Michelle D. Miller

Northern Arizona University | NAU · Department of Psychology and University College

http://scholars.fhsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=ts

Cognitive psychology has much to contribute to our understanding of the best ways to promote learning and memory in the college classroom. However, cognitive theory has evolved considerably in recent decades, and it is important for instructors to have an up-to-date understanding of these theories, particularly those—such as memory theories—that be...

Previous research has shown that passive voice predominates in mass media reports describing male violence against women. However, there has been little systematic study of narratives describing female violence against men. The authors analyzed the impact of perpetrator gender on verb voice, first in a content analysis of published news stories and...

We conducted a meta-analysis to determine the effectiveness of animal-assisted activities (AAA) and animal-assisted therapy (AAT) for reducing depressive symptoms in humans. To be included in the meta-analysis, studies had to demonstrate random assignment, include a comparison/control group, use AAA or AAT, use a self-report measure of depression,...

Past research indicates several factors influencing teaching evaluation ratings instructors receive. We analyzed teaching evaluations from psychology courses during fall and spring semesters of 2003–2004 to determine if class size, class level, instructor gender, number of publications (faculty instructors), average grade given by the instructor, a...

We experimentally investigated the effect of authorized crib cards on undergraduates multiple-choice exam performance for lower order and higher order questions and on anxiety levels in an upper division child and adolescent development course. Students (N =54) in 2 sections could use crib cards during 2 of the 4 exams. Despite student expectations...

We experimentally investigated the effect of required textbook study guides on undergraduates' multiple-choice exam performance for introductory psychology. Students in 2 sections participated. Students required to complete the study guide performed significantly better than students in the control section. Students who reported completing 75% or m...

Evidence from brain-damaged patients suggests a link between lexical-semantic retention capacity and sentence production. The present study seeks to establish whether lexical-semantic retention capacity changes with normal aging, and whether individual differences in this capacity predict the degree of increased difficulty older speakers have produ...

The present study investigated the scope of planning in speech production by examining onset latencies for sentences describing moving picture displays. The experimental sentences began with either a simple or complex noun phrase, but were matched in length and content words. Results from young and old normal participants replicated previous findin...

Two studies were conducted to test the hypotheses that: (1) news reports of anti-gay attacks would use fewer and vaguer referents to the violence than similar stories about attacks against straight persons; and (2) this milder use of referents would cause readers to perceive less harm done and to blame the perpetrator less. A content analysis of tw...

This comment corrects some inaccuracies, points to some methodological problems, and makes three substantive observations regarding the Altarriba and Soltano (1996) article. First, token individuation theory does not explain what is new and interesting in the Altarriba and Soltano data, namely cross-language semantic facilitation in lists and a lis...

Immediate recall decreases for repeated relative to unrepeated words in rapidly presented spoken lists, a phenomenon known as repetition deafness (RD). The present study examines RD as a test case for a distributed memory account of relations between language and memory. Within the distributed memory framework, general connection-formation processe...

This study concretely illustrates the Birren-Fisher strategy (1991), the use of well-established aging effects to understand fundamental but poorly understood phenomena in mainstream psychology. Our well-established aging effects included inhibition deficits and new learning deficits, and our poorly understood mainstream phenomenon was repetition d...

This research tested hypotheses that news media often report violence against women (VAW) in passive-verb format and that this leads readers to be more accepting of VAW than reports using the active voice. In Study 1, 1,501 verbs from news stories were classified as having active or passive voice. Passive voice use for both VAW (rape) and nonsexual...

This study tested 2 main hypotheses for explaining repetition blindness (RB), a difficulty in encoding and recalling rapidly presented repeated words in sentences. Under 1 hypothesis, RB reflects an inhibitory process and should be more pronounced in young than in older Ss, who typically exhibit diminished inhibitory processes. Under the second hyp...

This study demonstrates a recently predicted cognitive phenomenon known as semantic blindness, an inhibitory effect attributable to concept repetition in the serial recall of rapidly presented sentences. Proficient bilinguals read mixed, Spanish-English sentences, each including a target and a pretarget word. Targets and pretargets were related in...

This research demonstrates a new cognitive phenomenon known as repetition deafness, a difficulty in immediate recall of repeated words in computer-compressed speech Sixty-four subjects heard sentences and lists at four speeded rates 70, 55, 35, and 28 ms/phoneme Each target word in the materials followed a pretarget word that was either identical (...