Meaning of Missing Values in Eyewitness Recall and Accident Records

Background: Eyewitness recalls and accident records frequently do not mention the conditions and behaviors of interest to researchers and lead to missing values and to uncertainty about the prevalence of these conditions and behaviors surrounding accidents. Missing values may occur because eyewitnesses report the presence but not the absence of obvious clues/accident features. We examined this possibility. Methodology/Principal Findings: Participants watched car accident videos and were asked to recall as much information as they could remember about each accident. The results showed that eyewitnesses were far more likely to report the presence of present obvious clues than the absence of absent obvious clues even though they were aware of their absence. Conclusions: One of the principal mechanisms causing missing values may be eyewitnesses ’ tendency to not report the absence of obvious features. We discuss the implications of our findings for both retrospective and prospective analyses of accident records, and illustrate the consequences of adopting inappropriate assumptions about the meaning of missing values using the Avaluator Avalanche Accident Prevention Card

Self-Reported Frequency, Content, and Functions of Inner Speech

AbstractThis study obtained information about the frequency, content, and functions of inner speech by asking 380 participants what they typically say to themselves using an open-format thought-listing procedure. Participants mostly reported talking to themselves about themselves—i.e., evaluating the self, emotions, physical appearance, and relationships. Self-reported inner speech was also about individuals close to the self (family, friends, and intimate partner) and one's immediate physical environment. Participants listed inner speech about school, work, sports, and leisure activities. The inner speech functions of self-regulation and mnemonic aid were often mentioned. This represents the first study to explicitly examine self-reported inner speech frequency, content, and functions in adult participants

Student evaluations of teaching: teaching quantitative courses can be hazardous to one's career

Published VersionAnonymous student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are used by colleges and universities to measure teaching effectiveness and to make decisions about faculty hiring, firing, re-appointment, promotion, tenure, and merit pay. Although numerous studies have found that SETs correlate with various teaching effectiveness irrelevant factors (TEIFs) such as subject, class size, and grading standards, it has been argued that such correlations are small and do not undermine the validity of SETs as measures of professors’ teaching effectiveness. However, previous research has generally used inappropriate parametric statistics and effect sizes to examine and to evaluate the significance of TEIFs on personnel decisions. Accordingly, we examined the influence of quantitative vs. non-quantitative courses on SET ratings and SET based personnel decisions using 14,872 publicly posted class evaluations where each evaluation represents a summary of SET ratings provided by individual students responding in each class. In total, 325,538 individual student evaluations from a US mid-size university contributed to theses class evaluations. The results demonstrate that class subject (math vs. English) is strongly associated with SET ratings, has a substantial impact on professors being labeled satisfactory vs. unsatisfactory and excellent vs. non-excellent, and the impact varies substantially depending on the criteria used to classify professors as satisfactory vs. unsatisfactory. Professors teaching quantitative courses are far more likely not to receive tenure, promotion, and/or merit pay when their performance is evaluated against common standards

Student evaluations of teaching: teaching quantitative courses can be hazardous to one's career

Published VersionAnonymous student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are used by colleges and universities to measure teaching effectiveness and to make decisions about faculty hiring, firing, re-appointment, promotion, tenure, and merit pay. Although numerous studies have found that SETs correlate with various teaching effectiveness irrelevant factors (TEIFs) such as subject, class size, and grading standards, it has been argued that such correlations are small and do not undermine the validity of SETs as measures of professors’ teaching effectiveness. However, previous research has generally used inappropriate parametric statistics and effect sizes to examine and to evaluate the significance of TEIFs on personnel decisions. Accordingly, we examined the influence of quantitative vs. non-quantitative courses on SET ratings and SET based personnel decisions using 14,872 publicly posted class evaluations where each evaluation represents a summary of SET ratings provided by individual students responding in each class. In total, 325,538 individual student evaluations from a US mid-size university contributed to theses class evaluations. The results demonstrate that class subject (math vs. English) is strongly associated with SET ratings, has a substantial impact on professors being labeled satisfactory vs. unsatisfactory and excellent vs. non-excellent, and the impact varies substantially depending on the criteria used to classify professors as satisfactory vs. unsatisfactory. Professors teaching quantitative courses are far more likely not to receive tenure, promotion, and/or merit pay when their performance is evaluated against common standards

Rising verbal intelligence scores: Implications for research and clinical practice.

Evidence suggests that scores on various intelligence tests have been rising at a fast rate. To find out whether performance on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) Vocabulary subtest has also been rising, the authors searched major psychology journals for investigations involving healthy younger and older adult participants and collected the reported WAIS Vocabulary scores. The meta-analysis shows that WAIS Vocabulary scores have been rising at the rate of 0.117/year (corresponding to 1.52 IQ points/decade) for younger adults and 0.367/year (corresponding to 4.79 IQ points/decade) for older adults. Mounting evidence suggests that raw scores on various intelli-gence tests have been rising at a fast rate over the last 7 decade

The Influence of Object Relative Size on Priming and Explicit Memory

We investigated the effects of object relative size on priming and explicit memory for color photos of common objects. Participants were presented with color photos of pairs of objects displayed in either appropriate or inappropriate relative sizes. Implicit memory was assessed by speed of object size ratings whereas explicit memory was assessed by an old/new recognition test. Study-to-test changes in relative size reduced both priming and explicit memory and had large effects for objects displayed in large vs. small size at test. Our findings of substantial size-specific influences on priming with common objects under some but not other conditions are consistent with instance views of object perception and priming but inconsistent with structural description views

Transparent Meta-Analysis: Does Aging Spare Prospective Memory with Focal vs. Non-Focal Cues?

Background: Prospective memory (ProM) is the ability to become aware of a previously-formed plan at the right time and place. For over twenty years, researchers have been debating whether prospective memory declines with aging or whether it is spared by aging and, most recently, whether aging spares prospective memory with focal vs. non-focal cues. Two recent meta-analyses examining these claims did not include all relevant studies and ignored prevalent ceiling effects, age confounds, and did not distinguish between prospective memory subdomains (e.g., ProM proper, vigilance, habitual ProM) (see Uttl, 2008, PLoS ONE). The present meta-analysis focuses on the following questions: Does prospective memory decline with aging? Does prospective memory with focal vs. non-focal cues decline with aging? Does the size of age-related declines with focal vs. non-focal cues vary across ProM subdomains? And are age-related declines in ProM smaller than agerelated declines in retrospective memory? Methods and Findings: A meta-analysis of event-cued ProM using data visualization and modeling, robust count methods, and conventional meta-analysis techniques revealed that first, the size of age-related declines in ProM with both focal and non-focal cues are large. Second, age-related declines in ProM with focal cues are larger in ProM proper and smaller in vigilance. Third, age-related declines in ProM proper with focal cues are as large as age-related declines in recall measures of retrospective memory

Transparent Meta-Analysis of Prospective Memory and Aging

Prospective memory (ProM) refers to our ability to become aware of a previously formed plan at the right time and place. After two decades of research on prospective memory and aging, narrative reviews and summaries have arrived at widely different conclusions. One view is that prospective memory shows large age declines, larger than age declines on retrospective memory (RetM). Another view is that prospective memory is an exception to age declines and remains invariant across the adult lifespan. The present meta-analysis of over twenty years of research settles this controversy. It shows that prospective memory declines with aging and that the magnitude of age decline varies by prospective memory subdomain (vigilance, prospective memory proper, habitual prospective memory) as well as test setting (laboratory, natural). Moreover, this meta-analysis demonstrates that previous claims of no age declines in prospective memory are artifacts of methodological and conceptual issues afflicting prior research including widespread ceiling effects, low statistical power, age confounds, and failure to distinguish between various subdomains of prospective memory (e.g., vigilance and prospective memory proper)

Spatial memory changes in adulthood

The main goal of the research was to increase our understanding of spatial memory changes in adulthood. Four questions were examined in two experiments. Do age-related changes in spatial memory occur in real-life situations? If so, do they increase linearly across the adult lifespan? Do older adults benefit more than young adults from being informed about an upcoming memory test? Do age-related changes in performance depend on the type of spatial memory test? The first experiment involved a real-life setting~a science center exhibit on memory. Subjects were 302 visitors to the exhibit (approximately equal numbers of men and women), and ranged in age from 15 to 74 years. They were asked to recollect the locations of items displayed in the exhibit. For these subjects, spatial memory remained stable until about 60 years of age, and then declined sharply. The second experiment, conducted in a laboratory, was designed to examine age-related changes in spatial memory under more controlled conditions, while keeping the tasks as similar as possible to a real-life situation. For that purpose, subjects were asked to play the role of a secretary in a simulated office. Subjects were 64 university undergraduates (mean age = 20.1 years) and 32 adults over 65 years of age (mean age = 71.2 years). Half of subjects in each age-group were informed that spatial memory would be tested, whereas others were not. Subjects were required to recollect the locations of items they had used to complete a series of secretarial tasks, either by indicating their locations on a map of the office (the map test), or by relocating them in the office (the relocation test). The results of this experiment showed that (1) the intentional instructions improved spatial memory test performance of older but not young adults, (2) both older and young adults performed higher on the relocation test than on the map test, but (3) advantage due to the relocation test was larger for older than for young adults. The results of both experiments are discussed within a modified transfer-appropriate-processing (TAP) view (cf., Morris, Bransford, & Franks, 1977). This view claims that performance on any memory test is dependent on the degree of overlap between mental operations employed at study and test (Kolers, 1975, 1979). An extension of this view states (Craik, 1983) that study and test tasks can be arranged on a continuum that reflects the extent to which performance depends on subject-initiated processing, and the extent to which it is initiated and guided by the environment. The environmental support includes the cues present at test and instructions given to subjects (Graf, 1990, 1991). According to the modified TAP view, older adults experience difficulty carrying out selfinitiated processing, and are, therefore, more dependent than young adults on environmental support to initiate and guide processes required for effective remembering (Craik, 1983; Graf, 1990).Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat

Orientation, size, and relative size information in semantic and episodic memory

The time required to identify a common object depends on several factors, especially pre-existing knowledge and episodic representations newly established as a result of a prior study. My research examined how these factors contribute to identification of objects (both studied and non-studied) and to performance on explicit memory tests. The overall goal was to explore the link between memory and object perception. One series of experiments examined influences due to object orientation in the plane of the page. Subjects were shown color photos of objects, and memory was assessed either with an old/new recognition test or with a test that required them to identify objects that were slowly faded in on a computer monitor. The critical variables were the type of photo — each showing either an object with a predominant or cardinal orientation (e.g., helicopter) or a non-cardinal object (e.g., pencil), and the orientation at which the photos were displayed at study and at test (e.g., rotated 0°, 120°, or 240°). For non-studied targets, identification test performance showed a large effect due to display orientation, but only for cardinal objects. For studied targets, study-to-test changes in orientation influenced priming for both non-cardinal and cardinal objects, but orientation specific priming effects (larger priming when study and test orientations matched rather than mismatched) were much larger with cardinal than non-cardinal objects, especially, when their display orientation, at test was unusual (i.e., 120°, 240°). A second series of experiments examined influences due to object size (size of an object presented alone) and relative size (size of an object relative to another object). Size manipulations had a large effect on identification of non-studied objects but study-to- test changes in size had only a minimal effect on priming. In contrast, study1to-test changes in relative size influenced recognition decision speed which is an index of priming. The combined findings suggest that both semantic and episodic representations behave as if they coded orientation but only for cardinal objects. They also suggest that episodic representations code relative size but not size information. The findings are explained by the instance views of memory.Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat