Detection of extraneous signals during sentence recognition

In two separate experiments, 40 Ss were presented with recorded sentences during each of which a click occurred. Ss had to depress a key as soon as they heard the click. RTs were f aster when the click was located at the major syntactic break of the sentence compared with RTs to clicks not at a break. This confirmed the hypothesis that processing load is a function of the surface structure of sentences, although the role of minor breaks was not clear. A second finding was that RTs were slower when the click was in the first rather than in the second half of the sentence. This can also be explained in terms of differential processing loads.     

Cascaded versus noncascaded models of lexical and semantic processing: the turple effect

The density of the orthographic neighborhood surrounding an item has been shown to have an inhibitory effect for nonwords in a lexical decision experiment. Four experiments are reported investigating whether a similar pattern holds for a semantic categorization task (animal vs. non-animal). In the first experiment, no effects of neighborhood density were found for nonexemplars, whether they were words or nonwords. The absence of any inhibitory effect for nonwords implies that close orthographic neighbors are ignored. However, the second experiment showed that if the nonword has a neighbor that is an animal name (eg., turple), an interference effect is observed, implying that neighbors do exert an effect if they have the right semantic properties. The same items showed no additional interference in lexical decision. These results suggest the involvement of semantic properties very early in the processing cycle. A cascaded processing system monitoring activation in semantic features can explain these results, but cannot explain the frequency effect observed for nonexemplar words or the fact that variation in density is irrelevant when one of the neighbors is an exemplar. It is argued that existing models of semantic categorization must be extended to accommodate these results.     

The potential for experimenter bias effects in word recognition experiments

Word recognition experiments that involve comparisons between two different matched sets of words allow for possible experimenter bias if there are many equally well-matched pairs to choose from. The possible extent of this bias depends on the experimenter's intuitive knowledge of the likely difficulty of individual items. This is assessed by asking a number of experimenters to decide which of two frequency-matched words would produce the fastest reaction time in a lexical decision experiment, and then comparing their predictions with actual data. All experimenters demonstrated substantial above-chance accuracy, which was unrelated to the amount of experience they had in the field. It was concluded that the experimenters could potentially produce spurious effect sizes ranging from 16 to 38 msec.     

The effects of promotion and prevention cues on creativity.

This study tested whether cues associated with promotion and prevention regulatory foci influence creativity. The authors predicted that the "risky," explorative processing style elicited by promotion cues, relative to the risk-averse, perseverant processing style elicited by prevention cues, would facilitate creative thought. These predictions were supported by two experiments in which promotion cues bolstered both creative insight (Experiment 1) and creative generation (Experiment 2) relative to prevention cues. Experiments 3 and 4 provided evidence for the process account of these findings. suggesting that promotion cues, relative to prevention cues, produce a riskier response bias (Experiment 3) and bolster memory search for novel responses (Experiment 4). A final experiment provided evidence that individual differences in regulatory focus influence creative problem solving in a manner analogous to that of incidental promotion and prevention cues.     

Dynamic adaptation to history of trial difficulty explains the effect of congruency proportion on masked priming

In reaction time research, there has been an increasing appreciation that response-initiation processes are sensitive to recent experience and, in particular, the difficulty of previous trials. From this perspective, the authors propose an explanation for a perplexing property of masked priming: Although primes are not consciously identified, facilitation of target processing by a related prime is magnified in a block containing a high proportion of related primes and a low proportion of unrelated primes relative to a block containing the opposite mix (Bodner & Masson, 2001). In the present study, this phenomenon is explored with a parity (even/odd) decision task in which a prime (e.g., 2) precedes a target that can be either congruent (e.g., 4) or incongruent (e.g., 3). It is shown that the effect of congruence proportion with masked primes cannot be explained in terms of the blockwise prime-target contingency. Specifically, with masked primes, there is no congruency disadvantage in a block containing a high proportion of incongruent primes, but there is a congruency advantage when the block contains an equal proportion of congruent and incongruent primes. In qualitative contrast, visible primes are sensitive to the blockwise prime-target contingency. The authors explain the relatedness proportion effect found with masked primes in terms of a model according to which response-initiation processes adapt to the statistical structure of the environment, specifically the difficulty of recent trials. This account is supported with an analysis at the level of individual trials using the linear mixed effects model.     

A randomized controlled effectiveness trial of parent management training with varying degrees of therapist support

This study examined the effectiveness of a Swedish parent management training (PMT) intervention for parents of children aged 3 to 10 within the context of regular social service. Self-referred parents of 159 children (aged 3 to 10) with conduct problems were randomly assigned to either 11 practitioner-assisted group sessions (PMT-P), or a single instructional workshop followed by self-administration of the training material (PMT-S), or a waitlist control group. Intent-to-treat analyses showed that both PMT-P and PMT-S improved parent competence and reduced child conduct problems compared to the waitlist at posttest. Both training conditions showed further significant improvements at the 6-month follow-up. In direct comparison, PMT-P was superior to PMT-S on measures of child conduct problems at both posttest and follow-up. Improvement in child conduct was mediated by improvement in parent competencies and homework fidelity. The findings in this study have implications for large-scale dissemination of parent management training through different means of delivery.