Subjects were 510 college students who first took Part 1 of the difficult Terman Concept Mastery Test as individuals and then retook the same test in cooperative high-ability or low-ability groups of sizes two through five or as control individuals. Nine a priori social decision scheme models were tested as theories of the underlying group process. An a posteriori social decision scheme was also induced from a comparable previous study with 240 four-person groups and then tested against the current groups. The best-fitting a priori social decision scheme suggested an underlying "truth-supported wins" process, a finding which was more pronounced with increasing group size and for highability groups. However, the a posteriori principle, representing a combination of a truth-supported wins process, strong conformity pressures against a single correct member, and an increment from grouping when no member was correct, fit the current data better than any of the a priori social decision schemes.A recent theoretical approach to small group performance is to organize the social interaction as a social decision scheme (e.g.,
This study provides a numerical representation of contextual effects on the meanings of words, constructed from the order judgments of 19 subjects concerning the word "red" in 19 sentences. Subjects judged whether or not the red object mentioned in a sentence was redder than, less red than, or could be equally as red as the red object mentioned in each of the other sentences. These judgments were well described as an interval order. This means that the red ascribed in a sentence can be represented by a real interval with judgments of equally red corresponding to overlapping intervals. Semiorder axioms were not met, indicating that the width of the interval varied from sentence to sentence. Possible ways of incorporating the result into theories of semantic memory were discussed, as well as ways of accounting for the pronounced individual differences which were observed. The research described herein was supported by the National Institute of Education under Contract HEW NIE-G-74-0007.
The present study investigated why it is that the more concrete the subject noun phrase of a sentence, the more likely the predicate is to be recalled when the subject noun phrase is the cue. The findings were that concreteness dramatically influences both the probability of recognition of the subject noun phrase and the probability of recall of the predicate, given recognition. These results were taken to mean that a concrete phrase makes a good conceptual peg because it is likely to be given a specific, stable encoding and because it tends to redintegrate the whole sentence. Regression analysis showed that the concreteness effect could not be attributed to an influence on comprehensibility. A model of sentence memory is offered which can account for the results.
The massive scale and diversity of training needs in the military render it an enterprise that offers extensive opportunity for the application of cognitive science. Training in maintenance, in tactics, and in piloting or control of aircraft present several issues of interest to cognitive scientists. Halff and his colleagues use four recently developed military training systems to illustrate the potential for cognitive science to improve military training. These systems include a family of memorization games based on semantic networks; a simulator for steam propulsion plants with a graphic, schematic student interface; a system for training in problems of relative motion that provides explicit representations of spatial concepts and problem-solving procedures; and a method for building a new cognitive skill for air-intercept control based on principles for the development of automaticity. These systems illustrate the importance of making relevant knowledge concrete and explicit, of using problem-solving contexts for instruction in basic principles, and of careful management of information processing during learning.—The Editors
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