Mental organization of maps.

Previous studies deconfounding spatial and temporal proximity during map learning have found a temporal influence on mental map organization. The authors explored whether this observed priming effect reflected the manner in which a map was learned by having people either name objects or point to them during learning. Naming objects resulted in temporal organization but pointing to objects resulted in spatial organization, suggesting that mental map organization is sensitive to emphasizing different types of map information during learning. The authors also explored whether the temporal organization observed in the naming group was influenced by the ease of using spatial information during learning, such as when the expectancy to use spatial information was made explicit or when a consistent temporal order was absent. When naming map objects, evidence for a spatial organization was weak, whereas a temporal organization was observed when a consistent temporal order was present. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental illness, milieu therapy, and social organization in ward groups.

"It was concluded that as degree of mental illness increases, there is a decrease in social organization and social relationship involving positive or negative feelings. This process appears to be reversed by milieu therapy." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Opponent processes as a model of neural organization.

The basic principles of opposition and equilibria emerge clearly in the phenomena and data of color vision, and form the basis of models to account for the human color perceptions and psychophysical data. Increasingly, the same principles have become equally evident in detailed analyses of the neurophysiology of the visual system in animal preparations, thus making possible a fruitful interrelation between human-perceptual and neurophysiological issues and findings. By extending the opponent-process model of color vision to include opponent spatial interactions, it is shown that phenomena as diverse as contrast and constancy are both consistent outcomes. The seemingly contradictory phenomena of reverse contrast (assimilation) yield to an analysis of the opponent spatial organization as revealed by electrophysiological data on receptive fields. Different perceptual outcomes (i.e., contrast vs assimilation) are shown to be very strongly dependent on the dimensions of both the pattern of stimulation on the retina and the retinal receptive field sizes relative to that pattern. It is suggested that the concepts of opposition and equilibria may provide the most useful key to the behavior of the nervous system. (47 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A butterfly catastrophe model of motivation in organization: Academic performance.

This monograph advances and tests a model proposing that changes in performance levels, rates of absenteeism, and turnover are best described by a nonlinear interactive process that is controlled by the subject's abilities, intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors, and organizational climate variables. In an application to academic performance, changes in grade point average from high school to college were observed for 272 freshmen at a midwestern technical university. Operationalized control variables were American College Test scores plus others selected from the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory. Squared multiple correlation coefficients for the nonlinear (polynomial with ordinary least squares regression) hypothesis ranged from .35 to .70 for various data treatments, which were larger than values obtained for conventional linear hypotheses (.02 to .09). It is argued that (a) the theory subsumes most known motivational effects and ideas and that (b) its predictive superiority in appropriate situations warrants further motivation research of its type, plus explorations of other applications of catastrophe theory in applied psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental model metrics and team adaptability: A multi-facet multi-method examination.

This paper empirically examines the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of three team mental model measurement approaches. Specifically, this study measures the similarity (MM-similarity) and quality (MM-quality) facets of team strategy-focused mental models using structural networks, priority rankings, and importance ratings. The convergent and divergent relationships among the three mental model metrics are then examined via a multi-facet multi-method matrix. Finally, the relative utility of each metric for understanding the relationships between team mental models, team adaptability, and decision effectiveness are compared. The study was conducted in a laboratory setting, modeling 56 four-person decision-making teams. Results indicate little convergent and extensive discriminant validity across the three mental model metrics. In addition, only mental models measured using the structural networks metric were found to have predictive validity in relation to team adaptation and performance. The quality and similarity of team structural networks were found to have interactive effects in relation to adaptation such that mental model quality was most strongly related to adaptation for teams with low mental model similarity and unrelated to adaptation for teams with high similarity. In turn, adaptation was critical for team decision effectiveness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual organization of behavior: A hierarchical control model of coordinated action.

Compared the behavior of 4 college students and 2 faculty members (including the present author) with a hierarchical control system model of behavioral organization. Ss varied the position of 2 control handles simultaneously to keep the distance constant between 2 pairs of lines. Three variations on this basic experiment that illustrate some fundamental properties of coordinated action showed (1) how independent actions, compensating for unpredictable and undetectable disturbances, can produce a single behavioral result; (2) how the ability to produce a particular result is maintained when the connection between action and result is changed; and (3) how 2 independent outputs can appear to be related as coordinative structures when one output disturbs a result being controlled by the other. The correlation between the behavior of Ss and the model in all experiments was typically on the order of .99. A detailed examination of the operation of the model demonstrated that actions are structured by perception, not by central commands or equations of constraint. (35 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental Fitness.

The author explores Andie Knutson's plea for a more appropriate term to describe the positive aspects of mental health (see record 1964-01167-001) and suggest the term mental fitness. She provides the definition of fitness and explains that this concept of mental fitness carries much of the connotation we are groping for. It forms an excellent counterpart for the late President Kennedy's program for physical fitness. At the same time, it avoids the unfortunate connotation of illness, and consequent restriction to medical care. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Encoding processes and memory organization: A model of the von Restorff effect.

The mechanisms underlying the improved recall of isolated events (von Restorff effect) were investigated. Participants studied lists of stimuli containing a physical and a semantic isolate while performing a physical task or a lexical decision task. The physical-task group showed a physical but not a semantic isolation effect (IE) in free recall, whereas the lexical-decision group displayed both types of IEs. The recall of the isolates was independent of that of the other words, and isolates were usually reported separately from other words in the list. Event-related potentials recorded at encoding predicted the recall of both types of isolates. In recognition tests, the IE was obtained only when the encoding context was reinstated. These results are consistent with a model of the IE that stresses the role of the encoding processes immediately following the presentation of distinctive events, and that postulates interactions between these processes and subsequent elaboration of the stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental health technology.

Discusses the acute need for the development of viable technologies in social-behavioral areas, e.g., mental health. Technology is defined as anything that increases the efficiency of some work process, and has the potential for being based on science. By examining the nature and historical development of established technologies, some of their problems can hopefully be avoided. The field of mental health is essentially pretechnological, although, as is true of other social-behavioral areas, potential scientific data bases and directions for technological development are not lacking. 8 such areas are identified and briefly discussed. (15 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On Mental Illness.

Two official position papers of our APA seem to contradict each other with respect to whether mental illness is a myth or not. The APA official position paper, "The Community and the Community Mental Health Center," questions the appropriateness of the term "illness." The APA official position paper, "The Psychologist and Voluntary Health Insurance." identifies psychology in some of its roles as a health profession. Is psychology in some of its roles supposed to be a health profession that regards illness as a myth in some of its other roles? The answer seems to be, "Yes." If psychologists would switch hats as they changed roles from clinician to social science consultant, the contradiction would be resolved easily. Instead, the contradiction is denied by one role player or the other. Somehow, the medical model is supposed to be absolutely evil and to stand in the way of social progress. At the same time, psychiatrists seem to expect to exercise leadership in matters of social science. I believe that mental illness exists. Psychiatrists have primary responsibility for its treatment, and there is a very large and honorable role for clinical psychologists in the struggle against mental illness. Social disorganization exists. I doubt very much that psychologists deserve primary responsibility for the amelioration of social disorganization, but psychologists can make important contributions. Let us not overdefend against the boundless ambitions of our medical colleagues as social science experts by denying the legitimacy of mental illness and of the medical model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rethinking the role of organization in person memory: An independent trace storage model.

How do people represent information about others in memory when they form impressions? Previous answers to this question have been nearly unanimous in the model they describe. Subjects forming an impression of a person interpret that person's behavior in terms of the traits it exemplifies. When several behaviors exemplify the same trait, subjects organize those behaviors in memory into a trait-based category (e.g., D. L. Hamilton [1989]; and T. K. Srull and R. S. Wyer [see PA, Vol 76:15483]). The present experiments challenge this organized representation model of impression formation, and show instead that a better account of the data from impression formation studies is provided by a model in which behaviors exemplifying the same trait are stored independent of one another in memory. A unique feature of this model is the primary role it gives to retrieval factors, rather than the structure of the representation, in determining organization in subjects' recall of behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Leveling-sharpening and memory organization.

The Schematizing Test (see 35: 2266) and a psychophysical task utilizing the method of single stimuli were used to differentiate a group of "levelers" (in a perceputal sense—or, in a psychoanalytic sense, repressors) from "sharpeners." Ss were asked to relate requested details of a story (the Pied Piper of Hamlin), the story being used as a measure of remote memory. The groups were differentiated on the basis of such recall. The results were seen as supporting the effects of cognitive style upon memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual organization and schizotypy.

The preattentive visual information processing of hypothetically psychosis-prone college Ss was evaluated using 3 different paradigms: target detection (n?=?57), visual suffix effect (n?=?57), and configural superiority effect (n?=?68). It was hypothesized that anhedonic Ss would show the same perceptual organization deficits reported in process schizophrenics and that perceptual aberration-magical ideation Ss and depressed Ss would perform similarly to control Ss. In each study, anhedonics performed similarly to each comparison group, even though there was adequate power to detect performance differences if they existed. A framework for understanding the visual information-processing deficits of schizophrenics and high-risk Ss is proposed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual organization in schizophrenia.

A report of numerosity task was used in 2 experiments to examine the effect of inherent stimulus organization on the report accuracy of 2 S groups. Ss in each experiment were 10 schizophrenics and 10 drug abusing inpatients (controls). In both experiments, displays containing from zero to 6 lines were presented tachistoscopically. In Exp I, the lines appeared either alone or with noise elements (circles). When the lines appeared alone, schizophrenics and controls performed comparably. Their report accuracy decreased with increases in the number of lines. In the noise condition, the level of performance dropped only for schizophrenics. In Exp II, the stimulus arrays did not contain noise elements. Ss were given the task of reporting all the lines they saw. The perceptual organization of the arrays was manipulated by varying the similarity and proximity of the line elements. The performance of controls deteriorated as the organization of the arrays became more complex; schizophrenics were not affected by the organization. In fact, their average performance was significantly better than that of controls. Results of the 2 experiments are interpreted as evidence that schizophrenics' perceptual deficit lies in a failure to organize information at an early stage in processing. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental and manual rotation.

The relation between mental and manual rotation was investigated in 2 experiments. Experiment 1 compared the response times (RTs) of mental rotation about 4 axes in space with the RTs shown in the same task when participants were allowed to reorient the stimuli by means of rotational hand movements. For the 3 Cartesian axes, RT functions were quantitatively indistinguishable. Experiment 2 investigated interference between mental rotation and 4 kinds of simultaneously executed hand movements that did not reorient the stimuli. Interference was observed only when axes of manual and mental rotation coincided in space. Regardless of the hand used, concordant rotational directions facilitated, whereas discordant directions inhibited, mental rotation. The results suggest that mental object rotation and rotatory object manipulation share a common process that is thought to control the dynamics of both imagined and actually performed object reorientation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental testing and immigration.

Responds to an article by R. J. Herrnstein (1981), which asserts that the statement "83% of the Jews, 80% of the Hungarians, 79% of the Italians, and 87% of the Russians were 'feeble-minded' " (L. J. Kamin, 1974) was made by the present author (LJK) and not H. H. Goddard (1913, 1917). LJK acknowledges that the statement was his and that the supporting data can be found in Goddard's 1917 paper on the testing on immigrants. Although Goddard stated that it was unwise to discard a scientific discovery because of apparent absurdity, it is pointed out that he did not use his scientific data to make an unqualified argument against immigration. (4 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental Illness and Employment.

Comments on an article by Sturm and Lipton, and the article they are commenting on, by Rothaus, Cleveland and Johnson (see record 1964-02889-001). Sturm and Lipton criticize the study by Rothaus, Hanson, Cleveland and Johnson (the current authors) on the grounds that employment of psychiatrically discharged patients is controlled by personnel directors and not by employment interviewers. In our study we had found it advantageous for the psychiatric patient seeking employment to describe his recent hospitalization as a learning experience designed to aid him in coping with the problems of living rather than alluding to his hospitalization as treatment or a cure for illness. Using the former approach, ex-psychiatric-patients were judged by employment interviewers of the Texas Employment Commission as being more readily employable than patients using the mental-illness approach. But Sturm and Lipton complain that we were working with the wrong people since only personnel directors and employers do the direct hiring. In Texas at least, this is not necessarily so. The authors also comment on other criticisms of Sturm and Lipton. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental simulation of causality.

We propose that people imagine alternatives to reality (counterfactuals) in assessing the casual role of a prior event. This process of mental simulation (D. Kahneman and A. Tversky, 1982) is used to derive novel predictions about the effects of default events on causal attribution. A default event is the alternative event that most readily comes to mind when a factual event is mentally mutated. The factual event is judged to be causal to the extent that its default undoes the outcome. In Experiment 1, a woman was described as having died from an allergic reaction to a meal ordered by her boss. When the boss was described as having considered another meal without the allergic ingredient, people were more likely to mutate his decision and his causal role in the death was judged to be greater than when the alternative meal was also said to have the allergic ingredient. In Experiment 2, a paraplegic couple was described as having died in an auto accident after having been denied a cab ride. People perceived the cabby's refusal to take the couple as a stronger cause of the deaths when his taking the couple would have undone the accident than when it would have not have. We conclude that an adequate theory of causal judgment requires an understanding of these counterfactual simulations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental imagery and aging.

Young adult (aged 18–23 yrs) and elderly (aged 55–71 yrs) Ss performed 4 visual mental imagery tasks, each of which tapped different processes. The elderly had relatively impaired image rotation and image activation (the process of accessing and activating stored visual memories), and there was a hint that aging may impair the ability to maintain images. In contrast, the elderly were able to compose (the process of generating the segments of the shape, one by one) and scan visual mental images as well as young adults. However, when the authors correlated the mean performance of each age group across all the tasks, they found that the reaction times (RTs) of the elderly were almost perfectly predicted by the performance of the young Ss but that the error rates were not correlated. These findings suggest that although there is slowing with age, individual imagery processes are affected selectively by aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)