Other studies have found that it is easier to divide attention when messages can be discriminated on the basis of stimulus and response features. The present study extended these results and explored whether dual-task performance is a function of similarity of central processing and, more specifically, the semantic similarity of the competing messages. In a dichotic listening task, subjects detected targets in concurrent messages that either differed semantically and required different central processing (the mixed condition) or were semantically similar and required similar central processing (the same condition). Three criteria are developed to determine whether the tasks in the mixed condition call upon distinct resources. The results are discussed in terms of three metaphors for resources: fuel, structure, and skills.
There is a good deal of interest today in cultural psychology and its central forms of thought, which are interpretive or meaning making rather than computational or algorithmic. At the same time, there is a good deal of concern that such a focus is incompatible with the praxis of empirical or scientific psychology. The research described in this article is an attempt to exemplify one way that a scientific study of interpretive processes might proceed. Three age groups were read the same short story. Their responses to interpretive questions were taken as texts and analyzed for age-distinctive word usage. Characteristic forms of talk were found, and age-specific patterns of interpretive thinking were derived from them. In simple summary, when 10-year-olds saw a plot, adolescents saw a plight, and adults a dramatistic pattern.
In a previous article on "Unified Psychology," Sternberg and Grigorenko (in press) proposed a new way of thinking about and organizing the field of psychology-in terms of phenomena rather than in terms of subfields such as clinical psychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and so forth. But this article did not discuss the role of theory in unified psychology. The present article fills that gap. It discusses how theory knitting, as proposed by Kalmar and Sternberg (1988), can be used to provide a basis for the construction of theory in unified psychology.This article opens first with a brief description of the goals of unified psychology, which is the multiparadigmatic, multidisciplinary, and integrated study of psychological phenomena through converging operations. Second, it briefly provides background on some of the major attempts to unify psychology. Third, the article describes the precepts of unified psychology in more detail. Fourth and most importantly, the article discusses the role of theory knitting in unified psychology. Finally, This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
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