Acquisition of understanding and skill in relation to subjects' preparation and meaningfulness of instruction.

4 experiments examined effects of a total of 224 college students' aptitudes, preinstructional experience, method of instruction, and differences among posttest items. Instruction that emphasized meanings of concepts led to better performance on posttest items requiring understanding, but Ss with emphasis on computation performed better on simple problems. Ss with higher measured aptitudes directly relevant to instruction or given relevant preinstructional experience had more success in meaningful instruction than did Ss with lower aptitude scores, but little or no aptitude difference was found for instruction emphasizing algorithms. 2 kinds of operations were distinguished-identifying relevant information in the problem situation and carrying out computations. The former appears more closely related to conceptual understanding, the latter to computational skill. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Familiarity and attraction to pictures of children's faces.

Studied the relationship between familiarity and liking of a peer in 32 children in Grades 1–6. Pictures of boys' and girls' faces were shown at different frequencies; Ss then ranked the faces according to liking. Marked individual differences were found. For Ss with high sex-typed preferences, increased familiarity led to increased liking of same-sex faces and decreased liking of other-sex faces. For Ss with less sex-typed preferences, familiarity did not affect liking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stimulus significance and bilateral SCRs to potentially phobic pictures.

Conducted 2 experiments with 39 nonphobic undergraduates, 26 in Exp I and 13 in Exp II. Potentially phobic slides of snakes and spiders and neutral pictures of flowers and mushrooms were presented. Bilateral skin conductance responses (SCRs) were obtained during an initial habituation series of slide presentations that were followed by a series in which the participants rated the slides on a 7-point evaluative semantic differential scale ranging from unpleasant (1) to pleasant (7). A final slide series occurred in the absence of ratings. Type of slide did not evoke different SCRs during habituation. Significantly larger mean SCRs occurred to the pictures of snakes and spiders than to the neutral pictures during the rating series in both experiments and in the final nonrating slide presentation in Exp I. Results contradict the view that differential conditioning of SCRs to potentially phobic slides represents biological preparedness and offers an experimental analogue of clinical phobias. Instead, an interpretation is offered in terms of the evocation of orienting reflexes potentiated by their signal value. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Deprivation selectively modulates brain potentials to food pictures.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to examine whether the processing of food pictures is selectively modulated by changes in the motivational state of the observer. Sixteen healthy male volunteers were tested twice 1 week apart, either after 24 hr of food deprivation or after normal food intake. ERPs were measured while participants viewed appetitive food pictures as well as standard emotional and neutral control pictures. Results show that the ERPs to food pictures in a hungry, rather than satiated, state were associated with enlarged positive potentials over posterior sensor sites in a time window of 170-310 ms poststimulus. Minimum-norm analysis suggests the enhanced processing of food cues primarily in occipito-temporo-parietal regions. In contrast, processing of standard emotional and neutral pictures was not modulated by food deprivation. Considered from the perspective of motivated attention, the selective change of food cue processing may reflect a state-dependent change in stimulus salience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conceptual representation of pictures and words: Reply to Clark.

Clark (1987) offers a dual coding alternative (Paivio, 1971, 1986) to the conceptual hypothesis that Potter, Kroll, Yachzel, Carpenter, and Sherman (1986) proposed to explain the ease with which people can read and understand rebus sentences in which a picture replaces a noun. We present theoretical and empirical reasons for positing a conceptual representation that is distinct from the representation of an object's name and from a mental image of it. The hierarchical conceptual model has greater explanatory and predictive power and is more parsimonious overall than Clark's alternative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Alcoholic subjects' attentional bias in the processing of alcohol-related words.

Studied attentional bias for alcohol-related (AR) words in 13 alcoholic men and 17 matched control Ss with a modified version of the Stroop Color and Word Test that included color-interfering, AR, and neutral words. Results indicate that (1) alcoholic Ss responded more slowly to all word categories than control Ss, (2) both alcoholic and control Ss responded more slowly to color-interfering words than to neutral words, and (3) only alcoholic Ss responded more slowly to AR words than to neutral words. Findings indicate that when the alcoholic Ss were confronted with AR stimuli, cognitive processes presumably began that made it impossible for them to ignore the meaning of the words and their resources were allocated to the content of the alcohol stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Audiotape and videotape procedures: A study of subjects' reactions.

48 undergraduate females were recorded on audiotape or videotape (based on scores from Gendlin's Post-Focusing Questionnaire) while engaging in affect simulation and presented with an immediate replay. Ratings of desirability, productivity, and discomfort revealed that (a) various media experiences were described in neutral terms, (b) procedure accounted for differential ratings, (c) experiencing level did not account for differential reactions, (d) differences in medium did not affect the degree of discomfort, and (e) medium was a determinant of desirability and productivity ratings only as it interacted with procedure. Results contradict previous studies, and an instructional/self-learning model is proposed. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing time and memory for pictures.

Postexposure processing of an iconic memory following the presentation of pictures of complex, colored, naturalistic scenes was assessed in 3 experiments which examined the effects of exposure duration and mask delay upon recognition memory. Ss were 50 undergraduates. Exposure durations ranged from 50 to 550 msec and mask delays from 0 to 500 msec. For exposure durations of 300 msec and longer, recognition accuracy was primarily determined by exposure duration, and mask delay had no significant effect. For exposure durations of less than 300 msec, postexposure processing continued for up to 250 msec following the offset of a target picture, and recognition accuracy was a function of total processing time (i.e., the total time separating target and mask onsets.) This reciprocity between exposure duration and mask delay was similar to that previously demonstrated for verbal materials. The processing-time/recognition memory relationship was also shown to be due to differences in initial encoding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of structure and strategy in two-dimensional pictures.

The development of 2 structural principles, hierarchical complexity and interruption, was examined in a new domain, 2-dimensional pictures. Using felt pieces, 20 children in each of 3 age groups (4–4.5, 4.5–5, and 5–5.5 yrs) were asked to reproduce felt pictures of flower arrangements constituting tree structures of different levels of hierarchical complexity. For each model, task difficulty was varied by requiring Ss to construct pictures either with whole flowers or with component pieces. The ability to reproduce the models formed a Guttman scale according to tree structure complexity, and older Ss scored higher on the scale than younger Ss. Thus, hierarchical complexity has a developmental role in the pictorial domain, as in language and 3-dimensional construction. The construction process was analyzed in terms of uninterrupted and interrupted strategies. Unlike earlier results with abstract (nonfigural) 3-dimensional construction tasks, the present Ss did not avoid interrupted strategies. The lack of strategy preference with whole flowers and the development of a preference for interrupted strategies with components may stem from the fact that the strong figural and thematic aspects of the models reduced the cognitive complexity of an interrupted strategy. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distance-dependent processing of pictures and words.

A series of 8 experiments investigated the association between pictorial and verbal representations and the psychological distance of the referent objects from the observer. The results showed that people better process pictures that represent proximal objects and words that represent distal objects than pictures that represent distal objects and words that represent proximal objects. These results were obtained with various psychological distance dimensions (spatial, temporal, and social), different tasks (classification and categorization), and different measures (speed of processing and selective attention). The authors argue that differences in the processing of pictures and words emanate from the physical similarity of pictures, but not words, to the referents. Consequently, perceptual analysis is commonly applied to pictures but not to words. Pictures thus impart a sense of closeness to the referent objects and are preferably used to represent such objects, whereas words do not convey proximity and are preferably used to represent distal objects in space, time, and social perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic facilitation with pictures and words.

The present experiments explored the role of processing level and strategic factors in cross-form (word–picture and picture–word) and within-form (picture–picture and word–word) semantic facilitation. Previous studies have produced mixed results. The findings presented in this article indicate that semantic facilitation depends on the task and on the subjects' strategies. When the task required semantic processing of both picture and word targets (e.g., category verification), equivalent facilitation was obtained across all modality combinations. When the task required name processing (e.g., name verification, naming), facilitation was obtained for the picture targets. In contrast, with word targets, facilitation was obtained only when the situation emphasized semantic processing. The results are consistent with models that propose a common semantic representation for both picture and words but that also include assumptions regarding differential order of access to semantic and phonemic features for these stimulus modalities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's inferences with print and pictures.

The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether there is a difference in children's ability to answer inferential questions from pictures, print, and print with pictures. A secondary purpose was to determine whether there is a difference between more skilled and less skilled reader's ability to answer inferential questions in the different modes. The participants in the study were 116 fifth- and sixth-grade students. The materials consisted of 15 photographs and 15 passages of 150 to 200 words. Each student participated in each condition by answering 25 inferential questions. The results indicated that the students performed significantly better in the picture-only and the print-with-picture conditions than in the print-only condition. Although the more skilled readers scored significantly better than the less skilled readers in the print-only condition, there were no differences between the two ability groups in the two picture conditions. Qualitative analyses were also conducted on the students' responses for determining possible sources of errors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Infant social perception: Responses to pictures of parents and strangers.

Presented pictures of parents and strangers to 70 9–24 mo old infants. Results indicate that (a) Ss smiled more often and looked longer at pictures of parents than at those of strangers; (b) the smiling effect was related to age, with older Ss being more likely to smile at familiar than at unfamiliar faces; (c) younger Ss were more likely to smile at the strange woman than at the strange man; and (d) Ss did not differentially respond to pictures of their mother and father. (11 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Remembering pictures: Pleasure and arousal in memory.

Assessed incidental memory performance for pictures that varied along the affective dimensions of pleasantness and arousal. For both an immediate and delayed (1 yr later) free-recall task, only the arousal dimension had a stable effect on memory performance: Pictures rated as highly arousing were remembered better than low-arousal stimuli. This effect was corroborated in a speeded recognition test, in which high-arousal materials encoded earlier in the experiment produced faster reaction times (RTs) than their low-arousal counterparts. Pleasantness affected RT decisions only for pictures not encoded earlier. These results suggest that whereas both the dimensions of pleasantness and arousal are processed at initial encoding, long-term memory performance is mainly affected by arousal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neurometabolic and behavioural effects of haloperidol in relation to drug levels in serum and brain

A method has been developed for the quantitative determination of haloperidol in brain and other tissues. Such determinations have been made after acute and chronic administration of haloperidol to Sprague-Dawley rats. Different regions of the brain including the striatum, the limbic forebrain and the cerebellum have been analyzed separately. The haloperidol effects on Dopa formation have been studied in the same tissue samples. The stimulation of prolactin secretion via blockade of hypothalamic dopaminergic mechanisms and behavioural effects of the drug have been evaluated in parallel experiments. The elimination of haloperidol from brain tissue is a multiphasic process. The fourth phase of elimination is the slowest with a half life of 4 days. No strict correlation was found between serum and brain concentrations of haloperidol. Both after acute and chronic administration there exists apparently a saturating dose above which the brain concentration of the drug increases very little. The dose seems to coincide with that beyond which little increase in Dopa formation is observed. A pharmacokinetic analysis suggests an element of saturable binding or transfer of haloperidol to brain tissue. This mechanism is not preferentially localized to areas of brain rich in dopaminergic synapses. A good correlation was found between the haloperidol concentration in the brain on the one hand and its effects on behaviour, on serum prolactin values and on Dopa formation on the other.     

Repression and guilt in relation to aggression.

College men and women who were opposed to electric shock in research were instructed to deliver intense shock to others (victims). Before administering shock ? the Ss read a positive communication (shock is beneficial) and the other ?, a negative communication (shock is harmful). There was significantly less recall of the negative communication. For the same-sex pairs (male S-male victim and female S-female victim) the positive communication elicited significantly more guilt and opposition to shock than did the negative communication; for opposite-sex pairs the results were reversed. These findings could be explained by cognitive dissonance theory or by an identification hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Carboxyhemoglobin levels in relation with home heating

To study carboxyhemoglobin levels (HbCO) associated with use of different types of home heating and to evaluate the usefulness of measuring hemoglobin oxygen saturation. Nonsmoking patients with chronic respiratory insufficiency who were initially prescribed home oxygen therapy were enrolled in the study. One hundred four patients were studied in winter and summer (when heating was not used). The control group consisted of 92 hospitalized patients not exposed to carbon monoxide. Of the 104 patients 74.1% were men. Mean age was 72.33 (range 17 to 97 years) and 57.9% lived in rural areas. Mean HbCO in the control group was 1.53 +/- 0.96% (p = 0.01). Among the 39% who burned slack coal for heat, the mean HbCO was 4.63 +/- 2.87%. The 23.7% with central heating had HbCO levels of 2.15 +/- 0.87% (p < 0.0001). Pulse oximetry (SpO2) estimated higher hemoglobin oxygen than direct measurement (SaO2): 87.12 +/- 6% and 83.3 +/- 8%, respectively (p < 0.001). High HbCO concentrations are related to chronic exposure to slack coal fumes. Pulse oximetry, as opposed to SaO2, overestimates hemoglobin oxygen saturation in such cases.     

Contamination of facial memory through exposure to misleading composite pictures.

In Exp I, 46 male and 51 female undergraduates witnessed a filmed incident and later described the target. Results show that Ss who observed a composite containing misleading information (either incorrect hair or an added moustache) were significantly more likely to misreport hairstyle and the presence of a moustache than those who did not. In Exp II, 210 17–65 yr old Ss observed a filmed incident and were tested for their recall and recognition of the target either immediately or after delays of 2 or 7 days. Significant bias, consistent with the content of the misleading composite, was present for both cued recall and choice of mug shot in a photo spread. The effect did not increase over delay but was greater when the composite was seen just prior to recall than immediately after the incident. Implications concerning interference with the memory of the witness who produced the composite and for other witnesses exposed to the misleading composite are discussed. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Directed forgetting: Comparing pictures and words.

The authors investigated directed forgetting as a function of the stimulus type (picture, word) presented at study and test. In an item-method directed forgetting task, study items were presented 1 at a time, each followed with equal probability by an instruction to remember or forget. Participants exhibited greater yes–no recognition of remember than forget items for each of the 4 study–test conditions (picture–picture, picture–word, word–word, word–picture). However, this difference was significantly smaller when pictures were studied than when words were studied. This finding demonstrates that the magnitude of the directed forgetting effect can be reduced by high item memorability, such as when the picture superiority effect is operating. This suggests caution in using pictures at study when the goal of an experiment is to examine potential group differences in the magnitude of the directed forgetting effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual processes in matching and recognition of complex pictures.

The role of perceptual feature sampling in speeded matching and recognition was explored in 4 experiments. Experiments 1-3 involved a perceptual matching task with pictures of various objects and scenes. In Experiments 2 and 3, same-different judgments were given under time pressure. The main objective of the matching task was to obtain measures of the perceptual processing rates of different object features. Experiment 4 was an old-new recognition experiment, in which the same stimuli as those in the matching task were used. Response signals were used to limit processing time in the recognition task. The results demonstrated that it is possible to predict speeded recognition performance from performance in perceptual matching. A simple stochastic feature-sampling model provides a unified account of the data from the 4 experiments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)