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.     

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.     

Alleys in visual space

Geometry of frameless visual space is dealt with. First, parallel and equidistant alleys, horopters in the horizontal plane of eyes' level are discussed within the framework of the Luneburg's model that the frameless visual space is a Riemannian space of constant curvature. That basic postulate and the specific mapping functions assumed by Luneburg between the euclidean map of visual space and the physical space are kept separate, and efforts are directed to make the model applicable to more natural conditions of our visual space. A possibility is pointed out to remove the constraint “frameless” in the sense that perceptual geometrical properties are primarily determined by the convergence of optic axes. So far, only alleys in the horizontal plane extending from us toward infinity have been studied, but more often we perceive parallel lines, horizontal or vertical, in front of us like shelves of a bookcase. Hence, equations are derived for horopter plane appearing fronto-parallel in the three-dimensional visual space and alleys running horizontally or vertically on the horopter plane. It is shown that parallel and equidistant alleys are not the same in the horopter plane as in the horizontal plane, if the visual space is not euclidean. A method to evaluate the discrepancy between the two alleys without using any mapping functions is stated with some numerical examples.     

Acquisition and forgetting in monkeys' memory of informational object-reward associations

The first experiment showed the monkeys could recall whether an object had been rewarded with peanuts or with sultanas, two equally preferred foods. The second investigated the effect of rewarded trials with an object on monkeys' ability to recall a nonrewarded trial with the same object. The third demonstrated that monkeys could use the memory of reward to predict nonreward and the memory of nonreward to predict reward, in a Win-Shift Lose-Stay paradigm. The fourth found differences between Win-Shift Lose-Stay and Win-Stay Lose-Shift in the rate at which associations between objects and reward events were forgotten. These results are discussed in relation to D. L. Medin's (In A. M. Schrier, Ed., Behavioral primatology, Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1977, Vol. I, pp. 33–69) distinction between informational and hedonic effects of reward in monkeys. It is argued that the association between an object and a reward event is represented in memory by many independent traces, different traces recording the object's association with different attributes of the reward event.     

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.     

The effect of syntactic encoding on sentence comprehension in aphasia.

This study compared two levels of syntactic encoding with respect to their effect on aphasics' auditory comprehension. The same informational content was presented either as an embedded sentence or as two contiguous simplé propositions. A similar contrast was utilized to compare sentences containing relational terms of time, comparison, instrumentality, as well as sentences involving conjunction reduction, with parallel messages expressed in expanded, simplified form. A picture-verification paradigm was used. Comprehension was significantly enhanced only in the case of embedded sentences, with a tendency for Broca's aphasics to show the maximum effects.     

Memory scanning,introversion-extraversion,and levels of processing

Individual differences in information processing were studied in the form of the hypothesis that arousal, as indexed by a personality measure of introversion-extraversion, affects the speed with which certain kinds of processing are completed. The Sternberg paradigm was used, and the results suggested that introverts and extraverts scanned for physical features equally rapidly, but that introverts were slower than extraverts at scanning for the semantic features of category membership. There was limited support for the hypothesis that introverts, thought to be more aroused than extraverts, are less able to engage in shared or parallel processing. It was concluded that information processing in introverts and extraverts may differ qualitatively as well as quantitatively.     

Lateralization for reading musical chords: Disentangling symbolic, analytic, and phonological aspects of reading

It has been repeatedly shown that the left hemisphere (right visual field) is superior to the right hemisphere (LVF) in reading English, a bias possibly due to any or all of three confounded factors: (1) the symbolic nature of the coding system; (2) the analytic requirements of the decoding process; and (3) the phonological associations of the elements. Recent work on reading Japanese ideograms (Kanji) disentangles (1) from (2) and (3), but leaves the latter two confounded. We further disentangle (2) and (3) by examining visual field preference for reading musical chords, representatives of an analytic, nonphonological symbol system. The strong RVF advantage is interpreted as indicating that the left hemisphere is dominant for reading an analytic symbol system that is not phonologically based. We conclude that the left-hemisphere advantage traditionally found for reading phonological symbols is due to their analytic nature in addition to any effect due to their linguistic association.