentencing decisions of a target trial judge in the context of other trial judges who consistently gave either higher sentences or lower sentences than the target judge. As predicted, subjects tended to categorize the target judge as “lenient” in the former, harsh context condition, and as “harsh” in the latter, lenient context condition. A week later, subjects read about the sentencing decisions of some additional judges, and then recalled the sentencing decisions of the target judge they had read about the week before. Across the two sessions, either a harsh, moderate, or lenient category norm for judges' sentencing decisions was established by having subjects read about decisions that involved either high, medium, or low sentences, respectively. The results indicated that subjects recalled the target judge's decisions by interpreting their prior categorization of his behavior in terms of the category norm established across the two sessions rather than the original context. Thus, subjects who were exposed to the same target in the same circumstances, and initially categorized the target in the same way, nevertheless remembered his behavior differently if their category norm was different at the moment of recall. Other types of “change of standard” and their implications for human judgment and memory are discussed.     

Does reward depletion influence spatial memory performance?

If spatial memory tasks are considered as foraging problems, it can be predicted that rats' difficulty in learning a win-stay task—revisiting part of a maze where food has recently been found—should be partly overcome if the food is not fully consumed at the first visit (nondepleted reward) rather than being all eaten (depleted reward). Three experiments confirmed and further analysed this result. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that it does not depend on the amount of food initially found; nor is win-stay performance affected by the amount of food actually eaten. Experiment 3 suggested that the effects of nondepleted reward are mainly due to the animals' being interrupted while eating, and very little to the fact that uneaten food is left behind. The results are discussed with regard to their implications for learning theory, and for the application of foraging theory to learning and memory experiments.     

Deep agraphia

A case of agraphia is documented which resembles in every respect the pattern of results obtained in deep dyslexia. Pronounceable pseudowords could not be written to dictation while concrete nouns were more accurately transcribed than abstract nouns. Verbs and functions words were written very poorly and oral spelling was impaired. In addition, semantic paragraphias were present. In contrast to the deficit observed in writing, no such impairment was found for reading. It is concluded that writing can occur without phoneme-grapheme conversion and that codes generated for reading are functionally distinct from codes generated for writing.     

Foreperiod and visual stimulus intensity: A reappraisal

The joint effects of stimulus modality, stimulus intensity, and foreperiod on simple RT were investigated. In experiment 1 an interaction was found between stimulus intensity, both visual and auditory, and a variable FP such that the intensity-effect on RT was largest at the shortest FP. Experiment 2 provided a successful replication with smaller and weaker visual stimuli. No interaction was observed with a constant FP, although the visual stimuli were identical and the auditory ones psychophysically equivalent to the visual stimuli of experiment 1.It is proposed that an additive or interactive relationship between stimulus intensity and FP can be inferred only when the mental processes called for by the various uses of FP are simultaneously considered. Another precondition is an adequate sampling of the intensity-continuum with special reference to the retinal size of visual stimuli.