Divergent and Convergent Group Creativity in an Asynchronous Online Environment

This study examined the influence of various group diversity dimensions on collaborative creativity related to the healthcare system. Research findings on the association between diversity and brainstorming performance has been mixed. Diversity that increases cognitive stimulation or promotes elaboration has been shown to increase group performance. Participants exchanged ideas, replied, and elaborated using an electronic discussion board in an asynchronous fashion in groups of five over a period of 4 weeks. The groups varied in diversity of ethnicity, gender, age, and political orientation, but participants were not made aware of this diversity. Age and gender diversity were related to lower levels of replying to ideas and lower idea novelty but political diversity was related to increased replies and novelty. If a topic engages people with different perspectives to actively respond to others’ ideas, this can increase the creative potential of idea sharing in groups. Political or value-based diversity has the potential for creative solutions if the other participants’ political or value-based identities are not made salient.     

Bingeing,purging, and estimates of parental attitudes regarding female achievement

A questionnaire measuring respondents' beliefs about the attitudes regarding female achievement held by their parents was distributed to 326 women attending a state university. Women who report frequent bingeing are more likely than other women to report that (1) their parents believed a woman's place is in the home (2) their mothers were unhappy with their own careers, (3) their fathers thought the respondents' mothers were not intelligent, and (4) their fathers treated a male as the most intelligent sibling in the family. Reports of fathers' attitudes regarding mothers' intelligence and the proper role for women are related to respondents' self-reports of purging, but only among those women who are much more concerned with academic achievement than with household skills.     

Locational representation in imagery: The third dimension

Six experiments were conducted to test the relative processing characteristics of picture-plane and three-dimensional imagery as indexed by tasks that required subjects to keep track of successive locations in multiunit visual displays. Subjects were shown symmetrical displays either drawn on cardboard or constructed with three-dimensional blocks. They then were required to imagine these matrices and follow pathways through a series of adjacent squares (blocks) within the matrices. The pathways were described by a series of verbal terms that indicated the direction of the next square (block) in the pathway. Subjects experienced difficulty in performing the task with picture-plane displays composed of as few as 16 squares (4×4), but they rarely made errors with a three-dimensional matrix of 27 blocks (3×3×3). Performance with the three-dimensional task dropped dramatically when the matrix size was increased to 4×4×4. The results replicated previous findings that the image processing capacity for location in two-dimensional imagery is about three units in each direction, and they indicate that adding the depth dimension increases the capacity for representation of spatial location in imagery.     

Linguistic Phenomena and Language Selection in the REM Dreams of German-English Bilinguals

Sixteen German-English bilinguals were studied in a sleep laboratory for four nonconsecutive nights each. Half were native English speakers living in Zürich, and half native German speakers living in Atlanta. Presleep thought samples were solicited each evening and REM dream reports each night; subjects judged the waking appropriateness of their imagined speech and language phenomena, and also identified waking sources of their dream imagery, the following mornings. Incidences of dreaming and of speech therein generally were similar to those of monolinguals. Whether sessions were conducted in German (two nights) or English (two nights) did directly influence language selection in subjects' dreams. Judged appropriateness of language selection to imagined events was very high for thought samples, and high for REM dreams. Sources for thought samples were generally consonant with the language dominant at study site; for REM dreams this relationship was considerably weaker. Judged waking appropriateness to imagined situations was more strongly related to language selection than was the language reference of the supposed sources of those situations.     

Small Wins: Perceptual Focus,Efficacy, and Cooperation in a Stage-Conjunctive Social Dilemma1

A multi-stage social dilemma was used to explore the notion that focusing on part rather than all of a complex problem would affect self-efficacy and action. In two experiments subjects considered a multi-stage game asking them to invest an initial sum of money in hopes of earning a larger bonus to be paid if provision points were met at all stages (a “stage-conjunctive” task). Results indicated that under most conditions considered, presentation of the whole problem encouraged cooperation. The opposite pattern occurred when group members were asked to complete very demanding stages first. We suggest that these results depend strongly on the stage-conjunctive nature of our task.     

Effects of alcohol and extended practice on divided-attention performance

The effects of alcohol and extended practice on divided attention were investigated using a visual tracking task and an auditory detection task. Subjects performed the tasks with and without alcohol, under single-task (S) and dual-task (D) conditions, both before and after they had received extended practice under single-task conditions without alcohol. Tracking accuracy improved with practice and was impaired under divided-attention conditions but was not affected by alcohol. Speed of detection was impaired by alcohol, improved by practice, and impaired by divided attention. Extended practice did not reduce the influence of alcohol. The effects of both alcohol and practice on speed of detection were significantly greater under dual-task conditions than under single-task conditions. Analysis of detection-task reaction times in terms of relative divided-attention costs, (D-S)/S, showed no effect of alcohol, but a highly significant reduction in costs with extended practice. It is concluded that (1) alcohol and practice can have quantitatively, but not qualitatively, similar effects on speeded performance, and (2) the effect of alcohol is not influenced by the attentional requirements of the task.     

Cerebral Anesthetization for Localization of Speech: The Contribution of W. James Gardner

In 1949, the neurologist Juhn Wada reported the first use of a new procedure for determining the localization of speech and language in neurological patients: examination of the effects on speech and language after injecting a barbiturate, sodium amytal, into the internal carotid artery of each hemisphere in succession. By the 1960s, Wada'sIntracarotid Amobarbital Procedure,orIAP,had become the method of choice for identifying the speech-dominant side in one kind of neurological patient, persons with epilepsy who are candidates for surgical resection, and it remains so today. In 1941, however, an American neurosurgeon, W. James Gardner, reported his use of a different anesthetization procedure for speech localization in neurological patients. Instead of injecting sodium amytal through the blood supply, as in the IAP, Gardner injected procaine hydrochloride directly into cortical tissue. In this paper, we provide a brief biography of Gardner. We then discuss his method of cortical anesthetization, the theoretical and empirical background guiding his use of this method and his choice of patients, and, finally, the fate of Gardner's method within the scientific community.