Gerald A. Winer

Evidence of More Immanent Justice Responding in Adults than Children: A Challenge to Traditional Developmental Theories.

Three studies investigated developmental changes in immanent justice responding by asking participants to respond to vignettes in which a persons bad behaviour was followed by a negative consequence. Study 1 consisted of 152 sixth graders and 128 college students and presented participants with a vignette that examined the notion of bad people deserving to get ill. Study 2 consisted of 185 sixth graders and 154 college students and examined whether children and adults reasoned that that bad behaviour would actually cause the illness. Study 3 consisted of 96 third graders, 115 fifth graders, and 114 college students, and presented participants with vignettes that examined negative behaviours and consequences. Contrary to expectations based on traditional and contemporary developmental theories, all three studies demonstrated more evidence of immanent justice responding among adults than among elementary school children. These results call into question the comprehensiveness of traditional and contemporary developmental theories, and suggest the need to examine cognitive reasoning in adulthood when constructing developmental theories.

Development in the understanding of perception: the decline of extramission perception beliefs

Ancient philosophers, including Plato, Euclid, and Ptolemy, believed in an extramission theory of visual perception, which held that there are emissions from the eyes during the act of vision. Three studies, comparing college and elementary school students, documented a decrease over age in the belief of emissions from the eye during the act of vision and an increase in the belief that vision involved only incoming information. Questions about hearing and smelling were less difficult than those on vision but yielded analogous age trends. The results have implications for cognitive theories of development, for education, and for understanding the childs concept of mind

The persistence of a misconception about vision after educational interventions.

Children and adults, like many ancient philosophers, believe that seeing involves emissions from the eye. Several experiments tested the strength of these “extramission” beliefs to determine whether they, like other scientific misconceptions, are resistant to educational experiences. Traditional college-level education had little impact. Presenting a simplified lesson, stressing visual input, and a lesson directly counteracting the vision misconception had an impact, but for older participants the effect was evident only on short-term tests. Despite some gain due to learning, overall the results demonstrated the robustness of extramission beliefs.

Effects of reading content on occupational sex role stereotypes

Abstract The relation between sex and occupational role of story characters was systematically varied in reading material presented to preschoolers. On a series of posttests measuring stereotyped attitudes towards occupational sex roles, boys appeared more stereotyped than girls. Stories that portrayed a stereotyped relation between sex and occupation served to make girls more stereotyped in their responding, thus supporting the notion that reading content may reinforce attitudes and ideas developed from other sources. There was little to suggest that reading content could counteract established attitudes and predispositions, however.

An analysis of experimenter effects on responses to a sex questionnaire

To test whether responses to sex questionnaires vary as a function of the milieu in which the questionnaires are administered, university and college students were presented with an explicit sex questionnaire by a psychologist or by a member of the clergy. In the first study conducted at a nondenominational university, students generally responded similarly when tested by a psychologist, a rabbi, or a priest. There was some evidence suggesting that a greater number of students tested by members of the clergy, rather than by the psychologist, omitted responses to sensitive questions. In a second study conducted at a Catholic college, responses generally were similar when comparing a priest and a psychologist as testers. On one sensitive item, however, there was evidence of an experimenter effect in the predicted direction. Under testing situations common to a number of studies, responses to sex questionnaires seem relatively unaffected by experimenter effects.

Effects of drawing on directional representations of the process of vision

Four experiments demonstrated that children and adults, when asked to represent vision schematically, have a bias to draw arrows pointing away from the eye and toward a visual referent, avoiding the response of drawing arrows to indicate visual input. The outward bias was stronger than in previous studies involving other responses and means of representation. In the present study, the outward bias was also more evident when participants were asked to draw rather than choose, in writing, between visual input and output. Conditions designed to counteract the drawing bias had weak effects, at best. The results (a) point to a possible explanation for extramission interpretations of vision, (b) generally indicate that different means of representing a scientific process can influence beliefs, and (c) have significance for education.

Language versus logic: Responses to misleading classificatory questions

In this study we examined responses to apparent forced-choice questions in which two choices were presented as options and both were correct. The responses suggested by these questions were in conflict with responses based on simple classificatory logic. The results showed that adults, as well as children, were easily misled by the implication of the questions and there was no consistent evidence for increases in the number of “logical” responses as a function of age. However, when children and adults were initially given set-breaking items designed to sensitize them to the misleading nature of questions, they answered the set-breaking items as well as subsequent test items correctly. The results are consistent with pragmatic theories of language that stress the role of context and intentionality as major determinants of meaning.

Incidental learning in young children tested with words or words plus pictures as stimuli

Abstract The incidental memory of children 3, 4, and 5 years old was tested for words or words-plus-pictures that were initially presented under orienting conditions requiring responses to acoustic vs semantic qualities of the stimuli and requiring an affirmative vs a negative response to the orienting questions. Recall improved with age. It was higher for words plus pictures than for words alone, and there was an increase over age groups in the facilitative effects of semantic vs acoustic orientation.

Veridical and nonveridical interpretations to perceived temperature differences by children and adults

This study examined responses of children and adults to a phenomenon reported initially by the philosopher John Locke: namely, that when two hands are immersed in water of a given temperature, one hand can feel warmth and the other cold. We created this effect in children and adults and compared how subjects in each age group interpreted the effect. Adults responded veridically, that is, indicating that the perceived temperature difference did not reflect a real difference in water temperature. Children, on the other hand, tended more frequently to give nonveridical responses, indicating that the felt difference signified a real difference in temperature.

Testing Different Interpretations for the Mistaken Belief That Rays Exit the Eyes During Vision

Abstract Research has shown that children and adults believe that emissions from the eye occur during the act of vision. Such beliefs are similar to ancient extramission theories of perception. In Study 1, the authors tested the idea that extramission beliefs might stem from peoples thinking about what might occur during vision as opposed to what is necessary for seeing. Training participants to think about what is necessary for vision, however, had no effect on extramission responses. The results of Study 2 indicated that emphasizing the idea of visual input led to a decline in extramission responses and supported the hypothesis that extramission notions stem from the outer-oriented phenomenology of vision.