Adult Judgments Research Articles

The role of the functionality rule in the categorization of well-defined concepts

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether children and adults could construct concept definitions by utilizing the mechanisms proposed by Richards and Goldfarb's (1986) episodic memory model. In Experiment I the question of whether children and adults were able to utilize hypothetical counterexemplar reasoning was examined. When given novel instances and asked to judge whether they were members of familiar categories, subjects attributed concept membership more often to objects possessing form features irrelevant to function than to objects possessing form features interfering with function or objects lacking the ability to function. Subjects justified their answers by referring to the influence of each attribute on the intended function of the object. Experiment 2 examined whether children utilized the functionality rule in making category judgments about novel concepts. Functionality was found to influence the judgments of both children and adults. Results are discussed in terms of Richards and Goldfarb's (1986) model and are related to other evidence that children possess theories about concepts.

Children's identification of actors and patients in prototypical and nonprototypical sentence types

This research examined if children organize language categories around a prototype. Based on previous research with adults, the hypothesis held that the prototypical transitive sentence contains an animate actor and patient and a highly prototypical verb. The question of interest was if factors that contribute to adult judgments of sentence prototypicality (such as actor-patient animacy and verb prototypicality) affect young childrens' accuracy in correctly identifying sentence actors and patients. That is, are children more likely to make correct identifications in prototypical sentences? Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-old children were trained to to ntify sentence actors and patients in prototypical or nonprototypical sentences and then tested for generalization to sentences of other types. Two factors, verb prototypicality and animacy of sentence participants, combined to influence children's accuracy in actor/patient identification. Regardless of training condition, children produced more correct responses to sentences with animate actors than to sentences with inanimate actors. There was an interaction with verb prototypicality such that it was more typical for inanimate actors to act upon animate patients with what are otherwise low prototype verbs (e.g., low in action, low in intentionality). The results of the study are consistent with the view that similar cognitive mechanisms operate in language and in other nonlinguistic cognitive domains.

Children's judgments of event upsettingness and personal experiencing of stressful events.

Five-hundred and three urban and suburban 4th- to 6th-grade schoolchildren judged event upsettingness and reported the occurrence of 22 life events. Judgments of event upsettingness ranged considerably, some corresponding to, others differing from, adult judgments. Children reported experiencing an average of seven events during their lifetimes. Girls judged events to be more upsetting than boys, and fourth and fifth graders judged events to be more upsetting than sixth graders. Urban children reported having experienced more stressful events than suburban children, and sixth graders experienced more events than fourth graders.

The influence of facial characteristics on children's age perceptions

To examine the impact of age-related variations in facial characteristics on children's age judgments, two experiments were conducted in which craniofacial shape and facial wrinkling were independently manipulated in stimulus faces as sources of age information. Using a paired-comparisons task, children between the ages of 2 1 2 and 6 were asked to make age category as well as relative age judgments of stimulus faces. Preschool-aged children were able to use variations in craniofacial profile shape, frontal face feature vertical placement, or facial wrinkling to identify the age category of a stimulus person. Children were also able to identify the older, but not the younger, of two faces on the basis of facial wrinkling, a finding consistent with previously demonstrated limitations in young children's use of relative age terms. The results were discussed in the context of research which reveals parallel effects of craniofacial shape and wrinkling on the age judgments of adults.

Recognition and Frequency Judgments in Young and Elderly Adults

Three experiments examined frequency judgments and recognition memory in young and elderly adults. Subjects were presented a long list of words at either a 5-s rate (Experiments 1 & 3) or a 1-s rate (Experiment 2), after which frequency-judgment and recognition memory tasks were administered. Either an absolute (Experiments 1 & 2) or a relative (Experiment 3) frequency-judgment task was used. The recognition test, which involved repeated tests of some items, involved either one incorrect item paired with each correct item (Experiments 1 & 2), or four incorrect items (Experiment 3). Age-related differences in frequency judgments, for the more frequently presented items, were found in all three experiments. For the recognition scores, the predicted interaction between age and successive tests was found only in Experiment 3. The results were interpreted within the framework of age-related differences in elaborative encoding and in distractibility to irrelevant stimuli.

Code switching by bilinguals: Evidence against a third grammar

Bilingual code switching within sentences (as in “The towel roja was dirty”) is often observed in bilingual communities. The present study addressed two issues. First, what is the nature of the grammatical rules that underlie code switching? Second, how do bilingual speakers acquire such rules? We addressed the first issue by obtaining judgments of the grammaticality of four types of sentences containing code-switched words. Judgments of acceptability seemed to be based on two rules: (1) Code switching can occur only when the code-switched words are positioned in accord with the rules for which they are approriate lexical items; (2) code switching within word boundaries is considered ungrammatical. We addressed the second issue by exploring the effects of age and code switching experience on the grammatical judgments of bilingual children and adults. Extensive code-switching experience did not seem to be necessary for bilingual speakers to know the grammatical constraints of code switching. This suggests that the constraints of code switching are based on the integration of the grammars of the two code-switched languages rather than on the creation of a third grammar. There were developmental changes in the judgments made to the sentences. All aged subjects found sentences that violated the word-order rule (1 above) unacceptable. However, the youngest children (8- to 10-year-olds) found mixing within a word acceptable. This developmental change could be due to a change in the grammar of code switching, in the ability to make metalinguistic judgments, or in the child's general knowledge about the nature of languages.

Adult judgments of infant emotions: Replication Studies within and across laboratories

Questions about the biological patterning of facial expression have led to studies of presymbolic infants to see whether there are agreed-upon expressions of emotion relevant for caregiving. The current study assessed the reliability of emotion identification among adult judges who responded to context-free photographs of infant faces which conveyed emotions ranging widely in intensity and clarity of signal. Judges gave free response labels which were subsequently sorted into 10 emotion categories by use of a standard lexicon. Paired groups of judges from two laboratories labeled four sets of infant pictures. Agreement, assessed by correlating one group's judgments of the emotions present in a picture set with a second group's judgments, were very high for joy, interest, distress-sadness, and surprise, and somewhat lower for bored-sleepy, anger, and fear. The pattern of agreement was similar between and within laboratories. The results provide evidence that untrained judges agree to a remarkable extent on the emotionally patterned signal value of infants' facial expressions.

Distribution and desirability of life events in older adults: Population and policy implications

Estimates of the natural distribution of environmental demands on older adults are provided here. Frequencies of occurrence over a one-year period for 54 life events relevant to older adults are reported for a sample of 1102 men and 1758 women representative of the population aged 55 and older in Kentucky. Estimates of the absolute number of noninstitutionalized Kentucky older adults who would experience selected events in a year are thus made possible. In addition, older adult judgments as to the desirability or undesirability of each event are also reported. These data could be used, with some qualifications, to establish normative weights or desirability classifications for these events for older adults. The following selected classes of events are evaluated in terms of their impact, based on the desirability ratings and previous research: health, death, family conflict, and rewards. Program implications suggested by considering both the prevalence and impact data are: (a) mental health interventions should be closely tied to physical health events; (b) death of spouse would be an event important for prevention programs; (c) other forms of marital disruption would be too infrequent to justify programs; (d) retirement would appear to have too little impact to justify adjustment programs; and (e) the very desirable impact of reward events found here would justify programs promoting these events for older adults.

Adult judgments of delinquent and non-delinquent adolescent moral reasoning.

The ability of adults to accurately perceive the differences in moral judgments of delinquent and non-delinquent adolescents was the primary purpose of this study. One hundred forty-six adult college students were randomly assigned to one of five experimental conditions and asked to complete Rest'sDefining Issues Test (DIT). In one condition, the participants were asked to respond to theDIT as themselves. For the remaining four conditions, participants were to take different perspectives. Results indicated that adults are capable of perceiving differences between the moral reasoning of delinquent and non-delinquent adolescents. Further, adults tend to recommend higher level moral arguments for presentation to delinquent adolescents than the perceived level of functioning of delinquents of this age level.

The internal structure of vowel categories in infancy: Effects of stimulus “goodness.”

We investigated whether perceived differences in stimulus goodness, that is, the degree to which a stimulus within a phoneme category is considered to be a “good instance” of the category, predicted differential responses to these stimuli by young infants. Two points were chosen in an F1/F2 coordinate vowel space: one judged to be a “good” representative of the /i/ vowel category, the other a “poor” representative, based on adult judgments. Then, variants were synthesized by manipulating the first two formants in both distance and direction from these two points. The resulting stimuli formed rings around the “good” /i/ and the “poor” /i/. Thirty‐two 6‐month‐old infants were tested in a generalization task using a visually reinforced head‐turn procedure. Half of the infants were tested using the “good” /i/ and its variants, and half using the “poor” /i/ and its variants. Results showed that generalization around the “good” /i/ was significantly greater than around the “poor” /i/. Moreover, infant response patterns correlated with adult subjective “goodness” judgments.

Effects of the "mentally retarded" label on adult judgments about child failure.

Effects of the "mentally retarded" label on adult judgments about child failure.

Children's Social Desirability Ratings of Ingratiation Tactics

Fifty-eight children drawn from schools in Pennsylvania and Illinois were administered a questionnaire made up of scenarios depicting ingratiation tactics directed toward three types of targets (parents, teachers, or peers). The children, 22 of whom were diagnosed as learning disabled, were asked to rate the social desirability of each tactic. Learning disabled and nondisabled children judged the social desirability of the items similarly. The children's judgments were then compared with adult judgments of the social desirability of the same items obtained in a previous study. It was found that children and adults both judged tactics in the context of target or setting, and that they appeared to agree about the desirability of particular tactics directed toward particular targets.

Children's and Parents' Views of Ingratiation Tactics

Three studies were conducted. In Study I, 272 children were individually administered, via tape recordings, a questionnaire designed to assess their preferences for ingratiation tactics given particular targets. It was found that learning disabled children preferred ingratiation strategies which were judged less socially desirable by adults than those selected by non-learning disabled children. Additionally, scores on the questionnaire were not correlated with intelligence test scores, but were correlated with the child's sociometric ratings from peers and teacher ratings of the child's academic and attentional competence. In Study II parents of learning disabled and nondisabled children were compared as to their ratings of the social desirability of various ingratiation tactics. While no differences were found which were attributable to parent differences, parents made reliable discriminations as to the social desirability of various tactics addressed to particular targets. Study III attempted to replicate the results of adult judgments of ingratiation tactics obtained in studies I and II by employing an additional group of college students as subjects. Results across the studies suggest that adults agree on the social desirability of some forms of ingratiation tactics as used in interaction with particular targets. The implications of these findings for social-skills training are discussed.

Effects of the "mentally retarded" label on adult judgments about child failure.

Effects of the "mentally retarded" label on adult judgments about child failure.

Development of depth perception mediated by motion parallax in unidimensional projections of rotation in depth

Motion parallax is a composite of five transformations demonstrated to be effective in adult judgments of rotation direction in polar motion projections of a horizontal row of dots rotating in depth. The effectiveness of these transformations as a function of age was tested by presenting six such motion projections to first graders (age = 6 years), seventh graders (age = 13 years), and college students (age = 19 years). Identical age functions were obtained for judged rotation direction from the four motion projections representing (1) Velocity, corresponding to the traditional definition of motion parallax as differential velocity, (2) Velocity plus differences between ratios of instantaneous displacement to instantaneous acceleration for dots on the near and far sides of the rotation axis ( D A Difference), (3) Velocity, D A Difference, and a gradient across the row of D A ratios, and (4) all transformations. First graders, unable to use horizontal transformations, performed at chance on these four projections, while older students made correct judgments. Order, separated from Velocity for the first time, resulted in chance performance at all ages, while Direction, also separated from Velocity for the first time, resulted in veridical judgments in only 4 of 24 college students.

Influence of six types of visual structure on complexity judgments in children and adults.

Influence of six types of visual structure on complexity judgments in children and adults.

Abstraction, Inference, and Acceptance in Children's Processing of an Adult Model's Moral Judgments.

Abstraction, Inference, and Acceptance in Children's Processing of an Adult Model's Moral Judgments.

Intentions and Their Contexts in the Moral Judgments of Children and Adults

DARLEY, JOHN M.; KLOSSON, ELLEN CHERESKIN; and ZANNA, MARK P. Intentions and Their Contexts in the Moral Judgments of Children and Adults. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 66-74. A study was conducted to determine whether the moral judgments of adults and children take into account circumstances which in a legal sense tend to justify or excuse intentional, harm-doing actions. Subjects (first graders, fourth graders, and adults) were presented with a vignette in which 1 child harmed another. For half the subjects, information designed to constitute a valid legal defense was appended; for the other half, no such mitigating circumstance was presented. In various vignettes the legal defenses of necessity, public duty, and provocation were instantiated. The results indicated that each mitigating circumstance led to less recommended punishment for the harm-doing act and that this was so across the entire age range (5-44 years) sampled. The lack of a clear developmental result as well as the implications of these findings for the utility of employing a legal analogy for investigating the development of moral judgments are discussed.

An experimental investigation of adult perception of one-word utterances.

ABSTRACTIn order to examine the extent to which adult judgments of first words depend on visual and auditory cues, spontaneous utterances were collected for boys and girls of 1; 5, 1; 6 and 1; 10 as well as adults naming the same toys. Vocalizations clearly appropriate to the original visual context were dubbed onto new contexts varying in the number of phonetic features (0-2) by which the first phoneme of the utterance differed from the initial phoneme labelling the visual context. College students' perceptual accuracy declined with degree of mismatch, although the identical speech occurred in each context. The older the speaker, the less perception was affected by visual context. Whereas the meaning of child speech was judged by visual cues, adult meanings were judged mostly by auditory input. Biases in perceiving early speech may prompt reconsideration of current methodology and theory in early language acquisition.

Psychophysical scaling of stimulus similarity in 3-month-old infants and adults

The ability of 3-month-old infants to discriminate novel components of a prefamiliarized stimulus was assessed using an operant paradigm. Subjects were familiarized with the standard stimulus (five-component mobile) in three daily conditioning sessions and then were exposed to a comparison mobile containing from zero to four novel components substituted for familiar elements at the outset of a fourth daily session. Although a reliable reduction in mean number of footkicks was found only when an extreme number of components was substituted, log-log plots of infant response as a function of degree of novelty indicated that discriminability was described by a power function. Adult judgments of the similarity between the standard mobile and each degree of novelty were also described by a power function, suggesting a common basis may underlie the perception of similarity in the two groups. The finding of a power function for infant response to visual novelty is consistent with reports of similar discriminability functions in infant olfaction and audition. However, duration of visual fixation increased nondifferentially to all test stimuli, irrespective of degree of novelty. The latter finding is inconsistent with predictions arising from the visual attention literature.