Psychology Commons^™

Cerebral Hemispheric Mechanisms In The Retrieval Of Ambiguous Word Meanings, Roland Curt Burgess

Student Work

Targets related to ambiguous primes were projected to the left and right visual fields in a lexical priming experiment with stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) of 35ms and 750ms. Left hemisphere results were similar to earlier results with central projection (Simpson & Burgess, JEP:HPP, 1985). Facilitation across both SOAs for the more frequent meaning and a decrease in facilitation for the less frequent meaning at the longer SOA. In contrast, right hemisphere results indicated a decay of facilitation for the more frequent meaning at the longer SOA, while activation for the subordinate meaning increased. Results suggest that while automatic processing occurs …

Getting Ready To Learn: The Correspondence Between Contingency Awareness And Level Of Piagetian Sensorimotor Development, Patricia Beilby-Smith

Student Work

My purpose in this descriptive study was to view infants' readiness to learn and their performance on a simple discrete task from the perspective of Piaget's theory of infant intelligence. Such a readiness to learn has been described by Watson (1966, 1971, 1972) as contingency awareness. This study attempted to investigate the relationship between assessed Piagetian sensorimotor level and performance on a contingency awareness task. Performance measures included efficiency rate and latency to first hit on a second test session. Infant performance was viewed within the framework of sensorimotor development. From the literature there is evidence of a relationship between …

Correlates Of Life Satisfaction In An Aged Population, Janice Sue Sitzman

Student Work

This study investigated life satisfaction correlates of elderly persons living in two residential centers. Based on the theoretical and empirical literature, it was hypothesized that all elderly subjects tested would report high levels of life satisfaction. In addition, it was hypothesized that factors such as health perception, developmental task resolution, locus of control, and satisfaction with one's social network would be related to life satisfaction.

Subjects were recruited from two residential centers for the elderly. The measures were administered to 42 subjects. There were 34 female subjects and 8 male subjects. The elderly subjects were interviewed individually at their place …

Inferences At Encoding Vs. Retrieval: Clarifying The Issues Based On A Developmental Perspective, Mark A. Casteel

Student Work

This study addressed the controversy surrounding the locus of the inferential process (encoding vs. retrieval) in story comprehension by adopting a developmental perspective. Second, fifth, and eighth grade children, and college undergraduates, read eight stories from which two types of inferences could be drawn. Bridging inferences are inferences critical to the comprehension of a story while forward inferences are not. Eight questions (four inference and four filler) were answered to each story, and the dependent variables of reaction time and error rate were measured. The hypothesis that bridging inferences would be drawn at encoding was clearly supported as was the …

Levels And Conditions Of Goal Acceptance, Kim James Kohlhepp

Student Work

The role of goal acceptance in goal setting theory was investigated through the application of Reiman's theory of social influence and multilevel models of goal acceptance. Subjects were 144 undergraduate students. A 2X2X2 factorial design was employed. The three factors were: (a) antecedents of compliance (reward versus no reward), (b) antecedents of internalization (high value relevance versus low value relevance), and (c) goal specificity (specified goals versus non-specified goals). Three measures of goal acceptance were differentially affected by the manipulations: (a) A measure of intention to complete was uniformly high and not affected by the manipulations. (b) Perceived effort toward …