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Biomedical subjects

R H Maki

Publications and source records attributed to R H Maki.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Does distraction reduce pain-produced distress among college students?

College students in four experiments placed their hands in ice water (the cold-pressor task) and reported their distress. They simultaneously engaged in different reaction-time (RT) tasks that varied in the amount of attention required for successful performance. In each experiment, which differed in numerous procedural details, RT, error-rate, and self-report measures all demonstrated that the distraction tasks differed in the degree of attention required. Greater distraction, however, failed to reduce physiological, self-report, or behavioral responses to the cold-pressor task. These data call into question the hypothesis that attention mediates the process whereby distraction tasks reduce pain-produced distress.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1990

Memory for script actions: effects of relevance and detail expectancy.

Script actions that varied both in relevance to the script and in the expectancy of their details were developed. In Experiment 1, recall of these actions was tested. Actions of medium relevance were recalled better than actions of high or low relevance, whether or not details were presented. However, the unexpected details themselves were recalled better than the expected details. In Experiment 2, recognition was lowest for high-relevance actions but medium- and low-relevance actions did not differ. Actions with unexpected details were recognized better than actions with expected details, which tended to be better than generic actions. The results were interpreted as showing that both the relevance and the expectancy of the details in script actions are important in memory, but that the two dimensions may play different roles.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Recognition of added and deleted details in scripts.

Recognition of script actions that varied in specificity and expectancy of details was investigated. In Experiment 1, subjects indicated whether each action was the same or changed on an immediate or delayed yes/no recognition test. Changes that involved added details were recognized better than changes that involved deleted details. Unexpected added details were detected better than expected ones, but expectancy had no effect on deleted details. Experiment 2 tested whether the poor recognition of changes in actions with deleted details was due to a failure to retrieve those details. The recognition test was a forced-choice test with details present in the correct alternative, so their retrieval was not necessary for correct choices. Still, recognition of originally generic actions was better than recognition of originally detailed actions. Thus, a failure to retrieve details could not completely explain the results of Experiment 1. The subjects probably recognized originally generic actions better because they processed the material schematically so that the detailed actions subsumed the generic idea. Recognition decisions may then have been based either on the plausibility of the alternatives or on their familiarity within the experimental context.

Choice Behavior↗
PubMed1987

Effects of level of processing and rehearsal on frequency judgments.

The effects of attention during encoding and rehearsal after initial encoding on frequency estimates were investigated in three experiments. Varying the level of processing affected the linear increase in frequency estimates as a function of actual frequency, but varying processing after encoding with remember or forget cues had the greatest effects on the intercept of the function relating judged to actual frequency. Deeper levels of processing improved performance in a frequency discrimination task, whereas remember and forget cues had only very small effects on performance. Materials that are easy to rehearse were compared with materials that are difficult to rehearse in Experiment 2. The results were interpreted as evidence against a covert rehearsal explanation of slope effects in frequency estimation tasks because materials that are difficult to rehearse tended to produce larger interactions between remember versus forget cues and frequency than materials that are easier to rehearse. In Experiment 3, an arithmetic task that was performed during word encoding affected the slope of the function relating judged to actual frequency, but the same task performed immediately after word presentation had no effect on frequency estimates. It was concluded that frequency is not stored automatically because attention during the initial stages of encoding affects it; however, attention devoted to processing after initial encoding does not affect the rate with which subjective frequency increases with repetitions.

Attention↗
PubMed1985

Spatial memory of children and adults assessed in the radial maze.

To assess the development of accurate spatial memory and its relationship to organized search strategies, children (18-71 months old) and college students searched for rewards hidden at the ends of the arms of an eight-arm radial maze. Subjects made their first four choices in random order selected by the experimenter (forced choice) or in whatever order they wished (free choice). In some conditions, a retention interval was imposed between arm choices 4 and 5, followed by a resumption of the task. With free choice, accuracy of spatial memory increased linearly with age, and the proportion of tests on which the child entered four adjacent arms in sequence during the first four choices, a measure of organized searching, also increased linearly with age. Disrupting this sequential search strategy (forced choice) reduced accuracy for both children and college students, although the reduction with college students was small. Delays had minimal effects for children who met criterion at 0-delay and for college students. Although response patterns seem unimportant in accurate spatial memory in rats, systematic search strategies mature together with, and probably contribute to, the improvement of spatial memory with age in humans.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1985

The role of verbal labels in the judgment of orientation and location.

In an earlier study it was found that judgments of right-left orientations and locations were more difficult than judgments of up-down only when spatial words were used in the tasks. Experiments are reported in which pictures of many objects were presented to eliminate the possibility that subjects in previous studies had used strategies specific to single-stimulus tasks. In experiment 1, right-left orientations were judged more slowly than up-down orientations both when the spatial words were used and when arbitrary letters replaced the spatial words. In experiment 2, judgments of the right-left locations of pictures took longer than judgments of their up-down locations only when spatial words were used in the task; the right-left difficulty was eliminated when arbitrary letters replaced the words. The differential effect of words and letters in location judgments seems to be due to the different coding strategies adopted by subjects under the two conditions. It is concluded that a right-left difficulty does not depend on the use of spatial terms: word and letter conditions yield different results only when the task permits different judgments to be made under the two conditions.

Cognition↗
PubMed1984

Metacomprehension of text material.

Subjects' abilities to predict future multiple-choice test performance after reading sections of text were investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, subjects who scored above median test performance showed some accuracy in their predictions of that test performance. They gave higher mean ratings to material related to correct than to incorrect test answers. Subjects who scored below median test performance did not show this prediction accuracy. The retention interval between reading and the test was manipulated in Experiment 2. Subjects who were tested after at least a 24-hr delay showed results identical to those of Experiment 1. However, when subjects were tested immediately after reading, subjects above and below median test performance gave accurate predictions for the first immediate test. In contrast, both types of subjects gave inaccurate predictions for the second immediate test. Structural variables, such as length, serial position, and hierarchical level of the sections of text were related to subjects' predictions. These variables, in general, were not related to test performance, although the predictions were related to test performance in the conditions described above.

Achievement↗
PubMed1979

Why is telling right from left more difficult than telling above from below?

Adults take longer to judge the locations of horizontal stimuli than to judge the locations of vertical stimuli. In order to determine the source of this difficulty with the horizontal dimension, the congruity between the locations of stimuli and verbal descriptions was judged in a reaction time (RT) task. Because bilateral symmetry of the nervous system may be related to the difficulty with horizontal stimuli, this was varied by using right-handed, left-handed, and ambidextrous subjects. However, this variable produced no significant effects in the RT task. Horizontal stimuli took longer than vertical stimuli whether the verbal description was encoded before or during the RT periods, suggesting that label encoding is not the entire source of the effect. However, when the verbal labels were eliminated entirely by having subjects learn and use stimulus-letter pairs, horizontal stimuli did not take longer than vertical stimuli. This suggests that perception of the stimulus is not the cause of the difficulty. Together, the experiments indicated that comparing horizontal labels to stimuli is the largest source of the difficulty in telling right from left. Reasons why adults have such a problem were discussed.

Discrimination Learning↗