No abstract

Adults, ranging in age from 20 to 78 years, were required to give directions to a hypothetical stranger while looking at a map. The direction giving was scored according to the strategies employed by the direction giver (e.g., landmarks, relational turns, road names, and cardinality). The "map present" direction-giving paradigm was employed to reduce the influence of memory. The results suggest that the aging decline in spatial abilities does not influence direction-giving strategies when memory demands are minimal. Older adults are as proficient as young adults when employing direction-giving strategies. Middle-age females employed a significantly higher frequency of strategies relative to young males, young females, middle-age males, and older females. When accuracy was examined, gender-related differences favoring males were obtained for the relational strategy.

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Investigations of the short-term memory task performance of retarded individuals have indicated that these individuals demonstrate a deficit in the mechanisms necessary for the acquisition, storage and/or retrieval of information. The present study examined the tachistoscopic letter recognition task performance of retarded and non-retarded individuals under a partial report and a whole report procedure. The results revealed that the retarded subjects did significantly more poorly relative to the non-retarded subjects under both procedures. The data were interpreted as indicating that the retarded subjects were inefficient in their strategy to make the simultaneous input task manageable. Further, the data provided no support for the suggestion that a visual-to-auditory encoding process exists between iconic and short-term memory.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate hemispheric deficits in individuals with paranoid schizophrenia on four kinds of tasks: dichoptic viewing tasks involving verbal and nonverbal visual stimuli, and dichotic listening tasks involving verbal and nonverbal auditory stimuli. As dependent measures, both accuracy and speed of (correct) responding were measured. The sample recruited for this study consisted of 18 patients with paranoid schizophrenia, 15 outpatients with anxiety disorders, and 20 controls with no history of psychiatric disorders. Results indicated that, relative to the controls, the paranoid schizophrenic patients were less accurate and less efficient on auditory-verbal tasks requiring right hemisphere processing. Unlike the controls the paranoid schizophrenic patients manifested a lateralized left hemisphere advantage.