Biomedical subjects

A J Lambert

Publications and source records attributed to A J Lambert.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1992

Spatial attention and expectancy for colour, category and location: further evidence against the spotlight model.

A study of spatial attention is reported in which different colours and categories of object tended to appear at different locations. Subjects made speeded orientation judgements to alphanumeric characters that could appear either above or below the centre of a display. In the Colour Condition subjects were informed that red characters tended to appear at one location (p = 0.8), while green characters tended to appear at the other. In the Category Condition letters tended to appear at one location, and digits at the other. Before each trial subjects were cued to expect either a red or a green character (Colour Condition); or a letter or a digit (Category Condition). It was found that spatial selectivity varied according to the colour, or category of object presented. The latter finding replicated an earlier report (Lambert 1987). Spatial selectivity was appropriate for the character presented, even when it was in the uncued colour (or category). It is concluded that subjects are able to form and make use of complex attentional expectancies concerning combinations of colour with location, and category with location. Theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed1991

Interhemispheric interaction in the split-brain.

An experiment is reported in which a split-brain patient (LB) was simultaneously presented with two words, one to the left and one to the right of fixation. He was instructed to categorize the right sided word (living vs non-living), and to ignore anything appearing to the left of fixation. LB's performance on this task closely resembled that of normal neurologically intact individuals. Manual response speed was slower when the unattended (left visual field) word belonged to the same category as the right visual field word. Implications of this finding for views of the split-brain syndrome are discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed1991

The self and social judgment: effects of affective reaction and "own position" on judgments of unambiguous and ambiguous information about others.

Ss who differed in the extremity of self-definition ("own position") with respect to a given trait (sociability, independence, or patience) made trait and evaluative judgments of behavioral stimuli that varied in their descriptive implications for that trait. Across 4 experiments, individual differences in trait ratings of unambiguous information were mediated largely by differences in Ss' affective reactions to these stimuli rather than by direct use of own position as a judgmental anchor. When the target information was ambiguous, however, own position influenced trait judgments independently of Ss' affective reactions to these stimuli. These latter effects were moderated by either encoding or informational mechanisms. A theoretical framework is presented that accounts for these results and predicts how effects of self-knowledge on judgments of others should vary across different trait dimensions.

Adult↗

PubMed1990

Cognitive representation of conversations about persons.

Ss listened to a man and woman discuss the behaviors of a third, target person. First, however, they received handwritten sets of trait adjectives that each speaker had ostensibly used to describe the target before engaging in the conversation. Ss with the objective of forming an impression of the target person had better recall of behaviors if they were evaluatively inconsistent with the female speaker's trait description of the target. However, the behaviors' consistency with the male speaker's description of the target had little influence. When Ss listened to the conversation with instructions to infer each speaker's impression of the target, they typically had better recall of behaviors that were inconsistent with trait descriptions provided by the particular speaker who mentioned them. When they were told to form impressions of the speakers themselves, however, Ss had generally better recall of the behaviors mentioned by a given speaker when they were inconsistent with the trait description provided by the other speaker. Existing models of person memory and judgment could not account a priori for either these results or for judgments of the target and speakers.

Adult↗

PubMed1990

Stereotypes and social judgment: the effects of typicality and group heterogeneity.

Two experiments showed that when subjects believed a group to be heterogenous, they based their liking for a particular group member on their liking for the group as a whole, independently of and in addition to the target's behavior, and regardless of the target's typicality. When they believed the group to be homogenous, however, they treated the target's typicality as a favorable or unfavorable attribute, which affected their evaluation. The latter subjects used their group stereotype as a standard of comparison in judging the implications of the target's behavior for a trait to which it was relevant. All subjects' stereotypes had a positive influence on judgments of stereotyped-related traits for which the target's behavior was uninformative. A conceptualization is proposed to account for these findings.

Adult↗