One Missing-Letter Effect: Two Methods of Assessment.

When participants search for a target letter while reading, they make more omissions if the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. This effect is usually observed with a paper and pencil procedure. It has been shown that a similar pattern is observed using a rapid serial visual presentation procedure in which words appear one at a time on a computer screen. It has been questioned, however, whether the two methods tap the same cognitive processes. Item-based correlations between the paper and pencil and the rapid serial visual presentation procedure were high and not significantly different from reliability estimates of either procedure. It is concluded that both procedures highlight the same cognitive processes that are responsible for the missing- letter effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Electrometallurgically treating metal, oxide, and al alloy spent nuclear fuel types

Electrorefining uranium in a molten salt bath is the key step in the electrometallurgical treatment of spent nuclear fuels. The versatility of the electrometallurgical treatment suggests its use for a variety of spent fuel types, as well as for nonnuclear metal-separation applications.     

Review of La psychologie de A à Z: 500 mots pour comprendre.

Reviews the book, La psychologie de A à Z: 500 mots pour comprendre by Camilo Charron, Nathalie Dumet, Nicolas Guéguen, Alain Lieury, and Stéphane Rusinek (2007). Summarizing a discipline as broad as psychology in 500 words, that is the challenge that the five authors of Psychology from A to Z took up. In itself, establishing a list of the 500 most important concepts or words in psychology is likely to give rise to vigorous debate. Moreover, there is also the constraint to describe each concept in a few lines only. To further increase the challenge, the book presents itself as a dictionary whose reading will not be linear: each definition must therefore be independent while avoiding the repetition from one entry to another. Read more about this book review in the full text pdf. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evidence of anticipatory eye movements in the spatial Hebb repetition effect: Insights for modeling sequence learning.

In the present study, the authors offer a window onto the mechanisms that drive the Hebb repetition effect through the analysis of eye movement and recall performance. In a spatial serial recall task in which sequences of dots are to be remembered in order, when one particular series is repeated every 4 trials, memory performance markedly improves over repetitions. This is known as the Hebb repetition effect. Eye movement recorded during the presentation of the to-be-remembered (TBR) information revealed that for the repeated sequence, participants fixated the location of the next TBR location before the actual presentation of the dot. The extent to which a TBR location was anticipated increased over repetition and occurred only for post-initial positions of the repeated sequence. Eye movement–based rehearsal activity was related to recall performance but not to sequence learning. The findings provide further evidence of anticipatory behavior in sequence learning and place key constraints on modeling the Hebb repetition effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word Frequency Effects in Immediate Serial Recall of Pure and Mixed Lists: Tests of the Associative Link Hypothesis.

In immediate serial recall, high-frequency words are better recalled than low-frequency words. Recently, it has been suggested that high-frequency words are better recalled because of their better long-term associative links, and not because of the intrinsic properties of their longterm representations. In the experiment reported here, recall performance was compared for pure lists of high- and low-frequency words, and for mixed lists composed of either one low- and five high-frequency words or the reverse. The usual advantage of high-frequency words was found with pure lists and this advantage was reduced, but still significant with mixed lists composed of five low-frequency words. However, the low-frequency word included in a high-frequency list was recalled just as well as high-frequency words. Results are challenging for the associative link hypothesis and are best interpreted within an item-based reconstruction hypothesis, along with a distinctiveness account. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)