Induction into the workplace: The impact of internships

Some form of work experience or internship ranks high on the list of criteria used by recruiters of college graduates for positions as management trainees. While internships are discussed positively by students, faculty, and recruiters, their evaluation has been faulted as being highly subjective and lacking in the use of controls and psychometric sophistication. This study used an Institutional Cycle design to investigate changes occurring after participation in internships with three cohorts of college age students. Changes were noted in both terminal and instrumental values and in work-specific needs. In the former, changes moved the profiles of the students closer to those of campus recruiters. In the latter, changes moved the students' needs in the direction of characteristics of the job, away from environmental characteristics.     

Spatial knowledge in a young blind child

A set of eight experiments demonstrate spatial knowledge in a 2-year-old congenitally blind child and sighted blindfolded controls. Once the blind child had traveled along specific paths between objects in a novel array, she was able to make spatial inferences, finding new routes between those objects (Experiment 1). She could also do so when the routes were between places in space, not occupied by objects (Experiment II). Deviations from precisely straight routes in Experiments I and II were not due to faulty inferences, but probably came from imprecise motor control, since the same deviations occured when inferences were not required—when the child moved to a place designated by a sound source (Experiment III). This child's performances could not be accounted for by artifactual explanations: sound cues, experimenter bias, and echolocation were ruled out (Experiments IV, V, VI). Further, sighted blindfolded controls performed at roughly the same level (Experiment VII). Finally, Experiment VIII shows that the blind child could access her spatial knowledge for use in a simple map-reading task. We conclude that the young blind child has a system of spatial knowledge, including abstract, amodal rules     

Integration of melody and text in memory for songs

Two experiments examined whether the memory representation for songs consists of independent or integrated components (melody and text). Subjects heard a serial presentation of excerpts from largely unfamiliar folksongs, followed by a recognition test. The test required subjects to recognize songs, melodies, or texts and consisted of five types of items: (a) exact songs heard in the presentation; (b) new songs; (c) old tunes with new words; (d) new tunes with old words; and (e) old tunes with old words of a different song from the same presentation (‘mismatch songs’). Experiment 1 supported the integration hypothesis: Subjects' recognition of components was higher in exact songs (a) than in songs with familiar but mismatched components (e). Melody recognition, in particular, was near chance unless the original words were present. Experiment 2 showed that this integration of melody and text occurred also across different performance renditions of a song and that it could not be eliminated by voluntary attention to the melody.     

On the basis of early transitivity judgments

This research had two aims. The first was to test three explanations of performance on N-term series tasks by young children: the labeling model of B.DeBoysson-Bardies and K. O'Regan (1973), Nature (London), 246, 531–534, the sequential-contiguity model of L. Breslow (1981, Psychological Bulletin, 89, 325–351), and the ordered array or image model of C. A. Riley and T. Trabasso (1974, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 17, 187–202). In the first experiment, 5-year-old children were taught additional premises which would interfere with labeling and sequential-contiguity processes, but not with forming an ordered array. Reasoning performance was essentially comparable to previous results with the paradigm, thus supporting the ordered array model. The second aim was to reexamine children's ability to learn sets of premises which can be assembled into an ordered array, since there was reason to believe that previous studies had created false positives. In the second experiment, 3- to 7-year-old children were taught either overlapping (a > b, b > c, …) or nonoverlapping (a > b, c > d, …) premises. Overlapping premises can be integrated into an ordered array (a, b, c, d, e), but nonoverlapping premises cannot. However, the overlapping condition proved more difficult, and the success rate for preschoolers ($\text{3}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-}\text{to 4}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-year-olds}$) was of zero order. This raises doubts about their ability to learn a set of premises of the kind required for transitive inference. These doubts were strengthened by the third experiment which showed that when premises were not presented in serial order, preschool ($\text{3}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-}\text{to 4}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-year-old}$) children could not learn the premises of an N-term series task.     

Item-specific and relational encoding effects in children's recall and recognition memory for words

This study tests the hypothesis that children's deficiency in encoding itemspecific and relational information in episodic events contributes to age differences in recall and recognition. In two experiments, grade school children and college adults were presented with word triplets varying in categorical relatedness. The processing of the item-specific and relational information in the triplets was independently manipulated. Experiment 1 assessed cued recall, and Experiment 2 assessed recognition of both the central target and incidental contextual members of each triplet. The results showed that the processing manipulations had independent and different effects on recall and recognition, on memory for the members of the different kinds of triplets, on the use of the retrieval cues, and on memory for target and incidental words. Developmental differences were found in both recall and recognition, and of both target and incidental words, that varied with triplet type and the processing manipulations and that were attributable to differences in the encoding of item-specific and relational information in the triplets. The discussion contrasts alternative accounts of children's encoding deficiency, and suggests that the distinction between automatic, age-invariant, and strategic age-sensitive encoding processes needs to be redrawn.     

Five-month-old infant recall and utilization of temporal organization

The ability of 5-month-old infants to recall temporal information and utilize temporal organization was investigated in two experiments. Infants were trained to fixate a hierarchically structured or an unstructured sequence of stimuli which appeared in four spatial positions. In the first study, the number of infants who demonstrated correct recall through the third serial position of a sequence was significantly better then would occur by chance. In the second study, infants given structured sequences showed a significant increase in the number of correct fixations across trials, and they recalled across serial positions better in structured sequences. Also, accuracy of recall in both studies for the middle serial positions was related to hierarchical organization following 8-unit structured sequence training but was at chance level following unstructured sequence training. Results of both studies were interpreted within a temporal organizational framework: Infants appear to utilize organization within sequences of information.     

Spontaneous versus instructed use of multiple standards for evaluating comprehension: Effects of age,reading proficiency,and type of standard

Nine- and eleven-year-old children differing in reading proficiency read and commented on brief expository passages containing three different types of embedded problems (nonsense words, prior knowledge violations, and internal inconsistencies). Half of the children were specifically instructed as to the types of standards they should apply in order to detect the problems (lexical, external consistency, and internal consistency); the remaining children were simply instructed to look for problems. Both quantitative and qualitative differences in standard use were revealed by the children's comments about all parts of the passages. Older and better readers used more different standards and they used them more frequently than younger and poorer readers. The lexical standard was more likely to be adopted spontaneously than the other two standards and it was the only standard used by a substantial proportion of both younger and poorer readers. Finally, the consistent effects of instruction type indicate that children's evaluation activities were strongly influenced by the amount of guidance received.     

Context effects on the perceived physical attractiveness of faces

Four experiments were conducted to study the nature of context effects on the perceived physical attractiveness of faces. In Experiment 1, photos of faces scaled on attractiveness were presented in sets of three, with target faces appearing in the middle flanked by two context faces. The target faces were of average attractiveness, with the context faces being either high, average, or low in attractiveness. The effect of the context was one of assimilation, rather than contrast, regardless of whether the persons in the photos were portrayed to be associated. This result was interpreted in terms of a “generalized halo effect” for judgments of the physical attractiveness of stimuli within a group. Presenting the persons of a set as friends enhanced the perceived attractiveness of the target face but only when the context did not contain a face of low attractiveness. In Experiment 2, the assimilation effect was observed to carry over to influence ratings of the target faces several minutes after the context faces had been removed. Experiment 3 showed the assimilation effect to be robust regardless of whether the context was composed of two faces or one, but Experiment 4 showed the assimilation effect to be evident only when the context faces were presented simultaneously with the target.     

Causal attribution and dispositional inference: Evidence of inconsistent judgments

Two experiments examined whether individuals who ascribe the disparity in the performances of two actors to situational constraints adequately adjust their dispositional inferences to reflect their own perceptions of causality. Using the quiz-game format of L. D. Ross, T. M. Amabile, and J. L. Steinmetz (1977, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 485–494), the effects of the subjects' awareness of the role-determined, self-presentation advantage of the questioner on their dispositional inferences concerning the quiz-game participants are noted. It is hypothesized that subjects who indicated full awareness of the determining force of the situation would nevertheless draw more favorable dispositional inferences about the questioner than about the contestant. The prediction is confirmed. Although the situationally aware subjects rate the questioner and contestant more similarly than do the other subjects, they still rate the questioner higher in knowledge, memory, and education. The results of Experiment 2 indicate that increasing the salience of the subjects' assessment of the situational advantage of the questioner does not eliminate the disparity. It is proposed that the fudamental attribution error represents more a failure to adjust trait inferences for causal attributions than a misperception of causality. Implications concerning the relationship between knowledge of causality and social judgment and the utility of the distinction between “perceived causality” and “higher order causal inferences” are discussed.     

A maximum likelihood hierarchical disaggregate model for predicting choices of individuals

The absence of operational disaggregate lexicographic decision models and Tversky's observation that choice behavior is often inconsistent, hierarchical, and context dependent motivate the development of a maximum likelihood hierarchical (MLH) choice model. This new disaggregate choice model requires few assumptions and accommodates the three aspects of choice behavior noted by A. Tversky (1972, Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 9, 341–367). The model has its foundation in a prototype model developed by the authors. Unlike the deterministic prototype, however, MLH is a probabilistic model which generates maximum likelihood estimators of the aggregate “cutoff values.” The model is formulated as a concave programming problem whose solutions are therefore globally optimal. Finally, the model is applied to data from three separate studies where it is demonstrated to have superior performance over the prototype model in its predictive performance.