Incongruous item generation effects: a multiple-cue perspective.

In a series of studies, generation effects were obtained under encoding conditions designed to induce incongruous, unrelated item generation. Experiments 1 and 2, using free- and cued-recall measures, respectively, provided evidence that this unrelated generation effect was due to response-specific processing. Experiment 3 demonstrated a lack of relation between free recall and indices of clustering. A preliminary protocol study suggested that Ss generate multiple items in their search for appropriate unrelated responses. In Experiments 4 and 5, conditions designed to produce more extensive multiple generations demonstrated enhanced free recall. These results supported a multiple-cue account of facilitated recall for incongruous item generation. The multiple-cue perspective is consistent with traditional conceptualizations of memory, such as the principle of congruity, and contemporary distinctions between cue-target relational and item-specific processing.

An empirical evaluation of three components of the tetrahedron model of clinical judgment.

The tetrahedron model of clinical judgment (Rock, Bransford, Maisto, and Morey, Clin. Psychol. Rev. 7:645-661, 1987; Rock, Bransford, Morey, and Maisto, Clin. Psychol. Rev. 8:411-416, 1988) provides a framework for identifying factors that may influence the judgments of psychotherapists (e.g., clinical and counseling psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, etc). Three parameters of the model were experimentally manipulated: mode of of presentation of clinical information, patient, and judgment task. Sixteen clinical psychology graduate student therapists evaluated two patients on axis I and axis II of the DSM-III. Judgmental accuracy was influenced by main effects and two- and three-way disordinal interactions among the three model parameters. Additionally, we found that judgemental accuracy was positively related to experience and training. This relationship was evident only when experience was assessed with specific rather than general measures, and when the clinical materials were presented in an audiovideo format and hence resembled the conditions under which the clinicians in the study acquired that training and experience. Implications for the design of training programs that facilitate competency in clinical judgment are discussed.

Differences in judgments of learning difficulty.

Academically successful and less successful fifth graders were asked to make judgments about the ease of understanding and remembering various sentences and were given the opportunity to attempt to remember some of them before being asked to judge new sets of sentences. The results of the first experiment indicate that, at the beginning of the experiment, the successful students were much more likely than their less successful peers to realize that sentences expressing arbitrary relationships were more difficult to remember. These differences became even greater after students were given the opportunity to attempt to remember some of the sentences they had judged initially. The memory performance of the successful students also improved as they became more familiar with the experimental task, but the performance of the less successful students did not. The results of the second experiment showed that less successful students who had received appropriate training were able to use information about the arbitrariness of relationships as the basis for their judgments of learning difficulty. The training also facilitated their ability to remember. Implications of these findings are discussed.