Prospective memory and self-reports of memory abilities in older adults.

Investigated age differences in prospective memory, and the relations among metamemory, reported use of memory aids, and actual performance on prospective memory tasks. Ss were 83 males and 145 females, aged 30–99 yrs, (with approximately equal numbers in each of the age ranges of 30–39, 40–49, 50–59, 60–69 and 70+ yrs) who completed a metamemory questionnaire and 2 prospective memory tests. Findings of the metamemory task show an age-related increase in reported memory problems. The pattern of correlations revealed that metamemory scores and prospective remembering performance were often negatively correlated (especially for the 30-yr-old people). The correlations indicated either that people have poor knowledge about their own memory abilities or that their concept of memory is different from that of the psychologist. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychology's two cultures.

100 undergraduates without previous psychology training, 81 officers of divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA), and 164 APA members who belonged to only 1 division were administered an epistemic differential scale. Results demonstrate the existence of scientific and humanistic cultures within psychology and identify 6 dimensions that define the conflicting values of these cultures. The value dimensions are (a) most important scholarly values (scientific vs humanistic), (b) lawfulness of behavior (determinism vs indeterminism), (c) basic source of knowledge (observation vs intuition), (d) appropriate setting for discovery (laboratory vs field study/case history), (e) generality of laws (nomothetic vs idiographic), and (f) appropriate level of analysis (elementism vs holism). Psychologists associated with institutions and programs devoted to the natural science aspects of the field occupied the positions identified by the first-mentioned terms in the 6 polarities. With 1 exception (determinism), other psychologists clustered toward the position identified by the 2nd terms. (13 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Patterns of memory loss in three elderly samples.

Three groups of people ranging in age from 64 to 88 years performed tasks of word generation, paired-associate recall, also free and cued recall. The groups differed in socioeconomic status, verbal intelligence, and apparent levels of daily activity. A fourth group, consisting of young undergraduates, was also tested. Results showed that whereas there were age-related differences in some tests, these age differences were strongly modulated by characteristics of the participants and characteristics of the tasks. The findings are discussed in a contextualist framework. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Patterns of growth in verbal abilities among children with autism spectrum disorder.

Verbal skills were assessed at approximately ages 2, 3, 5, and 9 years for 206 children with a clinical diagnosis of autism (n = 98), pervasive developmental disorders-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS; n = 58), or nonspectrum developmental disabilities (n = 50). Growth curve analyses were used to analyze verbal skills trajectories over time. Nonverbal IQ and joint attention emerged as strong positive predictors of verbal outcome. The gap between the autism and other 2 groups widened with time as the latter improved at a higher rate. However, there was considerable variability within diagnostic groups. Children with autism most at risk for more serious language impairments later in life can be identified with considerable accuracy at a very young age, while improvement can range from minimal to dramatic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociation of musical tonality and pitch memory from nonmusical cognitive abilities.

Replicated, validated, and extended measures of sensitivity to musical pitch and examined whether performance on tests of tonal structure and pitch memory was related to, or dissociated from, performance on tests of nonmusical cognitive skills (standardized tests of cognitive abstraction, vocabulary, and memory for digits and nonrepresentational figures). Factor analyses of data from 100 neurologically intact Ss (aged 18–40 yrs) revealed a dissociation between music and nonmusic variables, both for the full data set and a set for which the possible contribution of levels of music training was statistically removed. A 40-yr-old female with neurological impairment scored within the range of matched controls on nonmusic tests but much lower than controls on music tests. It is concluded that this study provides further evidence of a functional specificity for musical pitch abilities. Examples of melodies and chord progressions are appended. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The structure of working memory abilities across the adult life span.

The present study addresses three questions regarding age differences in working memory: (1) whether performance on complex span tasks decreases as a function of age at a faster rate than performance on simple span tasks; (2) whether spatial working memory decreases at a faster rate than verbal working memory; and (3) whether the structure of working memory abilities is different for different age groups. Adults, ages 20–89 (n = 388), performed three simple and three complex verbal span tasks and three simple and three complex spatial memory tasks. Performance on the spatial tasks decreased at faster rates as a function of age than performance on the verbal tasks, but within each domain, performance on complex and simple span tasks decreased at the same rates. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that domain-differentiated models yielded better fits than models involving domain-general constructs, providing further evidence of the need to distinguish verbal and spatial working memory abilities. Regardless of which domain-differentiated model was examined, and despite the faster rates of decrease in the spatial domain, age group comparisons revealed that the factor structure of working memory abilities was highly similar in younger and older adults and showed no evidence of age-related dedifferentiation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Factors affecting employee selection in two cultures.

4 samples—100 Illinois and 100 Greek students, 32 Illinois and 20 Greek personnel directors (PDs)—were asked to respond to a structured questionnaire which permitted the computation of the relative weights that would be given to various characteristics (competence, age, sex, race, religion, sociability, and wealth) by these people, if they were hiring employees for various levels of jobs in the accounting and finance department of a company. The responses of the 4 samples were similar. However, the American PDs gave more weight to race and the Greek PDs more weight to age than did the other samples. The students differed significantly from the PDs; in both cultures, the students gave larger weights to competence than did the personnel directors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contributions of frontal system dysfunction to memory and perceptual abilities in Parkinson's disease.

Tested (1) the hypothesis that Parkinson's disease (PD), thought to result in disturbed neuronal outflow from the striatum, leads to circumscribed deficits in cognitive functions presumed to be dependent on the functional integrity of the frontal lobes and (2) whether such deficits could account for previously reported memory and visuoperceptual difficulties in PD. 19 nondemented PD patients were demographically matched to 19 normal elderly control Ss. Three categories of tests were given: (1) tests sensitive to frontal system dysfunction, (2) tests of learning and memory, and (3) tests of visuoperceptual and visuoconstructive skills. Nondemented PD patients demonstrated selective deficits on frontal system tasks; tests of learning and memory and of visuoperceptual and visuoconstructive skill were not significantly impaired once performance on the frontal related tasks was statistically covaried. Results are consistent with the striatofrontal outflow model of neuropsychological impairment in nondemented PD patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Genetic variance in processing speed drives variation in aging of spatial and memory abilities.

Previous analyses have identified a genetic contribution to the correlation between declines with age in processing speed and higher cognitive abilities. The goal of the current analysis was to apply the biometric dual change score model to consider the possibility of temporal dynamics underlying the genetic covariance between aging trajectories for processing speed and cognitive abilities. Longitudinal twin data from the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging, including up to 5 measurement occasions covering a 16-year period, were available from 806 participants ranging in age from 50 to 88 years at the 1st measurement wave. Factors were generated to tap 4 cognitive domains: verbal ability, spatial ability, memory, and processing speed. Model-fitting indicated that genetic variance for processing speed was a leading indicator of variation in age changes for spatial and memory ability, providing additional support for processing speed theories of cognitive aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Patterns of authority and affection in two generations.

Using data gleaned from a normative longitudinal study of more than 200 families by workers in the Institute of Child Welfare of the University of California at Berkeley, the research was devised to answer the question as to whether the perception of one's own parents influences parental attitudes towards one's own children. These relationships were studied through the media of 3 variables, viz., authority, affection, and involvement, and their intercorrelation. The "characteristic" or modal family pattern which emerges from the data is described and discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of adult age and working memory on reasoning and spatial abilities.

Three predictions were derived from the hypothesis that adult age differences in certain measures of cognitive functioning are attributable to age-related reductions in a processing resource such as working-memory capacity. Each prediction received at least some degree of empirical support in a study involving 120 males ranging between 20 and 79 years of age. First, older adults exhibited greater impairments of performance than did young adults when task complexity increased and more demands were placed on the limited processing resources: second, the magnitudes of these complexity effects were highly correlated across verbal (reasoning) and spatial (paper folding) tasks. Finally, statistical control of an index of a working-memory processing resource attenuated the effects of age on the measures of cognitive performance. It was concluded that further progress in understanding the mechanisms of the relation between age and cognitive functioning will require improved conceptualizations of the nature of working memory or other hypothesized mediating constructs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality and interpersonal predictors of loneliness in two cultures.

Administered measures of loneliness and relevant personality and interpersonal constructs to 259 mainland US and 332 Puerto Rican undergraduates to (a) assess cross-cultural variability in previously reported correlates of loneliness and (b) determine the relative contributions of such predictors to the experience of loneliness for each sample. Results show that the Puerto Rican sample reported greater loneliness, and most personality and interpersonal variables yielded differences between the groups. However, the correlates of loneliness appeared to be quite similar for both samples. Factor analyses of loneliness correlates yielded interpretable factors that preserved the ability of the original variables to predict loneliness. Data are consistent with the hypothesis that culture influences the specific values observed for personality and related measures, whereas the fundamental organization of personality remains stable across cultures. Cultural factors are discussed as possible explanations for the few group differences found with respect to predictors of loneliness. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Patterns of prospective and retrospective memory impairment in preclinical Alzheimer's disease.

Forty-six preclinical Alzheimer's disease (AD) participants and 188 nondemented control persons from the Kungsholmen Project (L. B?ckman et al., 2004) were compared on prospective memory (ProM) and retrospective memory (RetM) tasks 3 years before dementia diagnosis. The preclinical AD participants showed deficits in both ProM and RetM. Most interestingly, logistic regression analyses revealed that ProM made an independent contribution to the prediction of AD over and above that of RetM. This finding suggests that ProM and RetM tap partly different cognitive operations. Furthermore, within the ProM task, both the retrospective and prospective components were similarly impaired in preclinical AD. Within RetM, the preclinical AD participants were impaired on indices of encoding, storage (forgetting), and retrieval of information. Hence, the findings indicate a rather global episodic memory impairment in preclinical AD that cuts across type of memory assessed (ProM and RetM) as well as across different components of both the ProM and RetM tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in working memory within a nomological network of cognitive and perceptual speed abilities.

It has become fashionable to equate constructs of working memory (WM) and general intelligence (g). Few investigations have provided direct evidence that WM and g measures yield similar ordering of individuals. Correlational investigations have yielded mixed results. The authors assess the construct space for WM and g and demonstrate that WM shares substantial variance with perceptual speed (PS) constructs. Thirty-six ability tests representing verbal, numerical, spatial, and PS abilities; the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices; and 7 WM tests were administered to 135 adults. A nomological representation for WM is provided through a series of cognitive and PS ability models. Construct overlap between PS and WM is further investigated with attention to complexity, processing differences, and practice effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stochastic independence between two implicit memory tasks.

Two experiments tested the statistical relation between performances on two implicit, priming tests of memory: word-fragment completion and perceptual identification. If performance on implicit priming tests is mediated by a single memory system, then stochastic dependence between them should be found. Contrary to this prediction, stochastic independence was obtained between performances on the two tests in all but one condition. For that condition (Experiment 1) the results suggest that subjects may have knowingly used information derived from the first test to complete the second. When perceived similarity was eliminated by altering contextual cues (Experiment 2), stochastic independence was found in this condition as well. The results are not consistent with current multiple memory system interpretations that assign all implicit, priming tests to one system and explicit tests to another. An alternative interpretation is that the degree of dependence between performances on memory tests is determined by the similarity of the component processes that the tests engage and of the information they use. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual and structural solutions to resource dilemmas in two cultures.

Administered a resource management task to 86 US and 97 Dutch undergraduates. Ss were divided into groups of 6 and instructed to harvest points from a regenerating resource pool. Their objective was to maximize individual harvests while maintaining the resource pool. The factorial design crossed 3 levels of resource use (overuse, underuse, and optimal use) with 2 levels of variance of others' purported harvests (low and high). Both variables were manipulated through false feedback to Ss regarding the pool size and the other Ss' harvests. The primary dependent measures were Ss' individual harvests and whether Ss voted for or against elimination of free access to the resource in favor of electing a leader who would make harvest decisions for the group. Results indicate that harvest size increased over time only in the under- and optimal-use conditions. As predicted, overuse Ss voted to give up free access to the resource and to elect a leader more frequently than Ss in the other conditions. Differences between American and Dutch Ss were found only for the variance manipulation. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Thurstone's primary mental abilities and structure-of-intellect abilities.

Attempted to find in the factor-analytic investigations of L. L. Thurstone some information concerning factorial intellectual abilities that have unique places in the structure-of-intellect (SI) model, and to determine which SI abilities are represented in Thurstone's Primary Mental Abilities Test (PMA). Although a number of his factors can be cited as probable forecasts of SI abilities, in only 1 or 2 instances was a Thurstone factor clearly representative of a single SI ability, unconfounded with other abilities. This general outcome was largely due to the fact that his analyzed batteries involved too many different SI abilities for which the number and varieties of tests were not adequate. In successive analyses, some of his factors tended to converge in the direction of SI abilities, so that his PMA tests represent 1 SI ability each, with the exception of the Reasoning and Number tests. (28 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)