Four experiments investigated activation of semantic information in action preparation. Participants either prepared to grasp and use an object (e.g., to drink from a cup) or to lift a finger in association with the object's position following a go/no-go lexical-decision task. Word stimuli were consistent to the action goals of the object use…

Background: In view of the shortage of students majoring in science, we examined the image of physics in terms of students' implicit, automatic associations with physics. Aims: To describe the specific image of physics that might alienate students ("difficulty," "masculinity," "heteronomy") and test an intervention…

In an experiment designed to explore the interaction of individual differences with question pacing in learning from written materials, 93 subjects were administered aptitude tests representing verbal comprehension and associative memory abilities. Posttest analysis of relevant and incidential retention showed that relevant retention increased…

Thirty-two educable mentally retarded (EMR) and 32 nonretarded adolescent Ss were administered an association task and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test to determine aspects of verbal deficit, often the basis for placement of EMR students in special classes. The association task required an S to give up to 25 associations for each of 10 verbal…

Study supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (RS)

The validity of a culture-specific modification/adaptation of the Remote Associates Test (RAT) made for Jamaica was examined with other measures of creativity in 11th grade students. Factor analysis showed the Jamaican RAT loading with the Circles Test on an apparent fluency factor of creativity. (Author/CM)

Demonstrated the emotion-specific priming effects of negatively valenced emotions (anger, sadness, and fear) in a divided attention task. Results indicated that a negative emotion displayed by a target that matched the emotion induced by a priming manipulation was significantly stronger than an incongruous priming manipulation and displayed…

Harvard psychologist Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji is helping explore the world of subconscious bias with the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Banaji teamed up with fellow psychology professors Dr. Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington and Dr. Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia to develop the IAT. The IAT was created as a tool to…

The Implicit Association Test was adapted to assess the degree to which people hold, at least at an implicit level, a stereotype that Hispanics are less intelligent than Whites. On the test, a sample of 41 college students at a university in the United States showed significantly faster reaction times when faced with associations consistent with…

Investigated the learning of young and old adults as related to two variables, stimulus concreteness (low vs. high) and presentation method (recall vs. multiple choice vs. associate matching). Main findings were: (a) the elderly did not perform as well as young adults, (b) for both groups, performance was better for the pairs with concrete…

Verbal analogy items, consisting of an ambiguous stimulus word pair and two unambiguous response word pairs as choice alternatives, were presented to psychology students in a counterbalanced design to discover if preferences existed between the two competing relations in each item. The data were analyzed to see if these preferences ordered…

Awareness of the presence of sexual double entendres within a word association test was investigated with measures of response time, verbal content of responses, and videotaped facial expressions. Subjects characterized as internal-field independent were found to become aware earlier in the task, to test out their developing hypothesis about the…