The role of elaborations in memory for prose

In two experiments, subjects read stories and were asked to make plausibility judgments about statements with respect to the stories. The inherent plausibility of the queried statements, the amount of attention subjects focused on information necessary for making a judgment, and the interval between presentation of the relevant story information and the test probe were varied orthogonally. The pattern of latencies obtained to make these judgments cast strong doubt on the notion that question answering is typically accomplished by searching for a single fact in memory. Rather, people seem to retrieve any relevant, available information and then use this to compute whether a statement seems true. The independent variables in these experiments can be interpreted according to whether they affect the retrieval or the judgment phase.     

The psychological representation of musical pitch in a tonal context

In this series of experiments, evidence was found for a complex psychological representation of musical pitch. The results of a scaling study, in which subjects judged the similarities between pairs of tones presented in an explicitly tonal context, suggest that musical listeners extract a pattern of relationships among tones that is determined not only by pitch height and chroma, but also by membership in the major triad chord and the diatonic scale associated with the tonal system of the context. Multidimensional scaling of the similarity ratings gave a three-dimensional conical structure around which the tones were ordered according to pitch height. The major triad components formed a closely related cluster near the vertex of the cone; the remaining diatonic scale tones formed a less closely related subset farther from the vertex; and, the nondiatonic tones, still farther from the vertex, were widely dispersed. The results also suggest that, in the psychological representation, tones less closely related to the tonality are less stable than tones closely related to the tonality, and that the representation incorporates the tendency for unstable tones to move toward the more stable tones in time, reflecting the dynamic character of musical tones. In the similarity ratings of the scaling study, tones less related to the tonality were judged more similar to tones more related to the tonality than the reverse temporal order. Furthermore, in a delayed recognition task memory performance for nondiatonic tones was less accurate than for diatonic tones, and nondiatonic tones were more often confused with diatonic tones than diatonic tones were confused with nondiatonic tones. These results indicate the tonality-specific nature of the psychological representation and argue that the perception of music depends not only on psychoacoustic properties of the tones, but also on processes that relate the tones to one another through contact with a well-defined and complex psychological representation of musical pitch.     

WITHDRAWAL OF CHRONIC CHLORPROMAZINE MEDICATION: AN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS

Approximately 50% of all institutionalized, mentally retarded adults receive psychotropic medication to control inappropriate behavior. In this study, behaviors exhibited by five retarded adults were formally observed while they were on and off medication. Each subject had been receiving chlorpromazine for six or more years prior to the start of the study. The drug was withdrawn and readministered using a double-blind B-A-B (drug-placebo-drug) design. Effects were highly individualized. Some desirable behavior emerged when chlorpromazine was discontinued.     

EFFECTS OF SELF-INSTRUCTIONAL TRAINING ON SECOND- AND THIRD-GRADE HYPERACTIVE CHILDREN: A FAILURE TO REPUCATE

Bornstein and Quevillon (1976) demonstrated generalization from a 2-hour self-instructional training session to on-task behavior in the classroom with 4-year-old overactive children. In an attempt to replicate this work with older children, eight 7- and 8-year-old hyperactive children were assigned to either a self-instructional training group or an attention-practice control group. On-task behavior in the classroom and performance measures in reading and arithmetic were assessed. The level of difficulty of these tasks was varied. The results of Bornstein and Quevillon's (1976) study were not replicated, although the subsequent introduction of a token program significantly increased on-task behavior.     

Issues in multivariate assessment of a large-scale behavioral program

Several social and research issues directly affected the development and implementation of multivariate assessment in a large community-based applied research program. Examples are drawn from experiences of the Preparation through Responsive Educational Programs Project for disruptive and skill deficient adolescents in suburban, rural, and urban junior high school settings, focusing on the assessment of academic and social skill development and long-term skill maintenance. The social context altered both project treatment and follow-up plans, requiring assessment of potentially unintended effects and decreasing consistency across sites. Future community acceptance of such programs may depend on the investigators' adaptation to diverse community pressures for program conduct and assessment and the measurement of phenomena that are not always directly observable.     

The effect of self-recording and social reinforcement components of parent training programs

This investigation attempted to assess the effectiveness of two components of parent training programs: (1) the effect of a self-behavior management project prior to intervention with deviant child behaviors, and (2) that of social reinforcement from peers and the consultant. Four groups of parents were exposed to a basic training program and were measured on their success in an intervention program in the inappropriate behavior of their children (ages 7–9 years). Two groups of parents were requested to do a self-modification program prior to the intervention with deviant child behavior; two groups did a child intervention program without a self-management project. One group in the self-management and one group without self-management received verbal social reinforcement from peers and the consultant during interventions. Results obtained indicate that the parent group whose training involved a self-behavior management project prior to intervention with their child's inappropriate behavior and verbal social reinforcement achieved a significantly greater reduction of these behaviors when compared to the groups where either self-management of social reinforcement was used.     

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.     

Affective and cognitive mediators of reactions to spatial invasions

At a crosswalk on a busy street, a confederate, sketching a drawing or not, stood close or far from a pedestrian for 10 sec before the street light indicated “Walk.” In the first study, pedestrians were given the opportunity to subsequently help this confederate or another accomplice by calling attention to a dropped pen. In the second study, crossing speeds were timed and pedestrians were asked to record their mood and reactions to “another pedestrian,” who happened to be the confederate. These studies tested and found evidence for both cognitive and arousal explanations of reactions to spatial invasions. Cognitive and attributional theories imply that characteristics of the invader are important mediators of reactions to the invasion. The close nonartist was judged to be more inappropriate, produced faster escape speeds, and was helped less than the close artist or the far confederates. Arousal explanations imply that any invasion produces a generalized reaction which would be unrelated to characteristics of the invader. The other accomplice was helped less when the subject had been invaded and this reduction in helping was unaffected by the artist manipulation. These findings suggest a general arousal response to any invasion with a subsequent reliance on cognitive interpretations.