Types Of Processes Research Articles

Regional differences in the effects of task difficulty and motor output on blood flow response in the human anterior cingulate cortex: a review of 107 PET activation studies.

We reviewed 107 blood flow activation studies carried out with positron emission tomography and published between January 1993 and November 1996. These studies had reported their findings as peaks of significant difference in cerebral blood-flow (CBF) between two scans/tasks and had located the peaks in standardized stereotaxic space. We coded each task along several dimensions, including the type and rate of input and output, the types of cognitive processes, and the relative difficulty of tasks within a study. Based on this coding, a difference score (A-B) was calculated for each subtraction. Subsequently, the frequency distributions of the difference scores for subtractions yielding a peak in the anterior cingulate region (cingulate peak) were compared with those distributions obtained from subtractions without a cingulate peak (no cingulate-peak). The cingulate peak subtractions (n = 158) differed from the no cingulate peak subtractions (n = 229) in terms of difficulty level (p = 0.001) and the presence of a remote memory component (p = 0.01). Regional differences in the frequency distribution of certain task parameters, such as difficulty level, recent memory and the use of the hand for responding, were also observed when peaks found in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) were further classified as located in the rostral vs caudal ACC, supracallosal vs subcallosal ACC, and limbic vs paralimbic parts of the supracallosal ACC. We conclude that task difficulty plays a major role in modulating blood-flow response in the ACC, possibly interacting with other parameters such as the nature of the response and memory demands.

Childhood Anxiety and Memory Functioning: A Comparison of Systemic and Processing Accounts

Information-processing models of childhood anxiety highlight the centrality of memory processes in the maintenance and intensification of anxiety. Recent advances in memory research allow for an increasingly fine-grained analysis of the relation between anxiety and memory. The relation between childhood anxiety and memory was examined in a sample of 160 high- and low-trait-anxious sixth through eighth grade children. Results indicated that anxiety predicted a memory bias toward negative relative to neutral information during conceptual but not perceptual tasks. Further, anxiety predicted a memory bias toward positive relative to neutral information on procedural tasks and a memory bias away from positive relative to neutral information on declarative tasks. These findings accent the complexity and multidimensionality of relations among childhood anxiety, the emotional valence of stimuli, types of cognitive processing, and memory systems in contributing to biases in children's memory functioning.

Cognitive Processing of Students with and without Hearing Loss

We examined the performance of students with and without hearing loss in tasks measuring three cognitive processes: planning, simultaneous processing, and successive processing. Students with prelingual hearing losses, 10 and 13 years of age, and hearing students comparable in age and grade were given a verbal and a nonverbal task from each of the three types of cognitive processes. Both qualitative and quantitative scores were analyzed. Results showed that the students with hearing loss had an advantage at age 10 in nonverbal simultaneous and successive tasks, but a disadvantage in the verbal tasks compared to the hearing students. However, at age 13, students with hearing loss performed poorly in both verbal and nonverbal tasks. In regard to planning tasks, the students with hearing loss not only scored lower compared to the hearing students but also appeared to be using inadequate strategies and investing less effort. Educational implications of these findings are discussed, as is the value of a longitudinal study in determining whether their planning difficulty was developmental or not.

Measuring Stereotypes: A Comparison of Methods Using Russian and American Samples

The stereotypes of Americans and Russians held by American and Russian students were compared by using three measurement techniques: checklist, percentage, and diagnostic ratio. Two additional techniques were used with American samples: prototype and pathfinder. The high level of agreement that was obtained for the checklist, percentage, diagnostic ratio, and prototype techniques suggests that the same type of cognitive processing was elicited by all of these techniques. The pathfinder technique showed that American students' stereotypes of Russians have a more complex structure than their stereotypes of Americans. Russians and Americans generally agreed on the stereotypes of Americans, but differed on the stereotypes of Russians. The stereotypes of both nationalities were predominantly favorable

Assessment of Individual Differences in Preferences for Holistic-Analytic Strategies: Evaluation of Some Commonly Available Instruments

Recently, it has become more acceptable to assume two different types of cognitive processes: analytic, rule-based, and sequential versus holistic, episode-based, or simply "nonanalytic." Results of both educational research and cognitive laboratory research suggest the presence of a holistic-analytic continuum of individual differences in cognitive functioning. The present investigation was designed to compare several potential measures of the holistic-analytic dimension. Evidence for construct validity comes from the convergence of measures that should theoretically assess the holistic-analytic dimension (i.e., sensing, intuiting, judging, and perceiving on Myers-Briggs Type Indicator; the left and right hemispheric preferences of the Human Information Processing Survey; and the Fact Retention, Methodical Study, Holist and Serialist scales of the Inventory of Learning Processes). Construct validity of the holist-analytic dimension was also supported by the divergence of measures assessing a dimension theoretically unrelated to the holistic-analytic construct (i.e., the introversion extraversion scales of the Myers-Briggs and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire). Additional findings revealed a relationship between the Deep and Elaborative Processing scales of the Inventory of Learning Processes and the Integrated scale of the Human Information Processing Survey.

THE AFFECTIVE LEARNING PROCESS AND GIFTEDNESS

Abstract Learning for mastery is a time and energy consuming process that involves different types of cognitive processes and, above all, goal directed behaviour. The cognitive system is designed for knowledge and skill acquisition, but, as several researchers have pointed out, learning is also facilitated or hampered by emotions, moods and feelings. The emotion system is conceptualized as a more primitive processing system that uses gross discriminators to identify quickly problematic and nonproblematic situations. In the last few decades, students’ goal directed behaviour, their emotions and moods, their appraisals and attitudes have been studied extensively, and it has become clear that most students have a strong desire to control their environment, but also to increase their resources and to conserve energy. A framework for studying affective learning processes is outlined, and three key findings to help readers organize their reading on the affective learning process are presented.

Judgments of Sentence Grammatically with Differentiation and Enrichment Strategies

30 students rated the relative grammaticality of isolated sentences twice, with sentences presented repeatedly between the two judgments. Subjects were asked to adopt either a differentiation or an enrichment strategy during a repetition phase. The former strategy involved differentiation by structurally analyzing the sentences, while the latter involved enrichment by supplying situational contexts for the sentences. Analysis showed an interaction between a strategy adopted and the time of judgments such that the subjects instructed to adopt a differentiation strategy tended to use a more stringent criterion on judgments after than before repetition, whereas the subjects asked to adopt an enrichment strategy showed a slight tendency to use a more lenient criterion. These findings indicated that these two types of mental processes are involved in part in the change in criterion for judgments of grammaticality as shown in previous studies.

Levels of emotional awareness: a cognitive-developmental theory and its application to psychopathology.

The authors present a cognitive-developmental theory of emotional awareness that creates a bridge between normal and abnormal emotional states. Their primary thesis is that emotional awareness is a type of cognitive processing which undergoes five levels of structural transformation along a cognitive-developmental sequence derived from an integration of the theories of Piaget and Werner. The five levels of structural transformation are awareness of bodily sensations, the body in action, individual feelings, blends of feelings, and blends of blends of feelings. The authors suggest applications of this model to current unresolved problems in psychiatric theory, research, and practice.

Learning from distance‐teaching materials: a study of students’ mediating responses

It has been suggested that improvements in the quality of distance‐teaching materials could be effected if the mental responses that mediate study of and learning from such materials were known. This project aimed at identifying the types and origins of students’ convert mediating responses to distance‐teaching materials during study sessions. Three one‐half hour study sessions were videotaped for each of four student volunteers in a room set up on the campus. Immediately following each study session stimulated‐recall interviews were conducted, the data from these being audiotaped and then transcribed for further analysis. Interview protocols revealed that approaches to study were influenced by a set of interdependent factors, which, when combined with a set of study strategies, resulted in two broad classes of study orientation. Twenty different types of mental processes were identified, seven of which were used more frequently than the others. Furthermore, textual features which activated mental process...

Interference of Introspection with Thinking in Concept Identification

We examined changes in learning and in the content of verbal reports as a function of the regularity of introspective probes. Using a within-subjects design, concurrent undirected introspection was required on 0%, 50%, or 100% of the trials of a concept-identification task. The data for 18 subjects showed no differences in learning across 3 conditions. Verbal reports were classified according to the types of mental processes they indicated, e.g., hypothesis-testing. Analysis of the proportions of observed types suggested that the attention of subjects under the 100% condition wandered more to thoughts unrelated to the task than under the 50% condition; otherwise, the content of the verbal reports was uniform across these conditions. Undirected concurrent introspection seems to be a noninterfering, useful method for studying the nature of complex thinking.

Social anxiety, anxious self-preoccupation, and recall of self-relevant information.

Theoretical and empirical efforts concerning cognitive processes associated with anxiety have typically emphasized either cognitive deficits (i.e., reduced learning, memory, and task performance) or cognitive excesses (i.e., increased self-focused, ruminative thought). To date, evidence of these two types of cognitive processes has primarily been based on different types of sources (i.e., performance measures vs. self-reports), which precludes direct comparisons of the extent to which cognitive deficits and/or excesses characterize anxiety states. The present study attempted to directly compare the cognitive excesses and deficits associated with social anxiety by operationalizing both types of cognitive phenomena with similar performance measures. A modified self-referent depth-of-processing paradigm was employed. The results indicated that socially anxious individuals in a socially evaluative situation evidenced a specific type of cognitive excess (i.e., concern over evaluations by others) but not cognitive deficits. The results are discussed in the context of person-by-situation models of anxiety and in the context of the nature and treatment of social anxiety.

Utilization of Imposed Structure: The Impact of Reading Competence and Grade Level

Fourth and sixth grade students grouped as good or poor readers were asked to read a story from a certain perspective or with instructions to read carefully. The ability to take a perspective, as measured by skill in differentiating important material on a highlighting task or in reproducing it on a later recall test, was present in both age groups. Reading skill was found to produce significant differences on both types of dependent measures. Further analysis indicated that reading ability differences in recall were related to, but could not be totally accounted for, by the ability to identify important material. A model is proposed claiming that poor readers are too overburdened by lower level reading skills to engage in this type of cognitive processing.

Shifting from conceptual to visual problem solving facilitated by hypnosis.

Abstract The phenomenon of speed reading has revealed that it is possible to convert certain types of mental processes from one sensory modality to another. This article examines an experiment which attempted, through the utilization of hypnosis, to remove certain types of conditioned inhibitors in order to train subjects to convert the conceptual function of multiplying large numbers into a purely visual process. The results of the experiment tend to confirm the hypothesis that if conditioned constraints are effectively removed, mental functioning can be altered.

The multiplicity of thought.

Many writers have distinguished two types of mental processes. One kind of thinking is conscious, straightforward, predictable, and rather pedestrian; the other is confused, rich, productive of novelty, emotionally charged, and generally outside of consciousness. It is suggested that the latter arises from a multiplicity of processes going on together, while the former represents a single sequence among the crowd. These concepts are clarified by showing that sequence and multiplicity arise as alternative modes of organizing computer programs for pattern recognition. Even in the computer, multiple processing exhibits a superior ability to deal with novel or irregular input, while sequential processing appears less wasteful, and better adapted to fully predictable situations.The properties that have been said to distinguish primary and secondary process, autistic and realistic thinking, creativity and constraint, insightful and rote activity, and the like, are shown to follow from the multiplicity of thought. Relevant experimental findings are discussed.