Paul J. Casey

Environmental concern and behaviour in an Australian sample within an ecocentric – anthropocentric framework

Two hundred and ninety-two participants from 126 urban and rural locations across Australia responded to a questionnaire assessing levels of environmental concern and behaviour. The environmental concern items consisted of the Thompson and Barton ecocentric, anthropocentric, and apathy scales, together with the items in the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) revised scale. The broad picture in terms of sociodemographic variables was that female gender, better education, and being older were associated with higher levels of ecocentric concern for the environment and reporting more ecological behaviours. In regard to concern measures, reported frequency of environmental behaviours was positively associated with levels of ecocentric concern and endorsement of the NEP scale, and negatively associated with levels of anthropocentric concern and apathy. A combination of scores on the Thompson and Barton scales and demographic variables accounted for 36% of the variability in reported ecological behaviours.

A reexamination of the roles of typicality and category dominance in verifying category membership

Four partiaI replications of Chumbleys (1986) speeded category verification experiments were performed in order to test the generality of his finding that category dominance, but not typicality, uniquely accounted for highly significant amounts of category verification reaction time (RT) for both exemplar-category (E-C) and category-exemplar (C-E) orders.

Category Norms for Australians

Responses to 28 category titles were, generated by 620 subjects sampled from the Riverina-Murray Institute of Higher Education, the University of Newcastle, NSW and a cross-section of the community. The response frequencies for items from each category correlated highly across the three samples. However, the correlations were significantly lower between the Riverina-Murray norms and norms from other cultures, implying that Australian norms should be used with Australian subjects. The categories could be represented by two dimensions which measured the ease with which responses are generated and the similarity between responses across subjects.

Sex, body-esteem and self-esteem.

This study investigated the relationship between body-esteem and self-esteem among 215 young men and women (ages 18 to 25 years). It was expected that concern with weight and shape would be strongly associated with womens self-esteem, while mens self-esteem would be more closely linked to concerns about their fitness. Multiple regression analyses indicated that perceived attractiveness and the salience of weight and shape were significant predictors of self-esteem among women. Among men, the significant predictors of self-esteem were perceived attractiveness, body disparagement, and perceived strength and fitness.

That man's father is my father's son: the roles of structure, strategy, and working memory in solving convoluted verbal problems.

Normative data (N=896) collected on solutions to the traditional reasoning problem “Brothers and sisters have I none,/That man’s father is my father’s son” was the platform for a set of experiments to investigate the roles of problem structure, subject strategy, and working memory in error making in a class of verbal problems. The normative data revealed that the modal, but incorrect response to the brothers and sisters problem was “himself,” whereas the correct response of “son” was given by only 17% of subjects for the traditional version above, rising to 40% for a reordered novel version. This problem’s structure, identified as adouble-modifier structure, was found to produce similar response patterns across a range of verbal problems. Results from (1) syntactical structure manipulations (e.g., “My father’s son is the father of that man”), and (2) efforts to teach subjects to use a linear strategy (a sequence of steps), interpreted within a framework of Just and Carpenter’s (1992) capacity theory of comprehension, suggested that working memory overload varies across within-structure modifications and subjects. Further-more, this overload may be compounded by subjects’ choices of strategy.

Semantic Memory Retrieval: Deadlining the Typicality Effect

Corbett and Wickelgren (1978), employing a speed–accuracy tradeoff method for verifying category membership, found that while the estimated strength of the category–instance association was higher for category examples given more frequently as instances of the category (i.e. higher instance dominance), retrieval dynamics did not vary across levels of instance dominance. The Corbett and Wickelgren data challenged the claims of models of speeded sentence verification that postulated differences in the retrieval processes of high- and low-dominance category-instance associations (e.g. Smith, Shoben, & Rips, 1974). We argued that Corbett and Wickelgren very probably used category instances of debatable membership status in their low-instance dominance category examples, thus making it impossible to decide which responses to these items were correct. This, in turn, rendered their low-instance dominance data uninterpretable. Two partial replications of the Corbett and Wickelgren study were carried out, each with four subjects, and 10 variable lags between the stimulus presentation and the response signal. When care was taken that each category instance clearly belonged to its respective category, an estimate of the rate at which information accumulated towards its asymptote was greater for high-dominance, high-typicality items than for low-dominance, medium-typicality items. However, there were no dominance or typicality differences in the estimates of this asymptotic strength. In contrast, in the study in which low-dominance, low-typicality items were of questionable category membership, the results were similar to those obtained by Corbett and Wickelgren. These data support the idea that there is a continuous accumulation of information in the semantic memory sentence verification task.

A semantic memory sentence verification model based on relative judgment theory

A subjective referent model of sentence verification in semantic memory tasks based on the relative judgment theory of Link and Heath (1975), together with the derivation of a discriminability index, are presented in this paper. An attractive feature of the model is its consideration of both error rates and response times (RTs) in the calculation of the discriminability index. The model is also able to account for the frequent finding in semantic memory tasks that error RTs are longer than correct RTs. A partial replication of Experiment 2 of McCloskey and Glucksbergs (1979) sentence verification context effect studies, in which we employed 44 subjects and 28 categories, and controlled for item familiarity, revealed that error RTs were consistently longer than correct Rts—a finding inconsistent with the McCloskey and Glucksberg property comparison model, but in accord with the subjective referent model. An important fortuitous result was the detection of a context effect by the discriminability measure, an effect not detected by the RT data alone. The discriminability measures yielded a near perfect correlation with estimates of the mean step size of the random walk obtained by application of the parameter estimation program FITrRW (Heath, 1983).

Teaching how to solve “that man's father is my father's son”: adapting teaching method to working memory capacity

This research tested for an hypothesised interaction between instructional technique and working memory span level in outcomes from teaching how to correctly solve instances of a particular complex verbal problem form, the double modifier problem form (Casey, 1993), a problem form that arguably stresses working memory. The highest and lowest scoring sets of 22 University students (N = 64) in a working memory span test were randomly allocated to either an algebraic or a predominantly verbal instructional technique group, resulting in a 2 × 2 between groups design (n = 11 per group). It was expected that the verbal method would differentiate between low and high working memory span participants because the verbal method allowed potential distractors to be influential, a feature of problems that provide difficulties for participants with low working memory spans. In contrast, because the algebraic method avoided distractors no such effect was expected. The results supported the hypothesised interaction. The ...

Categorization reaction time, category structure, and category size in semantic memory using artificial categories

This study examined the effects of category structure and category size on categorization reaction time, artificial categories being used to obtain greater experimental control than is usually found in semantic memory research. Four artificial categories varying in structure (hierarchical and nonhierarchical) and size (8 or 16 instances) were introduced to 20 adolescent subjects over a 12-week period by means of stories, exercises, and discussions. Significantly longer categorization reaction times were required for instances from the hierarchical categories, but no set size effect was found. The application of clustering and multidimensional scaling procedures to subjects’ free recall data revealed that subjects had acquired the hierarchical structures but imposed their own structures on the other categories. These findings were interpreted within a spreading activation framework.

Remembering what we do, not what we view: The plasticity of everyday cognitive maps

When we examine a town map or view the town from a height we obtain survey knowledge, knowledge of the spatial configuration. When we navigate through the town we acquire procedural knowledge, knowledge about how our route connects different locations in the town. Three experiments investigated whether everyday cognitive maps formed after repeated navigation are primarily configurational or procedural when both configurational and procedural information on the routes travelled are available. If such maps are procedural then arguably they can be markedly inaccurate and lead to incorrect direction giving. The three experiments focussed on direction and location errors associated with constructing cognitive maps of routes from a town to a nearby university. Experiment 1 (N = 157), carried out when only one route was available, found that the distribution of the relative locations of the start and end points of the route from a frequentlynavigate-groups maps was markedly bimodal, including a large subset of ...