Knowledge that Transforms

adults were divided into three groups:young.old and aged.They were tested and trained through associative learning, figural free recall and additional association learning tests The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of age, degrees of task difficulty and training on memory. The results indicated that: 1)the performances of the yeung group were significantly better than that of the two seniorgroups.There is no difference between the two senior groups. 2) The age difference of unrelated association is greater than that of related assecia tion.It is proportional to the degreesof task dif ficulty. 3) After training, the memory performa nces were improved in each age group. The age differences and the differences in degrees of task difficulty were increased by training. It showed that memory was affected by the interaction among age, degrees of task difficulty and train ing. The plasticity of cognitive function in the aged was also demonstrated.

Rosenthal (1994) has expressed the view that university institutional review boards (IRBs) should reject proposed studies of low quality and employ a cost/utility ratio when making such judgments Similarly, many IRBs in applied settings, particularly those agencies accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations, follow a protocol for review in which IRB members are asked to determine if “the research will likely result in an increase in generalizable knowledge which is of vital importance for the understanding of the subject's disorder, condition, or state of health” (Prentice & Antonson, 1987, p 11) Unlike the university IRB, however, the IRB in an applied setting reviews a small number of proposals with an extremely narrow range of research and has a membership of individuals with experience in the field being researched Moreover, the importance of the research for the clients of the agency is more easily judged

McCloskey and a team of authors (1995) documented a fascinating deficit involving the localization of objects When subject A H reaches for objects placed in different positions, she is often wrong about direction but not amount An object located 30° to her left, say, might cause her to reach 30° to the right The authors demonstrated that her motor abilities are flawless and that the errors are genuinely in vision But precisely where in the visual localization process does the deficit occur?

Recently, Psychological Science published a series of articles on the interplay of ethics and scientific quality in psychological research (Parkinson, 1994, Pomerantz, 1994, Rosenthal, 1994, Sears, 1994) In the first of these, Rosenthal (1994) argued that the ethical and scientific quality of such research are in fact inextricably linked His case was logically tethered to a cost/utility ratio analysis of research Because all research carries with it some expenditure of resources (“cost”), the conduct of research possessing little scientific merit (and thus, presumably, little “utility”) cannot be justified

The Commentaries by Colombo and Mordock are thoughtful and thought-provoking contributions to the literature of ethical issues in psychological science In this brief continuation of the discussion, I try to sharpen some of the issues to highlight some areas of agreement and of disagreement

Does group discussion and deliberation on one issue or task influence the members' decisions or opinions on other issues? In contrast to past research looking solely at changes in responses to the same item discussed by the group, this study examined whether group interaction results in members changing the way they make judgments on related items in the future The results show that group discussion and consensus on one set of judgments led to a significant convergence of judgmental strategies that extended to a related (but different) set of judgments the members made later as individuals

Hemispheric differences in the recognition and manipulation of meaning may be based on distinctions in size, composition, or organization of the right and left semantic networks The present study describes these features of pictorially based semantic networks in 3 subjects with complete forebrain commissurotomy Stimuli were presented for prolonged viewing to the left and right visual hemifields For each trial, the subjects chose from a 20-choice array all pictures that were associated with a target, then indicated the member of each pair of chosen associates that was more closely related to the target The hemispheres' networks were found to be of similar size and composition, but were organized differently The right hemisphere more often produced linear rankings of semantic associates to a target than did the left, and rankings by the two hemispheres were not strongly correlated Hemispheric differences in semantic organization mirror differences in perceptual organization, with the right hemisphere specialized for conventional meaning and the left hemisphere specialized for detecting and processing deviations from standard meaning