Comparison in performance on active and passive retention tests was made for mice that had received scopolamine prior to a single passive-avoidance training trial. Control animals performed well with either retention test procedure, while the scopolamine group performed well for the active test but poorly for the passive test.
Children at three age levels were tested on the Poggendorff illusion with a method of production. The illusion decreased with age; this supports previous investigations in which the method of adjustment was used. A sex difference of marginal significance was found, but the illusion did not change as a function of successive trials. It was concluded that the method of production...
A multiple-choice learning task was used in four combinations of long-short ITIs and large-small number of items. In each group, half of the Ss were told right or wrong after each choice and half were given no feedback. All four groups showed similar results: Choice without feedback was sufficient to produce an increase in repetition of choices. Repetition after both right and...
Three groups of Ss participated in a vicarious conditioning experiment. Ss heard the heart beats of a model who ostensibly was either being shocked following a tone or who was exercising. Among those hearing a model being shocked, half heard a change in heart rate after each shock; for the remaining half no change in heart rate occurred. Heart rate and GSR of the actual Ss were...
The galvanic skin response (GSR) component of the orienting reflex was recorded for four groups of 12 Ss each. They were given 10 habituation trials to black on white numeric stimuli presented in seriatum. On Trial 11 an out-of-sequence test stimulus (TS) was delivered and was followed by one additional in-sequence number. The TS was either ±1 or ±11 places out of sequence. It...
An experiment designed to measure the effect of anchoring upon the heat-pain threshold is reported. The anchor stimulus, which took the form of repeated application of a low-intensity stimulus prior to the assessment of pain threshold, was found to have a significant effect. The conclusion was drawn that the low threshold values found when a small stimulus interval is used in the...
Eighty 4-year-old Ss were given an acoustic vigilance task in which they were to signal the presence of pure tones which appeared irregularly, infrequently, and at faint suprathreshold levels. In several significant aspects these young Ss behaved similarly to adults. Acoustic vigilance testing is discussed as a potentially useful framework in which to assess and observe children...
A hypothesis was tested that increased “fate control” will lead to increased compliance. Fate control was manipulated by inducing S to tell a lie about information he had received and then make use of the information. Other Ss were induced to lie but could not make use of the information. Control Ss who told no lie were included in the design. Significant compliance was observed...
Ratings of “similarity-in-sound” for pairs of words sharing letters in various ordinal positions were obtained using a 7-category graphic scale on which degrees of similarity were specified by verbal labels. Judged acoustic (articulatory) similarity increased as number of shared letters increased from zero to one, two, and three letters. Pairs overlapping in first letters were...
Two experiments, with 64 university students, were conducted under the unmixed-list design with various repetitive reinforcement (R)-test (T)-blank (B) acquisition programming: Conditions RT, RTT, RTB, and RBT. The major empirical findings did not differ, generally, from those obtained under the mixed-list design, indicating that the main effects overcame procedural artifacts...
Fast presentation (about 1 word/sec) impairs subsequent recognition of both common and very rare words. This presentation rate, slow enough for accurate perception but probably too fast for much more elaborate information processing, also sharply reduces the variability of recognition memory scores.
Seventy-four freshmen were asked to judge the concept of social dominance (or social submissiveness) by ranking a set of seven portraits of social scientists and by giving a definition of the concept. Results indicated significantly greater agreement among Ss on ranking portraits under the dominance criterion; also, submissiveness was defined less accurately, suggesting that this...
One hundred and twenty student Ss were divided into 30 four-man groups. The independent variable was the number of persons reinforced for verbal output in a group problem-solving situation. In 10 groups, only one person was reinforced; in 10 others two persons were reinforced; and in another 10 groups, all four persons were rewarded for their verbal participation. The dependent...
The present study investigated the relationship between a temporal interval’s perceived length and the amount of stimulus and stimulus change within that interval. In three separate tests, completely filled intervals were found to be significantly overestimated by the Ss in comparison with empty intervals. In contrast to this, interrupted or divided intervals were underestimated.
Three groups of Ss, exposed to 1, 4, or 7 days of sensory deprivation (darkness and silence), all showed a significant post-isolation decrease in occipital alpha frequency. However, no indication of a progressive decrease in mean alpha frequency as a function of increasing duration of sensory deprivation was obtained, a finding contrary to that reported in several earlier studies...
Two experiments were conducted to determine if the effect of manipulating imagery instructions and peg list abstractness depends on whether a paired-associate or one-bun technique is used. It appears that the paired-associate and one-bun techniques yield comparable results regarding the effectiveness of imagery instructions and peg list abstractness.
Measures of bidirectional commonality and bidirectional ratio of commonality are presented to assess the extent of inter-S agreement of subjective organization in free recall. The results of an experiment employing the commonality measure indicate that commonality increases across trials and is positively correlated with the amount of recall. However, the amount of commonality is...
The ability to select the current oldest item in a homogeneous series of items was examined in 250-item sequences with an “age” range of 1–15 items. Approximately 50% of the responses were correct, and the probability of a correct response increased linearly with the age of the correct response. The memory requirements of the task were discussed and compared with other covert...
In two experiments, Ss guessed averages of serially presented numbers. Guesses were made only at the end of a stimulus sequence. The results of both experiments showed strong primacy effects in the guesses; earlier information in the stimulus sequence was weighted more heavily than later information. The results for number averaging were comparable to results obtained for...
Ss tend to perform poorly on schema learning tasks with patterns below 50% redundancy. The present experiment attempted to determine if this was due to either (1) inability to abstract the schema with low-redundancy patterns or (2) a limited usefulness of the schema as an aid in the efficient encoding of low-redundancy patterns. Ss who were pretrained on the schema prototype...
Three experiments were conducted to show that the physical features of star-shaped patterns were preferred and used consistently as a basis of judgment across all pairs of patterns and throughout various tasks. Superior prediction of responding was achieved when it was hypothesized that within any pattern pair, the feature having the relatively larger difference in level would be...
The effect of verbal and nonverbal redundancy on the retention of 30 4-year-old children was examined to determine if the type of redundancy, as opposed to redundancy perse, facilitated the retention of this age child. The results demonstrated that the representational abilities of the child determine what type of redundant information will aid retention.
Ss were allowed to control their own intertrial interval (ITI) in a two-response concept-learning task. The mean ITI was longer following errors than following correct responses and decreased over trials. The results are compatible with measures of response latency on trials following errors and correct responses, but appear to conflict with results obtained when the length of...
The relative effectiveness of positive and negative verbal feedback was investigated in an attempt to ascertain whether the differential effect was due to reinforcement value of the feedback or to some difference in information gained from the feedback. College Ss solved a concept attainment task under one of two conditions: (1) right-nothing (R-N), feedback for correct responses...