A survey of how 17 recent experimental psychology textbooks treated the subject of random assignment of subjects to groups for purposes of experimentation is discussed. Findings indicate that the textbooks generally gave favorable coverage to the practice. Further research might improve this simplistic understanding. (Author/DB)

A phonetic confusion model and some procedural artifacts were eliminated as sources for individual differences in fusion rate. Results of these two experiments were consistent with the hypothesis that individual differences in fusion rate are due to differences in perceptual dependence on linguistic rules. (Editor/RK)

Two theories of comparative judgment were compared across four experiments on their ability to explain the Baldwin figure, a focal line whose apparent length is affected by square boxes at or near its endpoints. (Editor)

In four experiments involving blindfolded subjects, constant errors in the haptic judgment of extent in the horizontal plane were found to relate consistently to the time and velocity of limb movement. Taken together with additional information on judgments of movement duration, the results suggest that the illusion of extent is modulated by the…

Three experiments were performed to test the assertion that attractiveness of novel or complex stimuli has confounded experiments on the relative importance of S+ and S- in discrete-trial discrimination. (Editor)

Tests the theory that culturally associated words in a pair and nonassociated words in a pair differ after a single study trial in terms of their frequency representation in memory. (Editor/RK)

To determine whether perceptual asymmetries for faces occur at early or late stages of stimulus analysis, subjects compared the members of a pair of faces which appeared in the right or left visual field, either to each other or to a previously presented sample. (Editor)

Illusory correlation refers to an erroneous inference a person makes about the relationship between two categories of events. The present findings demonstrate that distortions in judgment can result from the cognitive mechanisms involved in processing information about co-occurring events, at least when the various events co-occur with…

Pictures generally show superior recognition relative to their verbal labels. This experiment was designed to link this pictorial superiority effect to sensory or meaning codes associated with the two types of symbols. (Editor)

Addresses three specific problems in children's noun-pair learning: (a) the storage versus retrieval locus of the presentation-mode effect; (b) the storage versus retrieval locus of elaboration effects; and (c) assessment of the effects of congruence on elaborative facilitation. (Editor)

Investigates the effects of actors' expectancies about the outcome of an event (positive or negative) and observation of the actual outcome (positive or negative) while in a state of high or low objective self-awareness upon attribution of causality for the outcome. (Author/RK)

An information processing model, Memory-Aided Pattern Perceiver (MAPP), that simulates the recall of briefly presented chess positions, was subjected to a test of its assumption that such positions are encoded and stored as chunks in short-term memory. (Editor)

Why does the rehearsal of information not interfere with a subject's temporal judgments. Offers evidence in favor of one possible interpretation. Taking an analogy from the phenomenon of the localization of sound in a sound-reverberating room, this research suggests a precedence effect in verbal information processing. (Author/RK)

These experiments allow a comparison between visual and auditory presentation per se: Will it be easier to identify "red" as relevant given a geometric design or its verbal description? Suggests that visual presentation confers one advantage: allows the formation of a nonverbal code in addition to a verbal description. (Author/RK)

Two experiments using five lists of words were conducted to explore the effects of the concreteness or abstractness of words on their tachistoscopic recognition. (Editor)