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D J Herrmann

Publications and source records attributed to D J Herrmann.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Quantitation of human IgG subclass antibodies to Haemophilus influenzae type b capsular polysaccharide. Results of an international collaborative study using enzyme immunoassay methodology.

An international collaborative study was conducted at ten sites to examine the performance of enzyme immunoassays (EIAs) for the quantitation of IgG1, IgG2, IgG3, IgG4 and total IgG anti-Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) capsular polysaccharide in human serum. All groups used the same reagents: microtiter plates coated with polyribosylribitol phosphate (PRP) conjugated to poly-L-lysine (PLL), reference, control and test human sera, biotin-conjugated International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS)-documented monoclonal anti-human IgG1-4 and IgG Pan detection antibodies, avidin-peroxidase and TMB substrate. Initial mixing of soluble PRP antigen or an equal volume of buffer with the 20 test sera prior to analysis confirmed PRP antigen specificity in all five EIAs with greater than 80% competitive inhibition at most sites. Positive correlation between the total IgG anti-Hib and sum of IgG1-4 anti-Hib was demonstrated (r2 = 0.99, Y = 1.13X -0.15). Good agreement was shown between the total IgG anti-Hib as measured by EIA and the total Hib-specific antibodies measured by the current radiolabeled antigen binding assay (r2 = 0.97, Y = 4.6X -5.8). Assay parallelism was demonstrated with an average interdilutional %CV of 22% and parallel dose-response curve slopes. The interdilutional %CVs were calculated as an average per sample of the variation of microgram/ml (corrected for dilution) at different dilutions per laboratory for all participating sites. The interlaboratory variation was the only performance parameter studied that exceeded the target level of 35% CV in all IgG1-4 and total IgG anti-Hib assays. IgG subclass distributions in the test sera demonstrated a predominance of IgG1 anti-Hib in the pediatric serum pools and IgG2 anti-Hib in the adult sera, with low but detectable levels of IgG3 and IgG4 anti-Hib in each group.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Gender-linked differences in everyday memory performance.

Recent research has demonstrated that people hold beliefs about how well others perform everyday memory tasks according to another's sex. For example, meta-memory ratings indicate that other men and other women are believed to differ in their success at performing certain memory tasks (Crawford, Herrmann, Holdsworth, Randall & Robbins, 1989). In the present study, two experiments investigated whether gender stereotypes concerning everyday memory have any validity. Experiment 1 presented female and male subjects with two tasks that the aforementioned meta-memory ratings had shown are implicitly gender marked: learning a shopping list (a sterotypically feminine task) and learning directions to go to a particular place (a stereotypically masculine task). The results were consistent with the gender stereotypes, i.e. women recalled more of the shopping list than men whereas men recalled more of the directions than women. The second experiment investigated whether memory performance would be influenced by mere changes in the label of materials in memory tasks to be biased toward male or female gender background: labelling a shopping list as pertaining to 'groceries' or to 'hardware store'; and a set of directions to 'make a shirt' or to 'make a workbench'. The results also indicated that memory performance varied in ways consistent with gender stereotypes.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1990

The representational bias of acquired memory processes.

The notion that some memory processes are acquired has been around for at least two thousand years. However, acquired memory processes have been made the object of scientific investigation in only the past two decades. Traditionally, psychologists have assumed that acquired memory processes are equally effective across the entire range of memory tasks. This article reviews research that has investigated whether these processes are equally effective across tasks or are more effective for just certain tasks. The review indicates that most, if not all, acquired memory processes are biased to deal effectively just certain kinds of mental representation. The article proposes that these processes are representationally biased because (1) they activate basic memory processes (e.g. imagery, rehearsal) which themselves are biased to process certain representational attributes and because (2) their use of basic processes follows a sequence required by particular memory tasks. Increased understanding of the representational bias of acquired processes may be seen to enable better control of memory performance and to foster more powerful investigations of memory phenomena.

Attention↗
PubMed1978

Handedness and the mental rotation of perceived patterns.

The present experiment investigated the effect of hemispheric dominance, as indicated by handedness, and perceptual processing. Displays containing two visual patterns were presented to right- and left-handed subjects who classified the two patterns as being the same or different. Also the two patterns in a display were in either an identical orientation or nonidentical orientations. Overall, left handers were faster than right handers at the "same-different" judgement. Additionally, latency increased with the angular discrepancy in orientation between patterns for both handedness groups but this increase was smaller for left handers than for right handers. Apparently, left handers evaluate overall perceptual similarity faster than right handers and they also mentally rotate perceived patterns of discrepant orientations faster than right handers. These findings contradict previous generalizations that left handers are deficient perceptually. Moreover, the present results support the position that left handers should be faster at global perceptual tasks because left handers have less neural distance than right handers mediating the transmission of information between the locus of perception and the locus of dominance.

Adult↗