How can a suspect's guilt or innocence be reliably tested? The validity of the polygraph, which measures changes in physiological arousal during a "guilty knowledge" test, is controversial (e.g., T. R. Bashore & P. E. Rapp, 1993; T. P. Cross & L. Saxe, 1992; D. T. Lykken, 1998; J. P. Rosenfeld, 1995; R. Steinbrook, 1992). One alternative to the polygraph examines event-related potentials recorded during a memory interference task (L. A. Farwell & E. Donchin, 1991). The present study extended this paradigm to determine whether response times (RTs) can accurately identify participants possessing specific guilty knowledge. Results from Experiment 1 showed that RT alone can reliably discriminate "guilty" from "innocent" participants. Experiments 2a and 2b indicated that an RT-based paradigm is more resistant to strategic manipulation than previously suggested (Farwell & Donchin, 1991). This RT-based paradigm may be a viable alternative to the polygraph for detecting guilty knowledge.

Hughes (1984) has reported that the magnitude of the cue-validity effect in luminance detection is unaffected by target luminance. In three experiments, we explored the possible basis of this counterintuitive finding. The experiments focused on the design of the Hughes study, in which target luminance was treated as a between-blocks variable. Our results reveal that when target luminance is varied randomly within trial blocks, the cue-validity effect grows with declining target luminance. The difference between our findings and those of Hughes is interpreted in terms of cue-utilization strategies, which may adapt to target luminance when luminance remains invariant within trial blocks. Several alternative conceptions of the nature and locus of the cuevalidity effect in luminance detection are considered in light of these results.Posner and his colleagues (e.g., Posner, Nissen, & Ogden, 1978) have devised a simple, yet highly sensitive, procedure for investigating the effects of directed attention in visual target detection. The procedure consists of presenting a cue indicating the likely location of a signal that is to be detected, and then presenting the signal either at the cued location or (occasionally) at an uncued location. Detection latency under these conditions is shorter when the cue is valid than when it is invalid as a predictor of target location.A complication of the basic procedure entails the addition of trials containing a noninformative (neutral) cue. Here, detection latency is often shorter in cued than in neutral trials, yielding what Posner terms an attentional benefit, and slower in uncued than in neutral trials, yielding an attentional cost. These effects hold even in the absence of eye movements (Posner, 1978). Posner has interpreted this pattern of results in terms of the assumptions that cuing directs the covert orientation of attention and that attention enhances the efficiency of sensory processes underlying detection.Recently, Hughes (1984) used the Posner procedure to inquire into the location within the visual system of the processes underlying the cue-validity effect. One of the variables he investigated was target luminance, and he found (1) that reductions in target luminance produce overall increases in target-detection latency, but (2) that the magnitude of the cue validity effect (reaction time, RT, on invalid cue trials minus RT on valid cue trials) Correspondence should be directed to H. L. Hawkins, Perceptual Sciences Program, Office of the Chief of Naval Research, Arlington, VA 22217-5000.does not increase with reductions in target luminance. In fact, the cuing effect was reliably smaller for the lowest target luminance studied than for all others. The latter result was dismissed as the likely result of ceiling effects. Drawing on the logic of additive factors (Sternberg, 1969), Hughes interpreted the observed additivity across all other luminance conditions as showing that signalluminance and directed visual attention operate at separate stages in the signal detection p...

The Defining Issues Test, developed by Rest, was given to 365 subjects in three age groups, junior high (n =60,meanage= 13.9 years); high school (n = 200, mean age = 17.3); and college (n = 105, mean age = 20.2). The main findings of Rest and his associates were replicated. Each scale score discriminated significantly among age groups (p < .01), as did the Principled Reasoning (P) score. The validity of the P-score with respect to age group was estimated to be .48, and its reliability was estimated to be .70. The design of the test was criticized on the grounds that some stages have many more items associated with them than do other stages (hence, scale scores are not comparable with one another), that different dilemmas have different numbers of items from a given stage, that there was a significant order artifact for Stage 3 and Stage 4 items, and that this order effect interacted with age group. Finally, there was evidence in three of six dilemmas that a subject's decision was correlated with his stage of reasoning. It was suggested that the relation of stage to age could be clarified if the design of the test were changed to eliminate the possible effects of decision.

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In two experiments, judges evaluated fictitious protocols that varied in the number and uniqueness of the answers. In Experiment 1, judges were instructed to use criteria for creativity; in Experiment 2, judgments were made according to creativity, intelligence, or gender. Productivity influenced the ratings under all three criteria with the largest effect being on intelligence, followed by creativity. Uniqueness had an independent influence on judgments of creativity, a borderline effect on intelligence, and no significant effect on gender. Protocols which had more answers were judged more "masculine."The results indicate that laymen share the same definition of creativity used by psychometricians, and that intelligence is semantically different from creativity. The method offers an unobtrusive but objective way of assessing factors that enter into conceptual judgments. Suppose you were shown a protocol of someone's solution to a problem such as the one displayed below? Newspaper to make things out of to keep pulp production in use to clean windows and wash with it to hide behind so nobody can sec you * handgrips for a bicycle Tire * rent, it * melt to tar and feather someone * for a big bird's nest * as a pacifier for a giant Shoe use the laces cocktails as a flower pot for Molotov

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