Relationships among leadership dimensions and cognitive style.

Witkin's differentiation hypothesis served as a basis for the investigation of 3 propositions: (1) field-dependent supervisors will show the highest "esteem for the least preferred co-worker," (2) field-dependent supervisors will be more "considerate," and (3) field-independent supervisors will be more "structure" oriented. Witkin's Embedded Figures Test (EFT), Fiedler's Esteem for the Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) instrument, and Fleishman's Leadership Opinion Questionnaire were administered to 73 civil service supervisors. The results establish the existence of significant curvilinear relationships between EFT and LPC (p     

Semantic priming: A cognitive neuroscience approach.

Posner and Snyder have proposed that semantic priming involves two processes: Automatic spreading activation and consciously directed attention. According to this view, activation will spread from the node in memory for the prime to nodes for related words. This facilitates response to related words, but does not produce inhibitory effects. Attention, however, is viewed as a slow serial process that produces both facilitation and inhibition effects, but only at a long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). An alternative model has been developed based on a paper by Walley and Weiden. According to our model, facilitation effects are attributed to spreading activation in a network of neurons. Our model differs from Posner and Snyder's model in that we assume that automatic spreading activation, if strong enough to cause neurons to discharge, will produce inhibitory effects through a mechanism of recurrent lateral inhibition. Consequently, this model predicts that if spreading activation is strong enough, responding to unrelated target words will be inhibited even though attention is not directed to the related target. It is possible that even with strongly related prime-target pairs, spreading activation may not be sufficient to cause neurons to discharge and generate lateral inhibition without some additional facilitation resulting from effort-induced arousal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eye movements in reading: Perceptual and cognitive processes.

This article discusses the variability of eye movement behavior. The variability exists between readers, so that the average fixation duration for sonic readers my be around 200 ms and for other readers it may be closer to 300 ms; the average saccade length for some readers may be 6 letter spaces, while for others it may be closer lo 10 letter spaces; and some readers rarely regress while others regress quite frequently. These eye movement characteristics can also be influenced by text difficulty; more difficult text leads to longer fixation durations, shorter saccades, and more regressions. More important than the between reader variability is the within reader variability that exists with each of these measures. The article also discusses research on eye movement during reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Introduction to the special section on cognitive processes and psychotherapy.

Theoretical models featuring cognitive processes have played a fundamental role in advancing knowledge of psychopathology and its treatment and have emphasized the importance of cognition in psychotherapy. Recognition of the importance of cognition in psychotherapy has led to a number of questions that are addressed by the articles in this special section of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Cognitive therapy is well represented in the articles in this special section, but therapeutic procedures that do not represent typical cognitive therapy are also examined. The articles in this special section focus on homework in the modification of cognition, cognition in the treatment of anxiety in adults and in children, change in depressive cognitions in children, cognition and rapid change in the treatment of depression, and the role of cognition in the treatment and prevention of depression that is recurrent. Examination of these types of questions holds the possibility of advances in existing treatments and the possibility of innovations in new treatments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Research with the deaf: Implications for language and cognition.

Deaf people who are deprived of linguistic experience during the formative years seem to provide a unique opportunity to psychologists concerned with the language-cognition relationship. Empirical studies of deaf people's performance on nonverbal cognitive tasks were reviewed. Deaf were found to perform similarly to hearing persons on tasks where verbal knowledge could have been assumed a priori to benefit the hearing. Such evidence appears to weaken a theoretical position which attributes to language a direct, general, or decisive influence on intellective development. The poorer performance of the deaf on some tasks is parsimoniously attributed to either lack of general experience which is no longer manifest by adulthood or to specific task conditions which favor linguistic habits. (2 p. ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Use of the deaf in language studies: A reply to Furth.

Furth, in a recent review (see: 39: 3964), concludes that studies of the deaf indicate that intellectual development proceeds independently of the acquisition of language. In this paper several issues were seen as limiting the premature acceptance of this conclusion. Among these were: (a) the deaf, through special training from 3 yr of age, often possess a verbal system; (b) the conclusion in the review can never be disproven, since any deficient performance by the deaf can almost always be attributed to numerous environmental factors rather than a language handicap; and (c) many tasks were arbitrarily assumed to require symbolic activity without recognizing that this assumption is still open to investigation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reaching while calculating: Scheduling of cognitive and perceptual-motor processes.

To address the neglected question of how cognitive and perceptual-motor processes are coordinated, the authors asked participants to move a cursor from one target to another to reveal operators and operands for a running arithmetic task. In Experiment 1 performance on this task was compared with performance on tasks requiring only aiming or only arithmetic. Aiming was faster in the aiming-only task than in the combined task. More importantly, times for steps requiring calculation were equivalent in the combined and arithmetic-only tasks. The results from this and a second experiment suggest that participants slowed their aiming to allow calculations to be completed before subsequent targets were entered. As a whole, the results suggest that cognitive and perceptual-motor processes are coordinated through scheduling. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Variability in deaf children's spelling: The effect of language experience.

French-speaking hearing and deaf children, ranging in age from 6 years 10 months to 14 years 7 months were required to spell words including phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences that were either statistically dominant or nondominant. Of interest was whether the nature of linguistic experience (cued speech vs. sign language) and the precocity of such experience (early vs. late exposure) determines accuracy in the use of phoneme-to-grapheme knowledge. Cued speech is a system delivering phonemically augmented speechreading through the visual modality. Hearing and deaf children exposed to cued speech early at home relied on accurate phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences, whereas children exposed to cued speech later and at school only, and children exposed to sign language, did not. A critical factor in the development of the phonological route for spelling seems to be early and intensive exposure to a system making all phonological distinctions easily perceivable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Leader assumed dissimilarity as a measure of prejudicial cognitive style.

In a series of studies Fiedler concluded that leaders who maintain a greater psychological distance between themselves and the group members are more effective in promoting group productivity. Statistical and sampling shortcomings of these studies led to the present study involving 43 infantry teams in training. The leaders of high teams as compared to low teams (as rated by their commanding officers) evaluated a least and most preferred co-worker on a series of dyadic adjectival scales. leaders of high rated teams evaluated the low reference person higher (p     

Contribution of specific cognitive processes to executive functioning in an aging population.

The current study investigated executive function measures emphasizing Alpha Span (ASp) to understand relationships among executive and nonexecutive tasks. Nondemented older participants (N = 417) received a comprehensive cognitive battery. Age and vocabulary adjusted correlations revealed associations among ASp, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale--Revised (D. Wechsler, 1981) Digit Span subtests, and fluency tasks. Principal-components analysis with varimax rotation revealed a 4 component solution (86.4% of the variance) with executive variables contributing to all loadings. Calculated component indices were submitted to a regression analysis predicting ASp performance. After accounting for age (6.3% of the variance), Component 3 reflecting brief attention-mental manipulation accounted for 13.4% of ASp variance; Component 1, verbal language ability, 11.5%; Component 2, sustained attention-mental tracking, 1.9%; and Component 4, visuoperceptual spatial organization-planning, 0.9%. Results stress the importance of considering executive and nonexecutive aspects of cognition when conceptualizing executive functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generality and consistency of relations between the alientation syndrome and cognitive processes.

"Twenty male undergraduates were administered an auditory projective technique, a word association technique, and a sentence completion technique, and engaged in two personal interviews with a clinical psychologist. Each of these procedures was designed to provide an independent measure of the Ss' relative standing on a motivational syndrome termed 'alientation'." This syndrome is defined and the results on the auditory projection test are interpreted as indicating that personality is likely to influence selective perception and retention. "These over-all findings of general and consistent relations between motivation and cognitive processes were interpreted as favorable evidence for the development of a general theory of cognition." 34 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Note on reductionism in cognitive psychology: Reification of cognitive processes into mind, mind-brain equivalence, and brain-computer analogy.

This note brings together three phenomena leading to a tendency toward reductionism in cognitive psychology. They are (1) the reification of cognitive processes into an entity called mind; (2) the identification of the mind with the brain; and (3) the congruence by analogy of the brain with the digital computer. Also indicated is the need to continue studying the effects upon behavior of variables other than brain function. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of the interplay between automatic processes and cognitive resources in reading.

An account was tested of the development of the interplay between automatic processes and cognitive resources in reading. According to compensatory-encoding theory, with advancing skill, readers increasingly keep automatic processes from faltering and provide timely, accurate data to working memory by pausing, looking back, rereading, and compensating in other ways when automatic processes fail. Reading skill profiles (e.g., word naming, semantic access, working memory capacity) were obtained from 71 third graders, 68 fifth graders, and 72 seventh graders from a university lab school or a public school (ages 7 to 15; 146 Caucasians, 61 African Americans, 2 Native Americans, 2 Latino Americans). Children participated in an unrestricted reading task (no time or performance pressure) and were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 levels of 3 experimental manipulations of restriction on reading: time pressure or no pressure, constant reading rate or variable reading rate, read silently or read aloud. Regression analyses revealed that developmental level and restriction moderated the reading skill level-comprehension relationship, and restriction lowered comprehension when it overwhelmed skills, especially for younger readers. Verbally inefficient readers compensated most often, and older readers compensated most efficiently. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of language on the development of concept formation in deaf children.

To isolate the effect of language development on the development of thinking, children between 7 and 12 who had been deaf since an early age were presented with 3 tasks assessing conceptual functioning. Their performance was compared to that of a relatively comparable group of "hearers." The results indicated that the lack of a capacity to verbalize did not, in itself, interfere with a general capacity for abstract conceptualization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hierarchical control of cognitive processes: Switching tasks in sequences.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 136(2) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (see record 2007-06470-005). Two task transitions were classified incorrectly in Table 7 (p. 634). Two task transitions were classified incorrectly in Table 7 (p. 634). The task transition at Serial Position 1 for sequence switches of the AABB sequence should be TR instead of TS. The task transition at Serial Position 1 for sequence switches of the ABBA sequence should be TS instead of TR. Two sections of text in the Results and Discussion section of Experiment 4 were affected by the misclassifications. The corrected text is provided for the Error rate analysis section (pp. 634-635) and the RT analysis section (p.635). These corrections do not alter any of the conclusions drawn from the original text.] Hierarchical control of cognitive processes was studied by examining the relationship between sequence- and task-level processing in the performance of explicit, memorized task sequences. In 4 experiments, switch costs in task-switching performance were perturbed by sequence initiation times that varied with sequence complexity, preparation time, and type of sequence transition (repetition or switch). Hierarchical control was inferred from these sequence initiation time effects and the recurrent finding of no switch cost at the first serial position across sequences, the point at which sequence-level processes are likely active in maintaining or instantiating a hierarchical control structure in working memory. These findings resonate with past research on motor programs and serial memory and provide new insights into the concepts of task set and control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The education of the deaf in Canada.

Some problems in the field of Deaf Education are described. It is maintained that the dominant system of educating the deaf in North America, usually referred to as the oralist approach, has been a failure. Reasons for the failure of pure oralism are offered, and some suggestions are made for an approach to Deaf Education which would involve the introduction of the language signs and fingerspelling at the time critical for language development. Also, the relationship of the adult deaf community to the educational system is discussed, and suggestions are made concerning the potential of Instructional Television for adult deaf education as well as for the education of deaf children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Creativity and cognitive style: The relationship between field-dependence-independence, expected evaluation, and creative performance.

This study explored the effects of cognitive style and expected evaluation on creativity. Past research has shown that an expectation of evaluation can have a negative impact on creativity. In addition, those individuals classified as field-independent rather than field-dependent are more likely to have higher creativity scores. Thus, an interaction between expected evaluation and cognitive style was hypothesized, along with main effects for expectation of evaluation and cognitive style. Participants created a collage to measure creativity, either with or without an expectation of evaluation, and then cognitive style was measured using the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT). The hypothesis was partially supported. The more field-independent an individual, the higher the creativity score. Despite the results of previous research, evaluation condition did not significantly affect creativity; this finding is discussed in terms of the experimental situation and the conceptualization of motivation. Further investigations of cognitive style and motivational conditions are suggested. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some effects of immediate versus randomly delayed shock on an instrumental response and cognitive processes.

"… Ss were required… to guess whether a right or left light would go on, indicating their guesses by pressing a lever below the appropriate light. Trials… [involved] non-shock… . [and] an immediate shock (IS) every time he pressed one lever and a randomly delayed shock (RDS) every time he pressed the other lever, irrespective of whether he guessed correctly or incorrectly." Results: a significant avoidance of the lever leading to RDS, a significantly greater number of Ss judged the RDS as more unpleasant than IS, a marked impairment of Ss' recall of stimulus events and their behavior during the shock trials. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of preferred coping style and cognitive strategy on laboratory-induced pain.

Objective: To evaluate the effects of matching an individual's coping style (low, mixed, or high monitoring) to an appropriate cognitive strategy (distraction or sensation monitoring) to improve pain management. Design: This study used a split-plot factorial design in a laboratory setting. Main Outcome Measures: Main outcomes were pain threshold, pain tolerance, pain intensity, pain affect, and anxiety. Results: The results of the 2 × 3 × 3 (Experimental Condition × Coping Style × Trial) analysis of variance (ANOVA) interaction were significant for pain threshold scores, F(4, 178) = 2.95, p     

Unpacking the cognitive architecture of emotion processes.

The results of 2 electroencephalographic studies confirm Component Process Model (CPM) predictions that different appraisal checks have specific brain state correlates, occur rapidly in a brief time window after stimulation, and produce results that occur in sequential rather than parallel fashion. The data are compatible with the assumption that early checks (novelty and intrinsic pleasantness) occur in an automatic, unconscious mode of processing, whereas later checks, specifically goal conduciveness, require more extensive, effortful, and controlled processing. Overall, this work, combined with growing evidence for the CPM's response patterning predictions concerning autonomic physiological signatures, facial muscle movements, and vocalization changes, suggests that this model provides an appropriate basis for the unpacking of the cognitive architecture of emotion and its computational modeling. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)