Implicit learning and tacit knowledge.

I examine the phenomenon of implicit learning, the process by which knowledge about the rule-governed complexities of the stimulus environment is acquired independently of conscious attempts to do so. Our research with the two seemingly disparate experimental paradigms of synthetic grammar learning and probability learning, is reviewed and integrated with other approaches to the general problem of unconscious cognition. The conclusions reached are as follows: (a) Implicit learning produces a tacit knowledge base that is abstract and representative of the structure of the environment; (b) such knowledge is optimally acquired independently of conscious efforts to learn; and (c) it can be used implicitly to solve problems and make accurate decisions about novel stimulus circumstances. Various epistemological issues and related problems such as intuition, neuroclinical disorders of learning and memory, and the relationship of evolutionary processes to cognitive science are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Practical intelligence in real-world pursuits: The role of tacit knowledge.

Examined the role of tacit knowledge (knowledge that usually is not openly expressed or taught) in intellectual competence in real-world pursuits. In Exp I, 54 university faculty members in psychology, 104 psychology graduate students, and 29 undergraduates were presented with 12 work-related situations and 6–20 response items and asked to rate the importance of the items. Results show that differences in tacit knowledge useful for managing self, others, and career were related to criterion measures of performance for both psychologists and graduate students. In Exp II, 54 business managers, 51 business graduate students, and 22 undergraduates participated. Differences in tacit knowledge were related to criterion measures of performance for managers. In Exp III, the results of Exp II were cross-validated on a group of 29 bank managers for whom detailed performance-evaluation information was available. Tacit knowledge differences were related to criterion measures of job performance. It is concluded that a comprehensive theory of practical intelligence in real-world pursuits will encompass general aptitudes, formal knowledge, and tacit knowledge that is used in managing self, others, and career. Work-related situations are appended. (54 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Analogue versus clinical depression: A critical reappraisal.

Much of the existing psychological literature on depression is based on research with college students. An important question is whether depression in college students represents an appropriate analog of depression in clinical patients. The purpose of the present article is to review past evidence on this issue from a critical perspective. Past arguments are examined, and little support is found for the position that depression research with college students is not warranted. Moreover, the results of studies with student and clinical samples are compared, and the findings are generally similar across populations. Next, a number of methodological issues are identified that may actually favor the use of depressed college students, and some methodological recommendations for future research are outlined. Finally, an appeal is made for research that directly examines the analog–clinical issue and the nature of college student depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional imagery in simple and social phobia: Fear versus anxiety.

In a 1st study, 60 phobic volunteer Ss reacted psychophysiologically with greater vigor to imagery of their own phobic content than to other fearful or nonaffective images. Imagery heart rate responses were largest in Ss with multiple phobias. For simple (dental) phobics, cardiac reactivity was positively correlated with reports of imagery vividness and concordant with reports of affective distress; these relationships were not observed for social (speech) phobics. In a 2nd study, these phobic volunteers were shown to be similar on most measures to an outpatient clinically phobic sample. In an analysis of the combined samples, fearful and socially anxious subtypes were defined by questionnaires. Only the fearful subtype showed a significant covariation among physiological responses, imagery vividness, and severity of phobic disorder. This fearful–anxious distinction seems to cut across diagnostic categories, providing a heuristic perspective from which to view anxiety disorders. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Deciding versus reacting: Conceptions of moral judgment and the reason-affect debate.

Recent approaches to moral judgment have typically pitted emotion against reason. In an effort to move beyond this debate, we propose that authors presenting diverging models are considering quite different prototypical situations: those focusing on the resolution of complex dilemmas conclude that morality involves sophisticated reasoning, whereas those studying reactions to shocking moral violations find that morality involves quick, affect-laden processes. We articulate these diverging dominant approaches and consider three directions for future research (moral temptation, moral self-image, and lay understandings of morality) that we propose have not received sufficient attention as a result of the focus on these two prototypical situations within moral psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bizarre imagery: The misremembered mnemonic.

Conducted 2 experiments with 56 undergraduates to measure the effects of bizarre imagery and image interaction on the brief and long-term memory of word pairs. Ss in Exp I performed an incidental learning task and were administered free- and cued-recall tests either 5 min or 1 wk after the task. Ss in Exp II received more intensive training in the learning task and completed 2 cued-recall tests in the same session and another cued-recall test 1 wk later. In both experiments, bizarre imagery did not improve memory more than plausible, interactive imagery. The degree of interaction in the image was a strong determinant of cued-recall performance at both retention intervals. Most Ss in Exp II believed that they had remembered more bizarre than plausible pairs, even though this was clearly not the case. Possible reasons for the acceptance of the notion that bizarre imagery improves memory are discussed. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Acquistion of structural versus object landmark knowledge.

Three experiments investigated the acquisition and retention of structural and object landmarks in virtual indoor environments. The experiments investigated the rate of acquisition and memory retention for hallway structure (structural landmarks) and pictures (object landmarks). The experiments investigated the rate of acquisition, the role of information content, and memory retention of this information when participants were trained and tested in novel virtual indoor environments. The results from these experiments suggest that (a) even initially, participants are biased toward encoding building structure over object landmarks; (b) participants are sensitive to the information content of landmarks and will allocate memory resources to landmarks that are more informative; and (c) information about these landmarks is retained even after a 1-year delay. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Television violence and aggression: The debate continues.

Defends the majority consensus in the literature that there is a causal relation between viewing TV violence and aggression. Replies are made to challenges of this consensus by J. L. Freedman (see record 1984-30860-001). It is concluded that the data support a bidirectional causal relation between viewing TV violence and aggression, that the potential threats to the internal and external validity of studies using different methods are not likely to produce a positive bias, and that the findings can be generalized to real-world violence. The available research is placed in a theoretical context encompassing multiple psychological processes and developmental change, and social policy implications are discussed. (48 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Consensus information and fundamental attribution error: The role of development and in-group versus out-group knowledge.

24 4-yr-olds, 24 9-yr-olds, and 24 undergraduates watched a target actor select an item from an array, and other actors either agreed (high consensus) or disagreed (low consensus) with the choice. Actors were either peers or nonpeers of the Ss, and the target's choice did or did not match the S's own preference. Ss were asked why the actor liked the chosen object best. Ss in all age groups appropriately used the consensus information. Nine-year-olds and adults, however, were much less likely to use the consensus information when judging peers than when judging nonpeers, suggesting the use of self-provided consensus information. Four-yr-olds made greater entity attributions when they agreed with the target actor's choice than when they disagreed, suggesting that young children use self-reference as a basis for normative expectancies. There was also a developmental shift in general attributional bias. Nine-year-olds and adults had a person bias for peer targets, but they had no attribution bias for nonpeer targets. Four-year-olds had an entity bias for both peer and nonpeer targets. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comment: The evidence-based treatment debate: Toward a dialectical rapprochement.

In this commentary on Zeldow's (2009) “In Defense of Clinical Judgment, Credentialed Clinicians, and Reflective Practice,” the dialectical method is presented as a conceptual model and strategy for reconciling the division between clinical practitioners and clinical scientists in their acceptance of the need for empirically based psychological treatments and practices. Recommendations are made for (a) better integrating practitioners in the conduct of science, (b) confronting unhelpful attitudes of scientific chauvinism and imperialism, and (c) recognizing the contributions of both microlevel (process) and macrolevel (outcome) phenomena in psychotherapeutic practice and its scientific investigation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Lashley–Hull debate revisited.

N. Weidman (see record 1995-00025-001) claimed that "Karl Lashley and Clark Hull had a long and unresolved controversy about the structure and function of the brain, its relationship to the mind, and the use of machine metaphors to explain intelligence." The present author contends that the record contained in published articles and unpublished correspondence indicates otherwise. The clash was explicitly about continuity versus noncontinuity in discrimination learning, stimulus generalization, and the development of quantitative and mathematical psychological theory and its relation to neurophysiological data. Weidman also contended that the subtext of the debate was whether heredity or environment was more important in determining intelligence and behavior. This is doubtful. It is more probable that the debate stemmed from Lashley's career-long opposition to connectionism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit knowledge versus psychoacoustic similarity in priming of chords.

A chord-priming paradigm was used to test predictions of a neural net model (MUSACT). The model makes a nonintuitive prediction: Following a prime chord, expectations for the target chord are based on psychoacoustic similarity at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) but on implicit knowledge of conventional relationships at longer SOAs. In a critical test, 2 targets were selected for each prime. One was more psychoacoustically similar to the prime, and the other was more closely related on the basis of convention. With an SOA of 50 ms, priming favored the psychoacoustically similar target; with SOAs of 500 ms and longer, the effect reversed, and priming favored conventional relatedness. The results underscore the limitations of models of harmony based on psychoacoustic factors alone. These studies demonstrate how neural net learning models that are appropriately constrained can be subject to strong empirical verification. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The self-reference effect with imagery encoding.

Reviews studies that have shown that memory for an item is better when that item is encoded with reference to the self than when it is encoded with reference to some other person and examines the work of C. G. Lord (see record 1981-07095-001), who observed a reversal of the self-reference effect and attributed this reversal to use of imagery. The present series of 6 experiments conducted with 261 undergraduates contradicted Lord's hypothesis that the self-reference effect is reversed when Ss use imagery to encode the material. In these experiments, self-reference effects were consistently observed with imagery instructions. It is suggested that the benefit of self-reference results from the use of episodic memory when forming images of the self. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The big picture in imagery research.

Reviews the book, Theories of image formation by David Marks (1986). This book contains 10 chapters spanning a wide range of views concerning the nature, function, and proper way to investigate mental imagery. It presents a striking variety of views and approaches. Some of the chapters are very good; the remaining chapters pale in comparison. Overall, the book provides what we might imagine as the big picture behind research on image formation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stability and change in the complexity of senatorial debate: Testing the cognitive versus rhetorical style hypotheses.

Tested the cognitive vs rhetorical style hypothesis (conservatives have more simplistic rhetorical, not cognitive styles than liberals or moderates) by assessing the integrative complexity of 10 paragraph-sized statements of 81 senators in 5 US Congresses: 3 dominated by liberals and moderates (the 82nd, 94th, and 96th Congresses) and 2 dominated by conservatives (the 83rd and 97th Congresses). Results show that liberals and moderates were more complex than conservatives in the 82nd, 94th, and 96th Congresses but that these differences among ideological groups were much less pronounced in the 83rd and 97th Congresses. The change in pattern was due to sharp declines in the complexity of liberals and, to a lesser extent, moderates in conservative-dominated sessions, not to an increase in the complexity in conservatives. Conservatives displayed more traitlike stability in integrative complexity both within and across Congressional sessions. It is suggested that the integrative complexity of senatorial debate may be a joint product of relatively context-specific styles of political impression management and relatively stable cognitive styles of organizing the political world. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of pitch in auditory imagery.

To study the representation of pitch in auditory images, the effects of pitch ratings of named but unheard sounds on auditory images of the sounds were tested. The times to mentally equate the pitch of the 2 images increased, and the time to identify the image with the higher or lower pitch decreased as the difference between the pitch ratings of the 2 sounds increased. The times to identify the image with the higher pitch were faster for sounds rated as high in pitch than for sounds rated as lower in pitch. The opposite trend for lower pitch image identifications did not appear, however. Instead, the "lower" identifications were similar to the "higher" ones, suggesting that the pitch of auditory images is influenced more strongly by sensory-perceptual features than by semantic ones. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)