Perceptual and conceptual variants of the oddity task as a predictor of learning disability

This paper compares LD and non-LD peers on eight variants of the oddity task. This study is part of a larger programmatic research effort aimed at the development of a screening test to detect preschool children who currently pass existing screening tests but, nonetheless, subsequently experience school failure. The theoretical orientation of this approach is to assess active, ongoing cognitive processing ability. The oddity task, which can be structured to assess such processing ability, was evaluated in the present study as a potential component of this screening test. Consistent with a priori predictions, the data resulted in strong group and developmental differences. Oddity performance increased over age, with the non-LD children performing consistently better than their LD peers at each age. Perceptual and conceptual factors were manipulated across the oddity variations, and both factors contributed to group differences. These results were discussed in relationship to early diagnosis and prognosis for learning disabilities that might result from deficiencies in abstract processing ability.The authors would like to express their thanks to the schools, teachers, and students who participated in this study. This research was supported in part by the Mailman Foundation and FDLRS/MAILMAN, a specialized university center of the Florida Diagnostic Learning Resources System, funded through State General Revenue appropriation to provide multidisciplinary evaluation services in exceptional student education programs.     

Factor structure of the basic personality inventory with incarcerated offenders

The item and scale factor structure of the Basic Personality Inventory (BPI) was examined in a sample of 486 offenders incarcerated for violent and sexual crimes. Separate principal-component analyses of the items for each of the 11 clinical scales, critical item scale, and social desirability scale indicated a one-dimensional factor solution for all scales except Depression and Persecutory Ideation. The Depression scale's two factors were Hopelessness and Depressive Affect and the Persecutory Ideation scale's two factors were General Paranoia and Perception of External Control. Although the factors for these two scales may assist in interpretation, the correlations between the factors and the total score of their respective scale were high. Confirmatory factor analysis of the 220 items from the 11 clinical scales supported the factorial logic of the scoring key. Analysis of the 11 clinical scales resulted in two factors: General Psychopathology/Adjustment and Antisocial Orientation. The results suggest that all but two scales can be viewed as unidimensional thereby allowing for a straightforward clinical interpretation. These analyses support the internal structure of the BPI and lend credence to external validity work with forensic populations.     

Constructing a theory of the triple typology: Some (second) thoughts on nomothetic and idiographic approaches to personality

Our fundamental scientific task is to convert observations of particular persons behaving in particular ways in particular situations into assertions that certain kinds of persons will behave in certain kinds of ways in certain kinds of situations, that is, to construct triple typologies or equivalence classes—of persons, of behaviors, and of situations—and to fashion theories of personality that relate these equivalence classes to one another. It is argued that the different approaches to the study of personality are distinguished from one another not by whether they are idiographic or nomothetic but by the strategies they employ for constructing—or ignoring—each of these three types of equivalence classes. The likely attributes of a successful interactional theory of personality—one that would embrace the entire triple typology—are proposed and discussed.     

Analogical transfer and expertise in legal reasoning

Analogical transfer and its relation to expertise is examined in a legal context. Three experiments were conducted comparing the performance of novices (introductory tax students) and of experts (experienced tax practitioners from multinational public accounting firms) on tasks involving the application of tax laws. In Experiment 1 subjects completed a target problem after reading a decided case that was either analogous or not analogous to a target problem. A limited amount of transfer was observed, with no differential rate of transfer across experience levels. In Experiments 2 and 3 attempts were made to facilitate transfer of knowledge by inducing transfer-appropriate processing of the source analog and by providing multiple source analogs. The results of both experiments indicate an interaction between treatment and expertise. Unexpectedly, the facilitating treatments reduced the transfer of knowledge for experts while increasing the transfer for novices. Subsequent analysis of the responses of the expert subjects indicates that for the more experienced expert subjects a highly proceduralized rule interfered with the knowledge transfer when that rule was made salient by the facilitating treatments. The less experienced expert subjects behaved in a manner consistent with the hypotheses. This poor performance of the more experienced experts results from the inflexibility in expert problem solving due to the proceduralization of information processing. Frensch and Sternberg (1989) demonstrate that this type of inflexibility is one of the costs of expertise and results from the development of a large and highly complex knowledge base containing numerous well developed strategies.     

Visual short-term memory load suppresses temporo-parietal junction activity and induces inattentional blindness

The right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is critical for stimulus-driven attention and visual awareness. Here we show that as the visual short-term memory (VSTM) load of a task increases, activity in this region is increasingly suppressed. Correspondingly, increasing VSTM load impairs the ability of subjects to consciously detect the presence of a novel, unexpected object in the visual field. These results not only demonstrate that VSTM load suppresses TPJ activity and induces inattentional blindness, but also offer a plausible neural mechanism for this perceptual deficit: suppression of the stimulus-driven attentional network.     

A comparison of working memory profiles in school-aged children with Specific Language Impairment, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Comorbid SLI and ADHD and their typically developing peers

The association between specific language impairment (SLI), attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and working memory (WM) was examined. WM has been implicated in language acquisition and models of ADHD; however, evidence for WM deficits in SLI and ADHD has been inconsistent. The components of Baddeley's WM model were investigated in 18 children with SLI, 16 children with ADHD, 11 children with comorbid SLI+ADHD, and 24 typically developing (TD) children. The presence of SLI resulted in deficits in more components of WM than the presence of ADHD indicating that children with SLI are more vulnerable to WM deficits than those with ADHD.     

Dilution, not load, affects distractor processing

Lavie and Tsal (1994) proposed that spare attentional capacity is allocated involuntarily to the processing of irrelevant stimuli, thereby enabling interference. Under this view, when task demands increase, spare capacity should decrease and distractor interference should decrease. In support, Lavie and Cox (1997) found that increasing perceptual load by increasing search set size decreased interference from an irrelevant distractor. In three experiments, we manipulated the cue set size (number of cued locations) independently of the display set size (number of letters presented). Increasing the display set size reduced distractor interference regardless of whether the additional letters were relevant to the task. In contrast, increasing the cue set size increased distractor interference. Both findings are inconsistent with the load explanation, but are consistent with a proposed two-stage dilution account.     

Long-term facilitation of return: A response-retrieval effect

The present study used a target–target procedure to examine the extent to which perceptual and response factors contribute to inhibition of return (IOR) in a visual discrimination task. When the target was perceptually identical to the previous target and the required response was the same, facilitation was observed for both standard and long-term target–target stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). When the color of the previous target differed from that of the current target but the response remained the same, facilitation was reduced in both the standard SOA and long-term SOA conditions. Finally, IOR was observed for both standard and long-term SOAs only in the condition in which there was a change in response. This pattern of inhibition and facilitation provides new evidence that the responses previously associated with a location play an important role in the ability to respond to a stimulus. We interpret this finding as consistent with a framework in which the involuntary retrieval of bound stimulus–response episodes contributes to response compatibility effects in visual stimulus discrimination.     

Terms of the debate on the format and structure of visual memory

Our ability to actively maintain information in visual memory is strikingly limited. There is considerable debate about why this is so. As with many questions in psychology, the debate is framed dichotomously: Is visual working memory limited because it is supported by only a small handful of discrete “slots” into which visual representations are placed, or is it because there is an insufficient supply of a “resource” that is flexibly shared among visual representations? Here, we argue that this dichotomous framing obscures a set of at least eight underlying questions. Separately considering each question reveals a rich hypothesis space that will be useful for building a comprehensive model of visual working memory. The questions regard (1) an upper limit on the number of represented items, (2) the quantization of the memory commodity, (3) the relationship between how many items are stored and how well they are stored, (4) whether the number of stored items completely determines the fidelity of a representation (vs. fidelity being stochastic or variable), (5) the flexibility with which the memory commodity can be assigned or reassigned to items, (6) the format of the memory representation, (7) how working memories are formed, and (8) how memory representations are used to make responses in behavioral tasks. We reframe the debate in terms of these eight underlying questions, placing slot and resource models as poles in a more expansive theoretical space.