Attitudinal qualities relating to the strength of the attitude-behavior relationship

A study was conducted to examine the relation between each of several attitudinal qualities and attitude-behavior consistency. Subjects' attitudes toward volunterring to participate in psychological research were assessed. The number of experiments in which each subject volunteered to participate was employed as the measure of behavior. Attitude-behavior consistency was significantly related to (1) the amount of direct experience upon which the subject's attitude was based (specifically, the number of experiments in which the subject had previously participated), (2) the degree of certainty with which the attitude was held, and (3) how well-defined the subject's attitude was, as measured by the width of his latitude of rejection. These three attitudinal qualities were significantly intercorrelated, suggesting that direct experience with an attitude object may produce an attitude that is both better defined and more confidently held than an attitude formed through more indirect means.     

Parameters for vowel substitutions in Broca''s aphasia

Most phonological investigations of aphasic speech have focused on consonants. In this study, the vowel substitutions of five English-speaking Broca's aphasics were investigated with respect to several major explanatory hypotheses. An important possible motivating factor for aphasic substitutions, phonological environment, is an unlikely origin for these errors, since most substitutions occur along the paradigmatic axis. Another prominent hypothesis, markedness, also has no predictive power for the data of this sample. However, an analysis of the five Chomsky and Halle (1968, (The Sound Pattern of English), New York: Harper and Row) vowel features indicates that the two features for vowel height are selectively impaired: There is a strong tendency for lower vowels to replace higher targets. Moreover, the substitution sounds tend to be close to their target sounds along the height axis. Four possible hypotheses are advanced to account for this consistent lowering tendency.     

Career stages: A partial test of Levinson's model of life/career stages

This study purports to test a theory of life and career stages developed by Daniel Levinson and his associates. The theory suggests four distinct stages between ages 20 and 45 each with their own developmental tasks and related behaviors and attitudes. Subjects (759 managerial, professional, and technical employees) were selected randomly from levels and departments of a major public sector employer in the midwest United States. The measure of career stage asked respondents to indicate whether they had passed through, were still in, or had not yet reached each stage as operationalized by a short vignette. Attitudinal and behavioral measures were abstracted from previously developed instruments. Only moderate support for the theory was found with little or no evidence to support the age-linked notion of these stages. Stages were found to be discriminable in terms of certain attitudes (upward mobility, career and overall job satisfaction, and job commitment) as predicted. Suggestions are given for improvements in measurement, research design, and theory refinement.     

Sex and cultural differences in the factorial structure of the self-directed search

Holland's Self-Directed Search was administered to 247 male and 252 female high school students, aged 16 to 18 years, attending state schools in New Zealand. Principal factor analysis was used in an attempt to identify six orthogonal factors analogous to Holland's six personality types. The Social and Enterprising scales could not be split into two factors in either sample, and the Investigative and Realistic scales defined a single factor for the female students. Computed distances between pairs of the six personality types in five dimensional factorial space were compared with the relative ordering of the distances expected from Holland's hexagonal model. The positions of the types in space corresponded more closely with the model for the males than they did for the females. The results, in conjunction with those of similar studies in Israel and the United States, imply that the correspondence between some summary codes on the SDS and existing occupational classifications based on Holland's types may be less than perfect, particularly for females. Also, care should be taken when using codes on the SDS to calculate Holland's indices of “consistency,” especially for females.     

Infant search tasks reveal early concepts of containment and canonical usage of objects

It is difficult to gain unambiguous evidence on the use of concepts by infants. Many results can be accounted for in terms of action-based strategies. The evidence reported here fulfils the minimal criteria for the operation of working concepts in infants. Search tasks are used with a filled interval which forces memory-search, and the object is hidden in containers which fulfil their customary job or violate it. Infants treat an upright cup as a more reliable location marker than an inverted one. A series of experiments probes the phenomenon. The results indicate that the infants have a working concept of containment which can be triggered by the provision of containers in their canonical orientation. Even “object permanence tasks” lead infants to access their knowledge of the relationships into which things typically enter in the world outside the laboratory.     

A feature-integration theory of attention

A new hypothesis about the role of focused attention is proposed. The feature-integration theory of attention suggests that attention must be directed serially to each stimulus in a display whenever conjunctions of more than one separable feature are needed to characterize or distinguish the possible objects presented. A number of predictions were tested in a variety of paradigms including visual search, texture segregation, identification and localization, and using both separable dimensions (shape and color) and local elements or parts of figures (lines, curves, etc. in letters) as the features to be integrated into complex wholes. The results were in general consistent with the hypothesis. They offer a new set of criteria for distinguishing separable from integral features and a new rationale for predicting which tasks will show attention limits and which will not.