Perceptual-gestural (mis)mapping in serial short-term memory: The impact of talker variability

The mechanisms underlying the poorer serial recall of talker-variable lists (e.g., alternating female–male voices) as compared with single-voice lists were examined. We tested the novel hypothesis that this talker variability effect arises from the tendency for perceptual organization to partition the list into streams based on voice such that the representation of order maps poorly onto the formation of a gestural sequence-output plan assembled in support of the reproduction of the true temporal order of the items. In line with the hypothesis, (a) the presence of a spoken lead-in designed to further promote by-voice perceptual partitioning accentuates the effect (Experiments 1 and 2); (b) the impairment is larger the greater the acoustic coherence is between nonadjacent items: Alternating-voice lists are more poorly recalled than four-voice lists (Experiment 3); and (c) talker variability combines nonadditively with phonological similarity, consistent with the view that both variables disrupt sequence output planning (Experiment 4). The results support the view that serial short-term memory performance reflects the action of sequencing processes embodied within general-purpose perceptual input-processing and gestural output-planning systems

Retrieval from memory: Vulnerable or inviolable?

We show that retrieval from semantic memory is vulnerable even to the mere presence of speech. Irrelevant speech impairs semantic fluency—namely, lexical retrieval cued by a semantic category name—but only if it is meaningful (forward speech compared to reversed speech or words compared to nonwords). Moreover, speech related semantically to the retrieval category is more disruptive than unrelated speech. That phonemic fluency—in which participants are cued with the first letter of words they are to report—was not disrupted by the mere presence of meaningful speech, only by speech in a related phonemic category, suggests that distraction is not mediated by executive processing load. The pattern of sensitivity to different properties of sound as a function of the type of retrieval cue is in line with an interference-by-process approach to auditory distraction

Dynamic cognitive control of irrelevant sound:Increased task engagement attenuates semantic auditory distraction

Two experiments investigated reactive top-down cognitive control of the detrimental influence of spoken distractors semantically related to visually-presented words presented for free recall. Experiment 1 demonstrated that an increase in focal task-engagement—promoted experimentally by reducing the perceptual discriminability of the visual target-words—eliminated the disruption by such distracters of veridical recall and also attenuated the erroneous recall of the distracters. A recall instruction that eliminates the requirement for output-monitoring was used in Experiment 2 to investigate whether increased task-engagement shields against distraction through a change in output-monitoring processes (back-end control) or by affecting the processing of the distracters during their presentation (front-end control). Rates of erroneous distracter-recall were much greater than in Experiment 1 but both erroneous distracter-recall and the disruptive effect of distracters on veridical recall were still attenuated under reduced target-word discriminability. Taken together, the results show that task-engagement is under dynamic strategic control and can be modulated to shield against auditory distraction by attenuating distracter-processing at encoding thereby preventing distracters from coming to mind at test

Planned Unit Development Legislation: A Summary of Neccessary Considerations

The object of this Article is to present some of the basic considerations which must be undertaken prior to developing a local planned unit development ordinance

Target marketing can help attract city residents

While suburban growth continues, city living is regaining popularity. It is common knowledge that urban neighborhoods often attract young, single professionals, but a more precise identification of potential city dwellers could help cities understand and develop their comparative advantages. Now, perhaps more than ever, cities need to know which people want to live in them and how their vision of urban life may be accommodated by public policy. A common concern expressed among urban mayors is that the quality of their city services, especially schools, stacks up poorly against that of most suburbs. Improving public education is often cited as the key to attracting suburbanites to cities. Enhancing school quality is indeed an important element in any urban revitalization effort, but it may be less critical than is commonly assumed. Consider that households made up of married couples with children under 18 now account for only a quarter of the nation\u27s total, down from 4 in 10 households in 1970

A Logic for Non-Deterministic Parallel Abstract State Machines

We develop a logic which enables reasoning about single steps of non-deterministic parallel Abstract State Machines (ASMs). Our logic builds upon the unifying logic introduced by Nanchen and St\"ark for reasoning about hierarchical (parallel) ASMs. Our main contribution to this regard is the handling of non-determinism (both bounded and unbounded) within the logical formalism. Moreover, we do this without sacrificing the completeness of the logic for statements about single steps of non-deterministic parallel ASMs, such as invariants of rules, consistency conditions for rules, or step-by-step equivalence of rules.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1602.0748