Children's avoidance responses to three probabilities of threatened consequences

Children's avoidance responses were conditioned and then extinguished in a laboratory analog of a social threat situation. Aversive events (story interruptions) were programmed to follow either 100% (group E100) of the signals (threats), 60% (group E60) of the signals, or 20% (group E20) of the signals during acquisition. The subjects could avoid the signal and/or the aversive event by responding with lever presses above criterion level. Results indicated that groups E100 and E60 were generally not different from each other but avoided significantly more interruption and signals and responded at a higher rate than group E20. Groups E100 and E60 both shifted their responding from approximately equivalent probabilities of signal and interruption avoidance to relatively greater avoidance of interruptions during acquisition, and then shifted back to equivalent probabilities of signal and interruption avoidance during extinction. Results were discussed in terms of the function of threats as discriminative stimuli.     

Comprehension,selective imitation,and the CIP hypothesis

The role of comprehension training in the selective imitation of indirect-direct object sentences was assessed for six preschool children. A modeling condition resulted in normal usage of indirect-direct object sentences for five of six subjects, but reversed usage was not obtained when modeling was reversed. Subsequent receptive comprehension training on normal and reversed forms of indirect-direct object sentences resulted in generalization to the productive mode. These results were related to an hypothesis about language acquisition in which selective imitation is a function of comprehension.     

The development of communication: Attribute variation leads to contrast failure

Groups of 5-year-olds in two experiments described multidimensional triangles for a listener. The attribute differentiating referent triangles from nonreferent triangles in Experiment I was constant across trials for the simple condition group, while any one of three attributes was distinctive on a given trial for the complex condition group. One-adjective messages by subjects in the simple condition were virtually always informative; in the complex group, such messages were predominantly ambiguous. The boundaries of the variation effect were assessed in Experiment II. In addition to the simple-complex variation of the relevant attributes, the values of the irrelevant attributes either varied across trials in the diverse groups or remained constant in the constant groups. One-adjective messages were informative only in the simple-constant group; in the other groups, such messages were predominantly ambiguous. Thus, young children can base their communications on a comparative analysis of stimulus arrays, but performance deteriorates when there is any variation in relevant or irrelevant attributes. These results were discussed in relation to various theories of the development of meaning and communication: the cognitive overload theory, the broad context theory, and the perceptual saliency theory.     

Effects of a prosocial televised example on children's helping

The possibility that regularly broadcast entertainment television programs can facilitate prosocial behavior in children was investigated. Thirty first-grade children, 15 boys and 15 girls, were individually exposed to one of three half-hour television programs: a program from the Lassie series which included a dramatic example of a boy helping a dog, a program from the Lassie series devoid of such an example, or a program from the family situation comedy series, the Brady Bunch. The effects of the programming were assessed by presenting each child with a situation that required him to choose between continuing to play a game for self-gain and helping puppies in distress. Children exposed to the Lassie program with the helping scene helped for significantly more time than those exposed to either of the other programs.     

The effect of orienting activity on memory for pictures and words in children and adults

Second and fifth grade children and adults were shown either pictures or words to study, and were tested with both pictures and words in a forced-choice recognition task. Prior to presentation of each study item, subjects were asked questions designed to orient them to the acoustic, schematic, or conceptual characteristics of the item, or were asked no questions at all (neutral condition). In addition, at recognition, each study item (target) was paired with a distractor related to the target either acoustically, schematically, conceptually, or not at all (neutral). The results show that deficits in the kinds of encoding operations performed are not responsible for developmental differences in memory performance, but suggest that young children differ from adults in terms of focused attention and direct access to semantic representations.     

Effects of US-Presentation and CS-termination contingencies on avoidance extinction following partial and continuous reinforcement

The present study assessed the role of both the US-presentation (punishment) and CS-termination contingencies on the maintenance of the shuttlebox avoidance responding in gerbils following acquisition under either partial reinforcement (PR) or continuous reinforcement (AV). Following PR, a stronger relationship obtained between delay of CS termination CR frequency than was found between delay of punishment and extinction performance. Following AV training, however, delay of CS termination and delay of punishment were equally effective determinants of avoidance extinction. These results were interpreted in terms of both the enhanced efficacy of the CS-termination contingency, possibly due to its increased informational value, and the attenuation of punishment suppression in PR-trained Ss.     

Interrater agreement for reviews for Developmental Review

Reviewer reliability is examined for the first 2 years of operation of Developmental Review. Using the statistic, Finn's r, summary recommendations on publishability are shown to be higher in reliability than previously reported for other journals. Separate rating scales are shown to be less reliable than summary recommendations. Finn's r is compared with the intraclass correlation coefficient and shown to be a better method for examining reviewer agreement across different journals. Potential causes of high reviewer agreement for Developmental Review are discussed, and the importance of the distinction between reliability and validity of reviews is noted.