The perils of knowing

As we await the government White Paper on social services, the authors examine; in the first of two articles, the current two-tier service which means that elderly people are often moved unnecessarily between residential and nursing homes when their health needs change. The Royal College of Nursing's proposals for single registration care homes is explained on pages 32 and 33 in this issue. The second article will appear next week.     

Reading and knowing.

In some modern accounts of cognitive processes, emphasis is given to modeling performance in terms of discrete mental abstractions; such propositionalized accounts are found especially in work on perception of written language. An alternative view proposes that an actional basis of performance be pursued, urging that much of what is known is derived from procedural rather than propositional knowledge. (In psychology the 2 are not equivalent.) A review of some experiments on literacy and bilingualism supports a procedural account. (French summary) (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociating knowing and the feeling of knowing: Further evidence for the accessibility model.

Predictions derived from the accessibility model of the feeling of knowing (FOK; A. Koriat, 1993) were tested regarding the basis of FOK and the reason for its accuracy. According to the model, FOK monitors the accessibility of partial information about unrecallable targets, and its validity depends on the accuracy of that information. General knowledge questions were classified in terms of their tendency to precipitate answers in recall (accessibility, or ACC), and the proportion of such answers that were correct (output-bound accuracy, or OBA). FOK increased with increasing ACC independent of actual recognition memory, and the FOK recognition correlation varied dramatically with OBA: It was positive for high-OBA questions, but nil or negative for low-OBA questions. The results suggest that people have no privileged access to the contents of their memory over and above what they can retrieve from it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reflection and patterns of knowing in nursing

Over the last decade nursing has progressed from a reliance on empirical theory applied to practice to a recognition that experience develops knowledge that can guide the actions of practitioners. Reflection is a means of surfacing experiential knowledge, and students may begin to use reflection as their experience of nursing accumulates. As Carper was a key figure in widening that knowledge accepted as knowing in nursing beyond the empirical, it is both justified and recommended that her work should be incorporated into reflective practice. Johns has integrated Carper's work in his model of guided reflection and this paper briefly examines this combination. The main focus is on two further patterns of knowing: unknowing and sociopolitical knowing. These patterns are examined and the contribution they could make to reflective practice is discussed.     

Conceptual fluency selectively influences knowing.

Research shows that Remember and Know judgments are effective measures of recollective experience. This article shows that Know responses can be selectively affected by fluency of processing that is created using a conceptual manipulation. In a recognition test, studied and nonstudied words were preceded by semantically related or unrelated primes. Participants gave significantly more Know judgments to items with related primes than unrelated primes but Remember responses were unaffected. Know responses are discussed in terms of familiarity assumed to arise from fluency of processing which, in turn, may be created through various sources including conceptual processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Writing poetry: a way of knowing nursing

Carper's patterns of knowing expose the relevance and importance of different knowledge to the enterprise of nursing. She noted that the aesthetic pattern enables nurses to know unique perceptive experiences. Poetry captures particular perceptive experiences and reconstructs them into universal wholes. The opportunity for nurses to write poetry can illuminate and legitimate their perceptive experiences which often become worn or hidden in the everyday work world and in other ways of knowing. Expressing nursing experiences through writing poetry generally involves three phases: (a) creating an image of experience, (b) fully articulating the image, and (c) sharing a clear, new meaning of the image. A poem, written to express one author's unique nursing experience, is used to explore the knowledge gained through the process of writing poetry. Writing poetry can help nurses connect with and maintain their personal and professional history. Moreover, writing poetry increases our awareness of the sensibilities of nursing practice and the meanings that these sensibilities add to the depth and design of the discipline.     

Developmental aspects of the feeling of knowing.

Prior reports that feeling-of-knowing (FOK) accuracy increases through childhood and remains constant during adulthood are inconclusive because (a) they used absolute FOK judgments that can be contaminated by differences in the threshold for claiming to know, (b) they used measures of FOK accuracy that are not invariant across different degrees of recognition-test difficulty, and (c) they did not rule out the possibility that age-related differences in FOK accuracy may be caused by changes in the reliability of FOK judgments. We avoided these methodological problems in two studies by using relative FOK judgments, by computing Goodman-Kruskal gamma coefficients to assess FOK accuracy, and by assessing the test–retest reliability of the subjects' FOK judgments. We found that 6-year-olds had less reliable FOK judgments but greater FOK accuracy than 10-year-olds or 18-year-olds. Moreover, 18- and 70-year-olds had equally reliable FOK judgments and equivalent FOK accuracy. Possible reasons for the greater FOK accuracy of youngsters included their lower rate of commission errors and more frequent recognition of correct answers for their commissions. Implications are drawn for the study of metacognitive development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy

Deciding advantageously in a complex situation is thought to require overt reasoning on declarative knowledge, namely, on facts pertaining to premises, options for action, and outcomes of actions that embody the pertinent previous experience. An alternative possibility was investigated: that overt reasoning is preceded by a nonconscious biasing step that uses neural systems other than those that support declarative knowledge. Normal participants and patients with prefrontal damage and decision-making defects performed a gambling task in which behavioral, psychophysiological, and self-account measures were obtained in parallel. Normals began to choose advantageously before they realized which strategy worked best, whereas prefrontal patients continued to choose disadvantageously even after they knew the correct strategy. Moreover, normals began to generate anticipatory skin conductance responses (SCRs) whenever they pondered a choice that turned out to be risky, before they knew explicitly that it was a risky choice, whereas patients never developed anticipatory SCRs, although some eventually realized which choices were risky. The results suggest that, in normal individuals, nonconscious biases guide behavior before conscious knowledge does. Without the help of such biases, overt knowledge may be insufficient to ensure advantageous behavior.     

Experiences of remembering, knowing, and guessing

The residential independence of postsecondary students was assessed in 5,462 parents or surrogate parents of students with disabilities from the National Longitudinal Transition Study who had left United States high schools between 1985 and the time of the questionnaire in 1990. An index of residential placement independence served as the dependent variable in a hierarchical regression analysis that featured 43 community, family, student, and school program characteristics entered as block-wise predictors (i.e., entered in a controlled order). This analysis produced a multiple R2 of .376: missing data, youths' daily living skills, youths' social skills, youths' maladaptive ("problem") behaviors, and community characteristics all contributed significantly to the prediction of the postschool residential independence of former special education students during the first 5 years after they had left secondary school.     

Recollections of faces: remembering differences and knowing similarities

Components of recollective experience were investigated in 4 experiments in which participants studied either similarities or differences among faces (relational vs. distinctive processing). Subsequently, when recognizing a face, participants indicated whether their decision was based on explicit recollection (remembering) or assessment of familiarity (knowing). Type of encoding interacted with judgments of recollective experience, so that the incidence of "remember" responses was higher following distinctive encoding than following relational encoding, whereas the opposite pattern of results was obtained for "know" responses. Furthermore, recognition of appearance-changed faces was based on feelings of familiarity, rather than on explicit recollection. The results support the dual-component notion of recognition but are inconsistent with the idea that dissociations between remembering and knowing merely reflect differences in conceptual and perceptual processing.     

A method for knowing the statistical reliability of instrumental measurements

The precision of instrumental measurements, usually expressed by SD (standard deviation) or RSD (relative standard deviation) is of importance in a society as well as in a world of analytical chemistry. For example, the detection limit and confidence intervals of calibration lines which are based on the precision are inevitable for regulatory science. As is well-known in statistics, however, a small number of repetitive experiments (e.g., 5) lead to a poor reliability of the precision. This presentation shows a method (called FUMI theory) which can provide a precision from a single measurement of noise and signal without any repetitive measurements. The statistical reliability of the precision from the FUMI theory corresponds to that from the repetitive method of 50 experiments.     

Gender, politics, and psychology's ways of knowing.

Recent work on the psychology of gender has emphasized comparisons of men and women. Such comparisons rest on a view of gender as an individual difference or psychological attribute. Feminist theorists have challenged this view as limited and inadequate. In place of it, a variety of alternative conceptions of gender are emerging. These conceptions shift the focus of analysis from the individual to interpersonal and institutional arenas. Moreover, they dispute the idea of gender as static, unitary, and separable from other markers of social identity and status. In contrast to Alice Eagly (see record 1995-21141-001), I assert that the production of knowledge (whether by scientific procedures or other means) is not set apart from society, but rather is always and inevitably embedded within it. Therefore, I call for efforts to uncover the ways in which psychological knowledge is shaped by ongoing societal struggles and cultural politics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The situativity of knowing, learning, and research.

The situative perspective shifts the focus of analysis from individual behavior and cognition to larger systems that include behaving cognitive agents interacting with each other and with other subsystems in the environment. The first section presents a version of the situative perspective that draws on studies of social interaction, philosophical situation theory, and ecological psychology. Framing assumptions and concepts are proposed for a synthesis of the situative and cognitive theoretical perspectives, and a further situative synthesis is suggested that would draw on dynamic-systems theory. The second section discusses relations between the situative, cognitive, and behaviorist theoretical perspectives and principles of educational practice. The third section discusses an approach to research and social practice called interactive research and design, which fits with the situative perspective and provides a productive, albeit syncretic, combination of theory-oriented and instrumental functions of research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The feeling of knowing experience in educable retarded children.

Required 50 educable retarded children to predict their recognition accuracy when recall failed. Ss were divided into 3 ability levels: (a) old Ss (mean CA 13.25 yrs, mean MA 10.5 yrs), (b) medium Ss (mean CA 11.25 yrs, mean MA 8.75 yrs), and (c) young Ss (mean CA 9 yrs 5 mo, mean MA 6 yrs 9 mo). Results indicate that old and medium Ss could reliably predict their recognition accuracy, suggesting sensitivity to their own feeling of knowing experience, but that the young Ss showed no evidence of this sensitivity. Even though the young Ss had difficulty predicting their recognition accuracy in advance they were able to estimate the success or failure of their responses after they had occurred. Results are discussed in terms of the complexity of the metamemory judgment required, and the advisability of evaluating metamemorial knowledge across several situations is emphasized. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Knowing where and knowing what: a double dissociation

We report a double dissociation between visuo-spatial abilities and semantic knowledge (knowledge of the names and attributes of objects and people), in two brain-injured people with longstanding stable impairments, using a wide range of tests to explore the extent of the dissociation, MU, who has bilateral lesions of occipito-parietal cortex, shows severe spatial disorientation with relatively well-preserved semantic knowledge. He is contrasted with JBR, who has bilateral temporal lobe damage and shows severe semantic problems and no impairment on visuo-spatial tasks. Our findings thus demonstrate a double dissociation between the performance of semantic and spatial tasks by MU and JBR. This pattern is consistent with Ungerleider and Mishkin's (1982) neurophysiological hypothesis of separable cortical visual pathways; one which is specialised for spatial perception and follows a dorsal route from occipital to parietal lobes, and the other following a more ventral route from occipital to temporal lobes, whose target is semantic information needed in specifying what an object is.     

A comparison of three predictors of an individual's memory performance: The individual's feeling of knowing versus the normative feeling of knowing versus base-rate item difficulty.

Compared the memory performance predictions of 168 undergraduates with normative item-difficulty predictions and with normative feeling-of-knowing (FOK) predictions. Ss attempted to recall the answers to general-information questions, made FOK judgments on nonrecalled items, and were subsequently administered a criterion test (relearning, perceptual identification, or 1 of 2 versions of recognition). Results indicate that, for predicting an S's criterion performance, the S's own FOK predictions were intermediate between 2 kinds of normative predictions: Ss' FOK predictions were more accurate than predictions derived from normative FOK ratings but were less accurate than predictions derived from base-rate item difficulty (normative probabilities of correct recall). Subsidiary analyses showed that factors other than unreliability were responsible for the partial inaccuracy of Ss' FOK. Possible ways to improve the accuracy of an individual's FOK predictions are discussed. (32 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Remembering and knowing: Two different expressions of declarative memory.

Amnesic patients and a control group were given a recognition test 10 min after studying words. For each recognized word, participants indicated whether they remembered it (R) or whether simply they knew that the word was presented but had no recollections about it (K). The patients were impaired for both R and K responses, performing like a control group tested after 1 week. Another control group was tested both 10 min and 1 week after study. The proportion of words initially eliciting an R response and later eliciting a K response exceeded the proportion of K responses that shifted to R responses. These data are accounted for if items initially eliciting R responses can also elicit K responses. We conclude that the R–K distinction does not reflect the operation of explicit and implicit memory but reflects instead a distinction within declarative memory. Thus, K responses depend on brain structures damaged in amnesia; R responses depend on these same structures and also on the frontal lobes for contextual information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)