Mental imagery helps eight-year-olds remember what they read.

To determine whether 8-yr-olds can use mental imagery to improve their memory of prose they read, 43 experimental Ss were given practice constructing mental images of progressively longer prose passages (sentences, paragraphs, and a short story) and were shown examples of good images. 43 controls were exposed to the prose material, but did not practice constructing mental images. Experimental Ss read 17 segments of a short story and constructed a mental image for each segment after reading the segment. Control Ss read the same story segments and were instructed to "do whatever you can or have to" in order to remember the story. Experimental Ss answered significantly more short-answer questions about the story than controls did. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evaluating the relationship between explicit and implicit knowledge in a sequential reaction time task.

Can knowledge underlying a simple perceptual-motor skill be unconscious? Three experiments with college students (a) trained Ss on a 4-choice reaction time (RT) task in which the stimulus on each trial was determined by a repeating 12-element sequence and (b) studied the extent to which participants' knowledge of this sequence was implicit, that is, unavailable for conscious access. Participants proved via an indirect test to have acquired knowledge of the sequence, because their RTs increased when the sequence was changed. To evaluate whether this knowledge was consciously accessible, participants were asked to perform an "objective" free-generation or recognition test of sequence knowledge. Results show that sequence knowledge is fully accessible on these objective tests. Moreover, it is demonstrated in this procedure that old-new recognition cannot be explained by unconscious attribution of perceptual-motor fluency. The question is raised whether distinct implicit (procedural) and explicit (declarative) forms of knowledge are acquired when participants learn a perceptual motor skill. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Roles of symbolic knowledge and problem-information context in solving word problems.

In 4 experiments, the effects of symbolic knowledge (i.e., knowledge about the meaning of mathematical notation) and problem-information context (PIC) on translating relational statements (e.g., "There are 6 times as many students as professors") into math equations were examined. College students were more likely to construct correct equations when symbolic knowledge was presented than they were when they only received a single relational statement. Ss who received a PIC that more closely resembled a complete word problem did better on the equation-writing task than did those who only received a relational statement. Results indicated that the effects of the two factors are not separate. When Ss had the appropriate PIC, performance on the equation-writing task was enhanced because Ss' own memory representations for symbolic knowledge were more accessible. Contextual constraints in the access and use of knowledge in problem solving are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Episodic memory in 16- and 20-month-old children: Specifics are generalized but not forgotten.

Three experiments tested (1) whether 1–2 yr olds generalize their knowledge of events to new instantiations and (2) 1 possible mechanism by which generalization is accomplished. In Exp 1, 12 16- and 12 20-mo-old children enacted 6 event sequences. One week later Ss were tested for delayed recall. At delayed testing the props used to enact half of the events were replaced by novel, functionally equivalent props. Ss in both age groups used the new props to enact the events, thereby demonstrating spontaneous generalization. Exps 2 and 3 tested whether generalization was accomplished through forgetting of the specific details of the original event. At Session 1, 24 16- (Exps 2 and 3) and 16 20-mo-olds (Exp 2) enacted 4 events. After a 1-wk delay, Ss selected props used to enact the events at Session 1. Among the objects from which they selected were functionally equivalent props of the sort used to assess generalization in Exp 1. Ss in both age groups performed reliably on the recognition-memory task. Results show that 16- and 20-mo-old children have at their disposal the capacity to productively generalize their knowledge of events to form specific, episodic event memories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-disclosure in a simulated psychiatric interview.

Describes 2 experiments in which a total of 192 undergraduates received 49 items of personal information previously scaled in terms of their intimacy and presented according to the method of constant stimuli. For each item, Ss indicated whether they believed they would have withheld or revealed that information under actual psychiatric interview conditions. Exp. I manipulated the professional role of the interviewer, confidentiality of obtained information, and sex of the interviewee in a 4 * 3 * 2 design. Results indicate that (a) Ss avowedly revealed more personal information to mental health professionals than they would in a control employment interview situation, with no differences between the mental health professionals; (b) informing Ss that the interview was not confidential produced significant information loss from female but not male Ss; and (c) Ss who received no information regarding confidentiality behaved like Ss who were told the information was confidential. In Exp. II, Ss were asked to assume the motivational-attitudinal state of persons either coerced or voluntarily seeking a psychiatric interview because they had violated interpersonal norms. Significant information loss occurred in coerced Ss while confidentiality had no effect on self-disclosure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of perceived dependency relationships upon conformity to group expectations.

The study was designed to test the hypothesis that "group members perceiving themselves as interdependent for their reward attainment become highly motivated toward the group task." Results generally are in accord with several predictions, one of which is that: "Members of groups who are instrumentally interdependent become more highly motivated toward the group task than Ss who can achieve their goals independently of the others in the group." Another prediction supported by results is that: "Under conditions of instrumental independence, Ss who are told that both they and their teammates can attain a valued goal through the group activity become more highly task motivated than Ss who are told either that only S or Ss partner can attain this goal." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Probing suspicion among participants in deception research.

Seven introductory psychology students were led to believe they were participating in a study of the effect of practice task feedback on subsequent performance. When left alone by the experimenter, Ss compared the feedback they had received and discovered it was false. When the experimenter returned, Ss continued to participate as though nothing had happened. After announcing that the experiment involved deception, the experimenter asked on 3 separate occasions whether Ss were suspicious of the procedures or of anything that had happened in the experiment. Not only did Ss fail to divulge their knowledge of the deception, but their responses to manipulation check questions completed before the questioning provided little evidence that they were aware of the deception. Results indicate that investigators (in any field) who fail to adequately assess participant suspicions and perceptions are jeopardizing the tests of their hypotheses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Constructing mental representations of objects from successive views.

Investigated the effects of complexity on processing objects by testing 3 graduate students and 7 staff members on a 3-dimensional analog of J. Hochberg's (1968) aperture viewing paradigm, the orthogonal slices task developed by J. Metzler and R. N. Shepard (1974), and a sequence matching task. In Exp I, Ss constructed, transformed, and compared mental representations of Shepard-Metzler figures varying in the number of component parts. Findings show that processing time increased with complexity. The results of Exp II show no effects of complexity on processing time when Ss merely judged the equivalence of the patterns used in Exp I presented in sequence. Rather, constructed mental representations appeared to preserve some of the spatial character of the corresponding objects. This conclusion was strengthened by the results of recognition tasks that showed that discrimination of constructed objects from appropriate distractors was better after Ss did the 1st (orthogonal slices) task than after they did the 2nd (sequence matching) task. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning about "famous" people via the keyword method.

106 8th-grade students were asked to learn the purported accomplishments of various individuals, as described in several short fictitious passages. In 2 experiments, Ss who studied the passages according to a mnemonic (keyword) strategy by far outperformed control Ss. This was true whether keyword Ss were provided with actual illustrations or whether they had to generate their own mental images. In the 3rd experiment, the same paradigm was used to gain support for a theoretical distinction between 2 kinds of prose-learning imagery, representational and transformational. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Latency to categorize disoriented alphanumeric characters as letters or digits.

Previous research has shown that if Ss must decide quickly whether a disoriented alphanumeric character is normal or backward, they "mentally rotate" an internal representation of the character to its normal upright position before making the decision. The present study with 12 undergraduates showed that latency to decide whether a disoriented character was a letter or a digit was barely affected by angular orientation, implying that mental rotation is not necessary for this task. However, latency was significantly shorter for normal than for backward characters, regardless of angular orientation, suggesting that the difference between normal and backward characters does register prior to mental rotation. (7 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpersonal consequences of person perception processes in two social contexts.

Examined whether perceiver-based perceptual processes affect social behavior. Approximately 1,100 undergraduates were exposed to a videotape that portrayed a male or female child interacting with an adult in a playroom. In Study 1, Ss who "saw" the child emit (a) primarily positive behaviors (i.e., Ss who were positively biased), (b) about equal numbers of positive and negative behaviors (i.e., Ss who were accurate), or (c) primarily negative behaviors (i.e., Ss who were negatively biased) then engaged in cooperative task activities with a 7-yr-old child. In Study 2, a subset of these Ss engaged in a discussion with another undergraduate about 3 issues on which they apparently disagreed. Systematic analyses of these interactions suggested that perceptual processes affected social behavior—negatively biased Ss tended to act in a more authoritarian manner in their encounters with the child, whereas positively biased Ss were the least effective in the discussion task. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Naming and locating the tops of rotated pictures.

Investigated whether and how pictures are mentally rotated to upright before they can be named. Four experiments were conducted with 12 college students in each, who were given the tasks of naming pictures of common objects with various orientations and locating their tops. In the naming task, Ss required more time the farther the picture was from upright, but the rotation effect was reduced after Ss had named each picture once, indicating that rotation may be required only for unfamiliar stimuli. The top locating task was faster with upright figures, but otherwise-oriented pictures required the same time regardless of orientation. Top-locating was faster than naming, indicating that "topness" may be guessed even in unfamiliar figures, while naming also involves searching one's semantic memory for a name. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Achievement attributions and self-instructions under competitive and individualistic goal structures.

Investigated whether competitive and individualistic goal structures elicit achievement cognitions that have been associated with helpless vs mastery-oriented children, respectively. 88 5th- and 6th-grade children were administered a novel achievement task in which a high vs low performance outcome was manipulated by varying the number of solvable puzzles across 2 sets of 6 puzzles, within either a competitive or individual goal structure. A "thought-matching" methodology was used to assess the type of frequency of Ss' thoughts. Results revealed that Ss made more ability attributions in the competitive than in the individual condition. In the individual condition, Ss displayed a mastery orientation in that they made more effort attributions and engaged in self-instructions and self-monitoring more than did Ss in the competitive condition. Ability attributions were predictive of Ss' positive and negative affective reactions. Results suggest that Ss were thinking about responses to the question "Was I smart?" in the competitive setting but were thinking about "How can I do this task?" in the individual setting. It is suggested that getting children to think about how to improve their performance may not be compatible with the focus of attention in competitive situations. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Familiarity effects in visual comparison tasks and their implications for studying human intelligence.

Two experiments were carried out to study the effect of prior knowledge on cognitive processes related to human intelligence by examining its role in defining task novelty. In Exp 1, Ss performed a letter-matching task involving same–different judgments based on 4 rules of sameness; physical identity, form, system, and name. When the stimuli were unfamiliar, performance on the name classification task was correlated with measures of fluid abilities, whereas when the stimuli were familiar, performance on this task was not correlated with measures of fluid abilities. In Exp 2, Ss performed 3 different forms of a mental rotation task. When the stimuli were unfamiliar, the slope of the rotation function was correlated with a test of fluid ability, whereas when the stimuli were familiar, the slope of the rotation function was not correlated with a test of fluid ability. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the nature of task complexity and the way knowledge and processing interact in the development of skilled performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Arousal level in repressors and sensitizers as a function of response context.

Gave 30 male and 30 female undergraduate repressors and sensitizers "noncontextual" and "contextual" tasks, with GSR as a measure of arousal. In the contextual situation, Ss were aware that they would be required to give free associations which might be self-revealing. In the noncontextual situation, Ss were not aware that they would eventually be required to form free associations. Results from the noncontextual task show that repressors had lower arousal levels than sensitizers during perception and verbal report, but higher during free association. Findings were reversed in the contextual condition. Analogies were drawn to the behavior of repressors (hysterics) and sensitizers (obsessive-compulsives) in psychoanalysis: repressors are more easily aroused by the free association condition, whereas sensitizers are able to use free association to diminish emotional reactivity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adapting to the stigmatizing label of mental illness: Foregone but not forgotten.

In a study with 30 female undergraduates that was ostensibly about memory ability, a condition was created experimentally in which half of the Ss believed that they were participating in the study with mental patients and half believed they were participating with physical injury patients. Behavioral measures of each S were made, and Ss provided self-reports of their perceptions of the other people who were in the study. Results indicate that the label of mental illness was stigmatizing even in the absence of bizarre behaviors. Although Ss interacted with the mental patients normally when in the adaptively unimportant waiting room situation, Ss scored higher on the adaptively significant memory test when participating in the study with "mental patients." Implications for stigma theory, social adaptation, and community placement programs are discussed. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The structure of mental plans for following directions.

Outlined a general framework for understanding how people construct mental plans for carrying out written directions. In the framework, it is assumed that (a) a mental plan consists of a hierarchy of action schemas, (b) the hierarchy is constructed by beginning with the schema at the top level of the hierarchy, and (c) plan construction goes on concurrently with other reading processes. Predictions made on the basis of this framework were confirmed in 2 experiments involving undergraduates. In Exp I, Ss were timed while they read and carried out simple directions such as "Press button B while light X is on." Directions were read more quickly when they began with the action ("Press button B") than when they began with either the antecedent or the consequence of the action ("while light X is on"). In Exp II, this effect was reversed by changing Ss' prior knowledge of what they were supposed to do. A 3rd experiment showed that these results are specific to the task of reading and carrying out the directions; they did not occur when Ss recalled the sentences. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depressive self-presentation: Beyond self-handicapping.

An experiment was conducted to examine the notion that depressives' responses would reflect a protective self-presentation style (M. G. Hill et al, 1986), the underlying goal of which would be the avoidance of future performance demands and potential losses in self-esteem. In this study, depressed and nondepressed Ss were asked to perform a relatively simple visual–motor task. Half of the depressed and half of the nondepressed Ss were told that if they were successful at the task, they would be asked to perform a 2nd similar task. The remaining Ss were given no such expectation of future performance. We predicted and found that depressed compared with nondepressed Ss strategically failed at the task when presented with the possibility of future performance and further losses in esteem. Moreover, this strategic failure was associated with some costs; depressed, future performance expectancy Ss experienced more discomfort or negative affect as a result of their performance. The relationship between this depressive self-presentation and self-handicapping strategies is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of task difficulty and task uniqueness on social loafing.

Previous research has shown that Ss taking part in either physical or cognitive tasks alone and/or in groups put out less effort in groups, an effect called "social loafing." This loafing can be eliminated by telling Ss that their individual outputs can be identified even when they perform in groups. In 4 experiments with 304 undergraduates, the authors demonstrated that loafing can also be reduced either by increasing the difficulty (challenge) of the task or by giving each S a different task to perform. Despite the fact that these Ss felt as unidentifiable as Ss working on the typical loafing task, they performed as well as Ss with identifiable outputs. It is concluded that when Ss perceive that they can make a unique contribution to a group effort, social loafing is reduced even if individual contributions remain unidentifiable. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)