This report describes the experimental studies conducted to examine the role of mental structures in four different areas of research. The first area involves the structural analysis of isolable subsystems involved in visual and auditory pattern recognition. The second area involves the study of the encoding and retrieval of emotional or…

Authors believes that three phenomena are all instances of "learned helplessness," instances in which an organism has learned that outcomes are uncontrollable by his responses and is seriously debilitated by this knowledge. This article explores the evidence for the phenomena of learned helplessness, and discussed a variety of theoretical…

A factor analysis was used to study the relationships among response time and accuracy scores for a verbal analogies test, as well as a number of experimental variables designed to measure a series of information processing stages of the analogies task. (CTM)

Experiments to probe the nature of one mode of thinking, imagined spatial operations, have been devised. Results confirm that the mind can model physical processes, subjecting them to the geometric constraints that hold in the external world. The experimental work and implications are discussed in detail. (MNS)

Reports on experiments designed to explore the way the processing unit depends on the information in the component letters and the information contained in their arrangements in a familiar letter string. Hypotheses were tested by degrading the quality of individual letters and by spacing the letters irregularly. (CLK)

A study used two-dimensional recall to identify the units of recall in the process of remembering, in order to investigate the correspondence of experimentally identified memory units to theoretically defined propositional units, and the correspondence of recall organization to story schema. (Author/AM)

Reports on experiments examining the semantic organization of concrete nouns and verbs and its development in childhood. Differences in semantic organization are said to be a clue to age-related changes in performance with verbs. (AM)

Three studies investigated the role of surface attributes in infants' identification of agents, using a habituation paradigm designed to tap infants' interpretation of grasping as goal directed (Woodward, 1998). When they viewed a bare human hand grasping objects, 7- and 12-month-old infants focused on the relation between the hand and its goal.…

Previous research by Lidster and Bremner (1999) on young children's ability to coordinate two dimensions has shown that performance on construction tasks (in which children have to give the correct coordinates for a point in space that is already known) is superior to performance on interpretation tasks (in which children are given a pair of…

Developments that laid the groundwork for the modern psychology of attitude began with early Greek philosophy. Conceptions of the cosmologists during the Golden Age of Greek Civilization and the Sophist movement served as a link between mythology and science. Contributions of British Empiricism and German Experimentalism were instrumental to the…

This study investigates cognitive dissonance and self-perception theories, utilizing the bogus pipeline to measure attitude change. Subjects were 48 college students. They were assigned randomly to one of four experimental groups, on the basis of extreme "pro" scores on an issue dealing with student participantion in university course…

Individual differences in the ordered recall of list of digits are examined experimentally. The resulting evidence argues that neither differences in rehearsal strategies nor differences in the tendency to group and chunk the digits are major determinants of differences in digit span size. Further experiments attempt to pinpoint the source of…

Author attempts to provide a careful analysis of Maier and Seligman's manuscript (AA 522 796) on learned helplessness with the hope that such a critique will produce a positive effect by clarifying issues of contention and pinpointing weaknesses in need of correction. (Author/RK)

Reports on three experiments that: (1) extend the findings of Scarborough et al. (1977) that exposure to single words facilitates lexical judgments of single words, and (2) suggest that recency of exposure may contribute to word "frequency" effects in reading and in learning from written material. (Author/AM)

After summarizing the findings of laboratory experimental geropsychological research pertinent to the instruction of older adults, this review focused on delineating the explicit implications of the research for adult education. Thirty-six implications were culled from the literature and categorized under 10 instructional variables. (Author/LAS)