Search

Four sets of cognitive psychology experiments are aimed to identify and empirically support principles of training intended to increase training effectiveness. Each set supports a different training principle: strategic use of knowledge (learning and memory are facilitated whenever preexisting knowledge can be used as a mediator in the process of acquisition), training difficulty (conditions that cause desirable difficulties during learning might facilitate later retention and transfer), mental practice (mental practice can retard forgetting and promote transfer of training, sometimes to a larger extent than can physical practice), and cognitive antidote (adverse effects of prolonged work on routine tasks can be mitigated by adding cognitive complications). The first 2 principles are focused on knowledge acquisition and the last 2 on skill acquisition. Nevertheless, the principles converge on similar prescriptions: Contrary to intuition and common practice, the trainer is recommended to increase the complexity of the training situation rather than use the simplest methods available.

In a continuous memory-updating paradigm, subjects studied name-color associations and were tested later for the color associate given the name. The default color response was made in one location, but on predesignated trials the response was required to be made in a special location. Memory for the color associated with a given name was assessed after short and long retention intervals when both default and special responses were required. Separate measures were examined of memory for the intention to respond in a particular way (default or special) and of memory for the color associations paired with the names. Memory for color associates was better overall with short than with long retention intervals and was better when special (rather than default) responses were required, especially at the long retention interval. These results imply that the requirement to respond in a special way protects associations from loss due to forgetting.

Two experiments examined participants' responses to simulated news reports of terrorist attacks. Participants were told that a nondemocratic nation had sponsored strikes on military and cultural or educational sites in the United States. Participants in both experiments reacted more conflictually to terrorist attacks on military sites than to those on cultural or educational sites. Their conflictual responses on a thermometer scale escalated after repeated attacks. When tested in 2002 and 2004, 1 and 3 years after the real World Trade Center attacks, participants' reactions were more conflictual than those of participants examined before September 11, 2001. Furthermore, current participants' fear and anger increased, and forgiveness decreased, over repeated simulated attacks. Participants lower in masculinity showed more fear and less anger than did those higher in masculinity. This study shows that terrorist attacks produce more than simple terror.

Retrospective verbal protocols collected throughout participants' performance of a multiplication verification task (e.g., "7 x 3 = 28, true or false?") documented a number of different strategies and changes in strategy use across different problem categories used for this common experimental task. Correct answer retrieval and comparison to the candidate answer was the modal but not the only strategy reported. Experiment 1 results supported the use of a calculation algorithm on some trials and the use of the difference between the candidate and correct answers (i.e., split) on others. Experiment 2 clearly demonstrated that participants sometimes bypassed retrieval by relying on the split information. Implications for mental arithmetic theories and the general efficacy of retrospective protocols are discussed.

We conducted two experiments to study the training of speeded responses to stimuli in a clock face array. Participants were trained on one clock face and later tested on either the same or a different clock face. The clock faces varied along 3 dimensions of change (left-right flip, up-down flip, and 180 degrees rotation). Skill acquisition was reflected in decreases in overall, initiation, and movement response times in the training and test phases except that movement time reached an asymptote during training and did not decrease further during test. Test performance was best when training and test used the same clock face and worst when the training to test change involved an up-down flip. The transition to different clock faces was consistent with an interpretation based on the violation of expectations about target positions acquired during training. Consistent trial-by-trial feedback led to better initiation time but not movement time during training than periodic feedback, but this effect did not persist into the test phase.

It is well known that the Stroop effect is subject to influence by same-modality primes, but the possibility of cross-modal priming effects is unclear. Smell is a fundamental sensory system that is assumed to have potent cross-modality priming effects. We might expect the presence of a specific odor to interfere with performance on Stroop cards containing odor-congruent words. Forty participants, half of whom were primed with an unpleasant odor and half with a pleasant odor, were examined with modified Stroop cards containing pleasant and unpleasant descriptive words. A significant Stroop card by odor group interaction was found, indicating that the presence of an odor interferes with the performance on an odor-congruent Stroop card. These findings demonstrate cross-modality priming between olfaction and vision.

The size of the perceptual unit used in reading was addressed using the predesignated target paradigm. Sixteen subjects viewed the following stimuli in random order: the words tee, the, tie, and toe; the nonwords eet, eht, eit, and eot; and the letters e, h, i, and o. Subjects fixated on the location of the center letter and identified the letter as e, h, i, or o, alternatives which were known to them at the onset. A word superiority effect was obtained for the common word the but not for the less common words tee, tie, and toe. The word superiority effect was attributable to bias rather than discriminability: Subjects exhibited a bias to perceive the words in this experiment as the (i.e., there was a bias to perceive h in the t e stimulus presentations). These results suggest that the common word the is processed in reading units that are larger than the letter, and that the system is biased to perceive common rather than uncommon words in data-limited conditions.

The importance of allocating conscious attention to encoding and retrieval from long-term memory was investigated. Encoding, retrieval, and reactivation hypotheses were tested. College students were shown schematic faces in a secondary task and numerical problems as a primary task. The primary task was imposed both when the faces were encoded on study trials and when they were retrieved on recognition test trials. Difficulty of the primary task (easy vs. hard) was varied on both study and test trials. The easy problems permitted conscious attention to be given to the secondary faces whereas the hard problems prevented such allocation. Instructions about encoding the faces (incidental vs. intentional) were given to different groups. The degree of conscious attention that was allocated to the faces on study trials was assessed by means of interference, intention, and retrospection criteria of attended processing. Recognition of the faces was better when subjects allocated conscious attention to encoding than when they did not, in consistent support of the encoding hypothesis. The data ruled out a reactivation explanation. Finally, at times, paying special attention at retrieval improved recognition performance, providing weak support for the retrieval hypothesis.

The difficulty of learning a conceptual rule has been shown to depend upon the stimulus attributes which that rule conjoins. For what appear to be separable attributes, the disjunctive rule is easier than the conjunctive. In contrast, for what appear to be integrable attributes, the conjunctive rule is easier. This paper reports six experiments designed to determine whether the integrality of stimulus attributes affects the speed of verification of the stimulus, as positive or negative, with respect to a given conjunctive or disjunctive concept. The pattern of reaction times is not consistent with the result of rule-learning experiments and does not support an integrality hypothesis. Verification times seem to be more a function of the perceptual salience of the relevant attributes of the concept. Thus, a perceptual-integrality hypothesis is an unlikely explanation of rule learning results.