Browsing by Author "Burnett, Sarah A."
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Item Event description by two subtypes of learning disabled children(1984) Bailey, Vonda; Watkins, Michael J.; Loveland, Katherine A.; Brelsford, John W.; Burnett, Sarah A.Event description by two subtypes of nine to thirteen year old learning disabled children (math and generally disabled) was examined. Children viewed a narrative or a puppet show, then were asked to either describe of enact what had happened. Generally disabled children enacted the events as accurately as nondisabled children, indicating that generally disabled children understood and remembered events as well as nondisabled children. However, their descriptions contained omissions, circumlocutions, and word substitutions, reflecting a subtle verbal deficit. Math disabled children were less accurate than nondisabled children describing a puppet show, but not in the other conditions, suggesting they have difficulty understanding the emotions and motives of the characters. Math disabled children were proficient in using language. Thus, the two learning disabled subtypes performed differently in event description, validating the subtyping criteria used in this experiment, as well as the concept of heterogeneity among the learning disabled population.Item Imagery and memory : the bizarreness issue reexamined(1979) Kennedy, Pamela Ann; Burnett, Sarah A.; Howell, William C.This research examined the effects of the bizarreness attribute of imagery on memory. While previous research has not generally supported the facilitory effects of bizarreness on recall performance, there are a number of conceptual and methodological problems with this body of research. The present research attempted to overcome these problems by developing a more rigorous conceptualization and operationalization of the construct of bizarreness, and utilizing a design which controls for past methodological contaminants. Half of the 64 subjects were instructed to form images while the other half rehearsed phrases in rote fashion. Within each of these conditions, half of the subjects were tested by free recall and half by frequency estimation. For all subjects, half of the phrases were bizarre and half were common, as defined by pre-ratings made by independent subjects. Frequency level of phrase presentation was varied, with frequency levels 1, 2, 4 and 6 being represented. Finally, subjects were tested immediately after list presentation and again after one week. The results indicated that for cued recall, bizarre phrases were superior to common phrases. In addition, the superiority of bizarre over common imagery increased between the immediate and delayed tests. For frequency estimation, the data did not reveal any readily interpretable differences between common and bizarre phrases. The results were discussed as they relate to previous research on bizarreness. It was concluded that bizarreness does have a facilitory effect in imagery mediation. Suggestions for future research to further clarify the effects of bizarreness were presented.Item The effect of arousal on a selective attention task(1982) Pearson, Deborah A.; Lane, David M.; Burnett, Sarah A.; Howell, William C.In two experiments, subjects performed a luminance detection task under conditions of low arousal and high arousal. In the low arousal condition, subjects heard 7 dB(A) broadband noise, and in the high arousal condition they heard 1 dB(A) noise. Stimuli were presented on a cathode ray tube, and appeared at the center and along the perimeter of an imaginary circle. Two expectancy conditions were used: a central expectancy condition, in which most of the stimuli appeared at the center of the screen and a few appeared along the perimeter, and a peripheral condition in which the opposite was true. Subjects responded faster to central stimuli than peripheral stimuli; they also responded faster to expected stimuli than unexpected stimuli. Noise had no effect on the way in which subjects processed location or expectancy information . It was concluded that arousal has no effect on the breadth of attention in this task.Item The effects of differential semantic encoding on free recall(1980) Rhoades, Howard M.; Brelsford, John W.; Burnett, Sarah A.; Lane, David M.One of the fundamental findings in the area of learning and memory is that the repetition of an item increases the probability of its recall. A number of theories have been advanced to explain the effects of repetition on memory. One such theory, encoding variability theory, postulates that changes in the context in which stimuli are presented or changes in the semantic representation of stimuli are directly related to recall. Experiments which have attempted to manipulate semantic variability (e.g., Madigan, 1969) have used no standardized method for selecting stimulus material. Furthermore, those items selected have not been chosen with respect to their degree of semantic variability but some other scale such as frequency of occurrence. In Experiment 1, ratings of semantic meaning change for 147 nouns, biased by different adjectives, were collected from 39 subjects. Two homogenous groups of items then were selected from these normative data and used as list items in a repetition experiment in which subjects were asked to free recall the nouns (Experiment 2). The results from the rating and free recall tasks indicated subjects do make distinctions along a scale of semantic meaning change and the degree of semantic meaning change is predictive of free recall. A model based on encoding variability is presented which assumes that the semantic encoding of an item forms the basis of the memory trace. This model is compared to a similar model of encoding variability recently formulated by Glenberg.Item The role of concentration in recall(1982) Allender, Laurel Elaine; Watkins, Michael J.; Lane, David M.; Burnett, Sarah A.Although concentration seems intuitively important for recall, it is a curious fact that the scientific study of this relation has been just about totally neglected. Reported here are four experiments designed as a beginning towards remedying this neglect. Experiment 1 showed that solving arithmetic problems intermittently during the recall interval lowered recall performance, but only to the extent that would be obtained if the time spent solving problems were simply not available for recall. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that two sets of items can be recalled only about half as efficiently as one. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that a card sorting task known to impair recall when performed during study also impairs recall when performed during recall, though not to as great an extent. In addition, Experiment 3 showed recall of words studied under two different orienting tasks to be comparably impaired by the card sorting task.Item Where Angels Fear to Tread: An Analysis of Sex Differences in Self-Confidence(Rice University, 1978-01) Burnett, Sarah A.; Electronic version made possible with funding from the Rice Historical Society and Thomas R. Williams, Ph.D., class of 2000.