Knowledge that Transforms

James looked for general principles in terms of which reasoning could be understood, and, in doing so, he sought to understand what it was about human beings that made them human.

Unconventional techniques considered by the United States Army for enhancing human performance were reviewed during a two-year study by a committee of the National Research Council. Little or no scientific evidence was found to support the effectiveness of several, including neurolinguistic programming in interpersonal influence and such paranormal techniques as remote viewing and psychokinesis. Mixed results were seen to characterize other techniques, for example, group-cohesion procedures. Further study was suggested for a few, including mental practice of motor skills. Guidelines requested of the committee for future army evaluation of enhancement techniques stressed the need for, and the conduct of, both laboratory and field research. The committee recommended further consideration of mainstream research in the behavioral sciences as a basis for effective performance enhancements.

Research on juror comprehension is reviewed with special attention to recent studies comparing types of definitions of three levels of the standard of proof (preponderance of the evidence, clear and convincing evidence, and beyond a reasonable doubt). Quantified definitions, (in which the standard of proof was expressed in probability terms, and combined quantified and legal definitions had their intended effect; verdicts favoring the plaintiffs decreased in number as the standard of proof became stricter. Nonquantified definitions did not achieve their intended effect on verdicts. The greater effectiveness of quantified definitions in communicating certainty levels precisely and concisely is attributed to the implicit context provided by their positions on an interval scale with known endpoints (i.e., 0-100%).

Previous research on transfer in problem-solving has primarily been concerned with the transfer of a specific solution procedure from a source problem to an analogous target problem. This paper considers whether transfer may also occur at a more general level of description, namely that responsible for specifying a common representation (e.g., a matrix) for two problems. The results of an experiment showed convincingly that representational transfer can occur in the absence of a common solution procedure for the problems. This result opens up a new area of research on transfer in problem solving.

Although there has been a tremendous outpouring of research on the consequences of children's television viewing, little is known about the causes of individual differences in television viewing, which is one of the major activities of childhood. We present results from the first parent-offspring and sibling adoption analyses of individual differences in time spent watching television in early childhood, and we consider IQ and temperament as possible mechanisms of genetic influence. The sample consisted of over 220 adopted children studied at 3, 4, and 5 years of age, the complete sample of probands from the Colorado Adoption Project. Also assessed are the adoptees’ biological and adoptive parents, matched nonadoptive families, and younger adoptive and nonadoptive siblings. Both the parent-offspring and sibling adoption designs yielded evidence for significant genetic influence on individual differences in children's television viewing. Neither IQ nor temperament appear to be responsible for this genetic influence.

Cultural adjustment involves both acculturation and assimilation. In the present study cultural adjustment is conceptualized similarly to Mendoza and Martinez's Model of Acculturation (1981). It is suggested that cultural adjustment is a process of multiple interacting factors distinguished by different behavioral, cognitive, affective and demographic attributes and by different levels, varying from cultural assimilation to cultural transmutation. A total of 159 students, 92 international and 67 U.S. students, responded to mailed questionnaires. The main findings suggest that cultural adjustment is simultaneously affected by employment level, language spoken at home, having both American and native friends, internal decision making, and work value. The study supports a native-extinction, host-association model of cultural adjustment.

Previous theories of early vision have assumed that visual search is based on simple two-dimensional aspects of an image, such as the orientation of edges and lines. It is shown here that search can also be based on three-dimensional orientation of objects in the corresponding scene, provided that these objects are simple convex blocks. Direct comparison shows that image-based and scene-based orientation are similar in their ability to facilitate search. These findings support the hypothesis that scene-based properties are represented at preattentive levels in early vision.

Conventional wisdom and previous research suggest that similarity judgments and difference judgments are inverses of one another. An exception to this rule arises when both relational similarity and attributional similarity are considered. When presented with choices that are relationally or attributionally similar to a standard, human subjects tend to pick the relationally similar choice as more similar to the standard and as more different from the standard. These results not only reinforce the general distinction between attributes and relations but also show that attributes and relations are dynamically distinct in the processes that give rise to similarity and difference judgments.

Scientific publication is a continuum, from unrefereed preprints to refereed reprints, to revisions, commentaries, and replies. All this is optimally done electronically, as "Scholarly Skywriting."