Temporal contiguity and contingency judgments: A Pavlovian analogue

The two experiments reported examine the role of temporal contiguity on judgments of contingency in a human analogue of the Pavlovian task. The data show that the effect of the actual delay on contingency judgment depends on the observer’s expectation regarding the delay. for a fixed contingency between the cue and the outcome, ratings of the contingency are higher when the actual delay is congruent with the observer’s expectation than when it is incongruent. We argue that our data can be understood within the context of the temporal coding hypothesis.     

Temporal contiguity and the judgement of causality by human subjects

Three experiments examined the role of the degree of temporal contiguity between an action and an outcome in human causality judgement. In all the experiments subjects were required to perform an action—pressing a key on a computer keyboard—and to judge the extent to which the action caused an outcome on the computer screen to occur. The action and outcome occurred on a free-operant schedule. In the first experiment a 2-sec delay between the action and outcome reduced causality judgements relative to a situation in which there was no delay. In the second experiment judgements in conditions with delays of 0, 4, 8, and 16 sec were compared with judgements in conditions in which the same pattern of outcomes occurred non-contingently with respect to the subjects' responding. In both of these experiments the events were controlled by random ratio schedules, following the procedure of Wasserman, Chatlosh, and Neunaber (1983), in which each condition was divided into 1-sec intervals. In the third experiment judgements in conditions with delays of 0, 2, 4, or 8 sec were compared in a continuous procedure rather than one divided into 1-sec intervals. In all experiments the increasing delays led to progressively lower judgements of causality. The results are related to three accounts of the mechanism underlying human causality judgement and are also compared with results from analogous animal conditioning studies.     

Conditioned ethanol aversion in rats induced by voluntary wheel running,forced swimming,and electric shock: An implication for aversion therapy of alcoholism

This study was planned to demonstrate rats’ acquisition of aversion to ethanol solution consumed before voluntary running, forced swimming, or electric shock delivery. Wistar rats under water deprivation were allotted to four groups of eight rats each, and all rats were allowed to drink 5% ethanol solution for 15 min. Immediately after the ethanol drinking, rats of Group Run were put into the individual running wheels for 15 min, those of Group Swim were put into the individual swimming pools for 15 min, those of Group Shock received electric shocks for 15 min (15 0.45-mA shocks of 0.7s with the intershock interval of 1 min) in the individual small chambers, and those of Group Control were directly returned back to the home cages. This procedure was repeated for six days, followed by a two-day choice test of ethanol aversion where a bottle containing 5% ethanol solution and a bottle of tap water were simultaneously presented for 15 min. In the test, Groups Run, Swim, and Shock drank ethanol solution significantly less than tap water, while Group Control drank both fluids equally. The effects of running, swimming, and shock were equivalent. The successful demonstration of acquired ethanol aversion induced by exercise (running and swimming) or shock in rats suggests an avenue for clinical application of exercise and shock treatments for human alcoholics, though there are many issues to be resolved before the practical use.     

Behavior analysis of cigarette smoking

Patterns of cigarette smoking, treated as series of discrete events in time, were investigated with a variety of quantitative techniques designed to characterize individual subject smoking series and to illuminate the relationship between cigarette smoking and environmental events. Data were collected from a total of 35 subjects who were either participants in residential laboratory studies or in a smoking cessation program. Cigarette smoking events were found to be fairly irregularly distributed with respect to time within individual subject series. However, strong dependencies were found between the occurrence in time of individual acts of cigarette smoking and coffee drinking. In addition, the distribution and frequency of smoking events throughout one-hour activity sequences were found to be dependent upon the nature of the activity, and the temporal scheduling of activities was found to affect several quantitative indices of smoking patterns.     

Prevalence of cigarette smoking in Iran.

The current research assessed the prevalence of cigarette smoking in Shiraz, Iran by randomly selecting 1,335 subjects (782 men and 553 women) from the city for a face-to-face interview and completion of a questionnaire. Of the participants, 205 (26%) of the men and 20 (3.6%) of the women reported being current smokers. The mean ages of smokers and nonsmokers were 41.8 and 37.0 yr., respectively (range between 16 and 90 years for smokers and nonsmokers). The mean age of starting to smoke cigarettes was 21.3 yr. (range of 10 to 60). The most common reasons for current cigarette smoking were Need to avoid withdrawal symptoms, Release of tension, and Pleasurable purposes. Foreign filter-tipped cigarettes were the most common type consumed. The mean number of cigarettes per day was 13.4 (SD = 10.3). Reports for onset of cigarette smoking included Modeling, Release of tension, and Pleasurable purposes. Cigarette smoking was reported by more males than females. The most common reason for onset of cigarette smoking was different from that for current smoking. Frequencies of smokers within age groups were varied.     

Temporal contiguity and ageing: The role of memory organization in cognitive decline

The temporal contiguity effect is the tendency to form associations between items presented in nearby study positions. In the present study, we explored whether temporal contiguity predicted conversion to cognitively unimpaired-declining (CUD) status from a baseline of unimpaired older adults. Data from 419 participants were drawn from the Wisconsin Registry of Alzheimer’s Prevention (WRAP) data set and analysed with binary logistic regressions. Temporal contiguity was calculated using the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test. Other predictors included age, years of education, sex, APOE-ε4 status, and other measures of memory recall. Lower temporal contiguity predicted conversion to CUD after accounting for covariates. These findings support the hypothesis that temporal organization in memory is related to cognitive decline and suggest that temporal contiguity may be used for studies of early detection.     

Evaluation of a cigarette holder for use in analytical smoking machines

A cigarette holder that simulates the lips of a human smoker has been tested for use in measurements of yields of tar, nicotine, and carbon monoxide. In this study, we tested five different brands of cigarettes that ranged in tar yield from 1 to 15 mg per cigarette. The dependence of the yields and ventilation rates on insertion depth and pressure exerted on the mouthpiece of the cigarette were investigated.