Cognitive styles in the development of medical careers

Recent research has shown that academic choice and achievement may be partly a function of the student's standing on the field-dependence-independence cognitive-style dimension. The results of two longitudinal studies suggest that information about field dependence-independence may be of value for student guidance in the medical setting. The first, a study of college undergraduates who early expressed an interest in medicine, showed that these cognitive styles play a discernible role in determining who will eventually enter medical school. The second, a study of medical students, showed that field-dependent and field-independent students subsequently tend to choose different medical specialties. These results are consistent with cognitive-style theory, which proposes that field-independent people will choose vocations that require cognitive restructuring skills, whereas field-dependent people will choose vocations that require greater social-interpersonal involvement.     

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.     

Visual information processing in relation to age and to reading ability.

Temporal aspects of early visual information processing were studied developmentally in good and in poor reading male subjects ranging in age from 7 to 13 years. Forced-choice temporal integration and backward masking tasks, respectively, were utilized to assess duration of visual persistence and of relative rate of visual information processing. The results did not reveal differences in either visual persistence or processing rate in relation to reading ability at any age level studied. However, processing rate was found to increase markedly with chronological age in both the good and the poor readers while visual persistence did not vary significantly. The findings were discussed in relation to earlier work and in relation to current theoretical formulations of visual information processing.     

A reappraisal of the relation between performances of quantitative identity and quantitative equivalence conservation tasks

Previous studies of children's performance on quantitative identity and equivalence conservation problems in the number domain are suggested to be flawed because of the low numbers of items in the arrays. In Experiment 1, children were tested on three different number versions of identity and equivalence conservation tasks. Their performance varied with the number of items and no child was found to pass a large number version of an equivalence conservation task and fail the corresponding version of an identity conservation task. In Experiment 2 the notion that the contextual effect of asking two similar questions might underlie the difference in performance on the two tasks was tested and rejected. The results are discussed in relation to recent analyses of conservation problems.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Indirect social influence: Change in judgmental process or anticipatory conformity?

In three experiments, subjects imposed sentence in a criminal case before and after reading the harsh sentence imposed by the trial judge. They then read and imposed sentence in another case. In one experimental condition the subjects anticipated learning the judge's sentence in Case 2; in the other condition they were told not to anticipate learning the judge's sentence. Control subjects made their judgments without ever seeing the judge's sentence. Direct influence was the change in sentences within cases; indirect influence was the difference between initial sentences in Cases 1 and 2. Though direct influence was minimal and not significant, indirect influence was substantial, and was greater in the anticipation than no-anticipation than control conditions, indicating that both modification of the judgmental process and anticipatory conformity were operating. Indirect influence may then reflect a change of either type, depending on a number of methodological and other factors.