Role of an abstract order schema in conceptual judgment.

Ss performed same-different judgments for which order information was logically irrelevant. In Exps 1 and 2, the stimuli for the judgment task were derived from an ordered set of concepts from long-term memory (US presidents ordered on the dimension of historical time); in Exps 3 and 4 the stimuli were derived from 2 ordered sets of concepts. In the stimulus set for each experiment, there were several associate phrases for each concept and the task was to judge whether the phrases were paired with the same concept (Exps 1, 2, and 3) or the same ordering (Exp 4). The time to respond "different" decreased with the ordinal distance between the concepts even when the concepts belonged to different orderings. It is concluded that same-different judgments are based in part on amodal order information (i.e., not tied to any particular dimension). Two models of the implicated order schema are proposed and tested. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-sensitive cognitive abilities related to children's acquisition of spatial knowledge.

Two experiments were conducted to determine the extent to which developmental improvement in children's performance on tasks requiring the acquisition of spatial knowledge was related to age-sensitive cognitive abilities. The results of path analyses in Exp 1 indicated that the relationship between age and the acquisition of landmark knowledge was, in fact, mediated by recognition-in-context memory, whereas relationships between age and route knowledge and between age and landmark judgment were unmediated. Similar analyses in Exp 2 indicated that perceptual-motor speed mediated the relationships between age and route knowledge and between age and landmark knowledge. Again, the relationship between age and landmark judgment was unmediated. Overall, the results suggest that the approach used in these experiments can provide new insight into the relationship between spatial cognitive development as a specialized research area and cognitive development in general. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Studies of concept formation by stumptailed monkeys: Concepts humans, monkeys, and letter A..

Natural concepts were studied in 3 of 4 experiments with 4 stumptailed monkeys, using a series of photographic slides. The concept of humans was studied in Exp I, using scenes with or without one or more humans present, and the concept of monkeys was studied in Exp II, using scenes with one or more monkeys and scenes with other types of animals. In both experiments, Ss were trained on 1 set of slides using a conditional spatial discrimination task and tested for transfer to a new set. All Ss tested showed positive transfer, performing at a higher level with new slides initially than they had during original learning, though well below the level reached by the end of original learning. The initial transfer could not be explained by learning of individual slides, though such learning was clearly a strong factor in the overall performance. Performance was better when humans were a prominent part of the scene. In Exp III, the discrimination task was changed to go/no-go. There was some improvement in discrimination but not in transfer. In Exp IV, Ss were trained to discriminate the letter A from the numeral 2 in a variety of typefaces, and they transferred the discrimination at a high level to a set of these stimuli in new typefaces. Results are consistent with a concept interpretation. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the relation between feeling of knowing and lexical decision: Persistent subthreshold activation or topic familiarity?

Exp 1 replicated I. Yaniv and D. E. Meyer's (1987) finding that lexical decision and episodic recognition performance was better for words previously yielding high-accessibility levels (a combination of feeling-of-knowing and tip-of-the-tongue ratings) in comparison with those yielding low-accessibility levels in a rare word definition task. Exp 2 yielded the same pattern even though lexical decisions preceded accessibility estimates by a full week. Exp 3 dismissed the possibility that the Exp 2 results may have been due to a long-term influence from the lexical decision task to the rare word judgment task. These results support a model in which Ss (1) retrieve topic familiarity information in making accessibility estimates in the rare word definition task and (2) use this information to modulate lexical decision performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sagacious judgment via word association.

Based on K. E. Scheibe's (1979) concepts of the mask and the prediction mode of sagacity, 4 experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that awareness of subtle cues accounts for success on a judgment task that requires recognizing the implications of target persons' word associations. Preliminary studies with 7 undergraduates identified word associations but not facial expressions or reaction times as relevant to success on the task. Thus, it was hypothesized that successful judges would be more accurate than unsuccessful judges in assessing the diagnosticity of word association clues. 30 undergraduate social welfare majors participated in Exp I; Exp II was a replication of Exp I using 73 high school students. Both Exps I and II involved a video presentation. Exp III involved a pencil-and-paper version of the judgment task used in Exps I and II. Ss were 76 undergraduates. Exp IV tested the generalizability of the previous results across S groups. 12 American and 14 foreign-born undergraduates (e.g., Malaysian, Taiwanese, Colombian, and Nigerian) served as Ss. Overall findings show that the predicted relation emerged in all 4 studies, despite variations in the task and S groups (varying in age, nationality, and amount of psychology-related training). Results are generally consistent with expectations based on Scheibe's analysis of sagacity and provide a basis for research on the judgment task in terms of personality correlates of cue utilization, individual differences in depth of processing, and ability to draw pragmatic implications. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intuitive physics in action and judgment: The development of knowledge about projectile motion.

Contrasts intuitive knowledge about projectile motion expressed in action with knowledge expressed in explicit judgments. In the action condition of Exp 1, children and adults threw a ball horizontally from different heights to hit targets on the floor; in the judgment condition the same Ss rated the respective launch speeds required. All age groups appropriately varied the launch speed with respect to both height of release and target distance in the action condition. In the judgment condition, however, kindergartners failed to integrate the relevant dimensions and even 4th graders and adults showed misconceptions of the speed–height relation. Exp 2 established that the speed gradations in the action condition did not critically depend on visual flight feedback or the availability of outcome information. It is concluded that perceptual-motor knowledge about projectile motion is distinct from naive, verbal-cognitive concepts of projectile motion and follows different developmental courses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Typography manipulations can affect priming of word stem completion in older and younger adults.

The experiments reported here investigated whether changes of typography affected priming of word stem completion performance in older and younger adults. Across all experiments, the typeface in which a word appeared at presentation either did or did not match that of its 3-letter stem at test. In Exp 1, no significant evidence of a typography effect was found when words were presented with a sentence judgment or letter judgment task. However, subsequent experiments revealed that, in both older and younger adults, only words presented with a syllable judgment task gave rise to the typography effect (Exps 2–4). Specifically, perforance was greater when the presentation and test typeface matched than when they did not. Exp 5, which used stem-cued recall, did not reveal a difference between syllable and letter judgment tasks. These findings highlight the complex nature of word stem completion performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social reference points.

Conducted 2 experiments in which a total of 324 undergraduates were asked to make similarity judgments about social concepts, varying the direction of the comparison specified by the question. Asymmetries in rated similarity were used to diagnose concepts that function as habitual reference points. In Exp I, after completing the Self-Monitoring Scale, Ss were asked to make directional judgments about themselves vs a friend along various dimensions (social and physical). Ss were found to rate a friend as more similar to themselves than vice versa along both social and physical dimensions, suggesting that the self served as a reference point. In Exp II Ss made global similarity comparisons between themselves and typical examples of various social stereotypes. Directional asymmetries were inversely related to the extent of Ss' knowledge about the stereotypes: The self acted as a reference point with respect to stereotypes with few known attributes but not with respect to those with many attributes. The relation between level of self-monitoring and asymmetry effects was weak and inconsistent in both experiments. Results suggest that concepts serving as social reference points vary across judgment contexts in accord with general cognitive models of similarity comparisons. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive tuning set, source credibility, and the temporal persistence of attitude change.

Tested the prediction that a transmitter cognitive tuning set confers more persistence of attitude change than a receiver set. 550 undergraduates read an essay with its source defined as high or low credibility and were told to prepare to report on it (transmit) or listen to a similar essay (receive). Persistence of attitude change was measured at 2, 5, or 9 wks. Consonant findings were obtained only when the persuasive message came from a source of low credibility. When the source was of high credibility, findings were reversed and the receiver set conferred more persistence. Exp II (104 Ss) examined the interpretation that, relative to the transmitter set, the receiver set leads to a stronger association between the conclusion of the message and its source and that it is this differential associative strength that mediated the obtained interaction between cognitive tuning sets and source credibility in Exp I. Exp II confirmed that message–source links were stronger with a receiver set than with a transmitter set. Additional data indicated that the transmitter set enhanced Ss' focus on the message and may have highlighted the inconsistency between the cogent message and the low-credibility source. Combined findings suggest that 2 cognitive processes mediated the obtained persistence results, one process based on the strength of the association between the source and message and the other based on the transmitter set sometimes enhancing involvement with a message. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The locus of knowledge effects in concept learning

Three experiments investigated how knowledge influences concept formation and representation in a standard concept acquisition task. The primary comparison was among arbitrary concepts, which had meaningless features; meaningful concepts, which had meaningful features from different domains; and integrated concepts, which had meaningful features interconnected by common knowledge. Experiment 1 found that learning was superior for the integrated concepts but that there was little difference as a function of feature meaningfulness. Experiment 2 suggested that the integrated Ss were learning to form a knowledge-based schema as their concept representation because they did not distinguish the typicality of features that differed in frequency. Experiment 3 introduced a category whose features were from the same domain but were not otherwise related. This concept was as difficult to learn and use as the meaningful concepts were. These comparisons help specify the ways in which knowledge does and does not influence concept formation.     

Comparing the mental lexicons of deaf and hearing individuals.

This study compared the organization of verbal concept knowledge in deaf and hearing adults. Such organization has been shown to influence performance by hearing adults on language and memory tasks, but comparisons of deaf and hearing individuals' mental lexicons have not been conducted. A semantic association task was used to estimate the mental lexicons of deaf and hearing adults for a sample of words that were either sound related or not sound related. Estimates of the size of the associative set for a given word and the strength of the relationship between the word and its associates were computed. The associative sets of deaf and hearing adults varied in the coherence and accessibility of the lexical concepts but showed generally high agreement in the strengths of the relationships within the associative sets. Observed similarities and differences between deaf and hearing adults were comparable for sound-related and not-sound-related words. (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)     

Impulsivity and perception: Individual differences in the processing of the local and global dimensions of stimuli.

In Exp I, 48 undergraduates differing in impulsivity (as measured by a self-report inventory) performed 2 versions of filtering, interference, and invariant control tasks. In one version, Ss sorted according to the value of the local dimension; in the other, the global dimension was the relevant one. In addition, Ss performed a task in which the 2 dimensions were perfectly correlated. Results show that Ss sorted more quickly when the global dimension was relevant than when the local dimension was relevant. In Exp II, 43 of the Ss from Exp I were used to determine whether failure to find a relationship between impulsivity and filtering performance was due to correlations of local and global dimensions; results were negative. In Exp III, the same 43 Ss used in Exp II were used to test the information-integration hypothesis. Results support the hypothesis—high impulsives were more impaired than other Ss when the task required that they integrate information from the global dimension with information from the local dimension. Findings can be explained in terms of individual differences in the value placed on speed, relative to accuracy, in information processing. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automatic versus intentional uses of memory: Aging, attention, and control.

In 2 experiments, the authors used a process dissociation procedure by L. L. Jacoby (see record 1992-07943-001) to separately examine the effects of aging on automatic and consciously controlled memory processes. In Exp 1, a group of young adults in either a full-attention or divided-attention condition were compared with a group of elderly adults on a fame judgment task. Both age and divided attention had a detrimental effect on consciously controlled memory processing but left automatic processing intact. In Exp 2, the same age-related pattern was found using a more demanding forced-choice recognition paradigm. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Disconnect in concept learning by rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta): Judgment of relations and relations-between-relations.

The authors investigated the role that entropy measures, discriminative cues, and symbolic knowledge play for rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) in the acquisition of the concepts of same and different for use in a computerized relational matching-to-sample task. After repeatedly failing to perceive relations between pairs of stimuli in a 2-choice discrimination paradigm, monkeys rapidly learned to discriminate between 8-element arrays. Subsequent tests with smaller arrays, however, suggested that, although important for the initial acquisition of the concept, entropy is not a variable on which monkeys are dependent. Not only do monkeys choose a corresponding relational pair in the presence of a cue, but they also choose the cue itself in the presence of the relational pair--in essence, labeling those relations. Subsequent failure in the judgment of relations-between-relations, however, suggests that perhaps a qualitatively different cognitive component exists that prevents monkeys from behaving analogically. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Analysis of task requirements in schizophrenic concept-identification performance.

Two experiments were performed to examine the effects of manipulating concept-identification task requirements involving (a) discrimination (DC cue type), (b) discrimination plus symbol manipulation (DS cue type), and (c) retention of concept information on correct identifications, false-positive errors, and response latencies for 3 levels of schizophrenic pathology and nonpsychotic Ss. Results of Exp. I indicated a differential set of cue type on pathology level. Latencies for correct "yes" responses were greater than for correct "no" responses. The size of this difference was negatively related to pathology level. A predominance of false-positive errors was accounted for by a partial recall explanation. Results of Exp. II indicated that simultaneous presentation procedures improved schizophrenic performance which supported a partial recall explanation. The importance of experimental manipulation of concept task variables in "psychological deficit" investigations was discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Schema acquisition from a single example.

Compares similarity-based learning (SBL) and explanation-based learning (EBL) approaches to schema acquisition. In SBL approaches, concept formation is based on similarity across multiple examples. However, these approaches seem to be appropriate when the learner cannot apply existing knowledge and when the concepts to be learned are nonexplanatory. EBL approaches assume that a schema can be acquired from even a single example by constructing an explanation of the example using background knowledge, and generalizing the resulting explanation. However, unlike the current EBL theories, Exp 1 showed significant EBL occurred only when the background information learned during the experiment was actively used by the Ss. Exp 2 showed the generality of EBL mechanisms across a variety of materials and test procedures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Involuntary covert orienting is contingent on attentional control settings.

Four experiments tested a new hypothesis that involuntary attention shifts are contingent on the relationship between the properties of the eliciting event and the properties required for task performance. In a variant of the spatial cuing paradigm, the relationship between cue property and the property useful in locating the target was systematically manipulated. In Exp 1, invalid abrupt-onset precues produced costs for targets characterized by an abrupt onset but not for targets characterized by a discontinuity in color. In Exp 2, invalid color precues produced greater costs for color targets than for abrupt-onset targets. Exp 3 provided converging evidence for this pattern. Exp 4 investigated the boundary conditions and time course for attention shifts elicited by color discontinuities. The results of these experiments suggest that attention capture is contingent on attentional control settings induced by task demands. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Categorical shape and color coding by pigeons.

Two studies with 32 pigeons assessed the categorical coding of shapes and the existence of a higher-order color category (all colors). Ss were trained on 2 independent tasks (matching-to-sample and oddity-from-sample). One task involved red and a plus sign, the other a circle and green. On test trials, 1 of the 2 comparison stimuli from one task was replaced by one of the stimuli from the other task. Differential performance based on which of the 2 stimuli from the other task was introduced suggested categorical coding rules. In Exp I, evidence for the categorical coding of sample shapes was found. Categorical color coding was also found; however, it was the comparison stimuli rather than the samples that were categorically coded. Exp II replicated the categorical shape sample effect and ruled out the possibility that the particular colors used were responsible for the categorical coding of comparison stimuli. Results support the view that pigeons can develop categorical rules involving shapes and colors and that the color categories can be hierarchical. (12 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)