Modification of interactive behaviors in chronic mental patients

Four chronic mental patients, residents of a token economy treatment unit, were randomly assigned to an experimental or control condition and attended 10 thirty-minute treatment sessions. For the two experimental subjects, contingent reinforcement was received for interacting with each other according to instructions in four distinct phases of interpersonal behavior: talking to another person, attending and talking to another person, asking and answering questions in a dyad, and working cooperatively in the dyad to solve problems. The two control subjects were instructed to perform the same behaviors but received non-contingent reinforcement. The results indicated a strong contingent reinforcement effect on the performance of the treatment sessions' target behaviors. Several baseline, treatment, and post-treatment response measures indicated that the treatment effects had generalized to other areas of social behavior away from the treatment setting.     

Modification of verbal behavior in speech deficient children

Operant conditioning techniques were applied to the verbal behavior of three speech deficient children. Subjects A and B having no intelligible speech and Subject C having very little. Using candy and a puppet with a 13-yr-old boy (A), it was possible to condition vocalization rate. Using social reinforcement with a 6-yr-old boy (B), it was possible to extinguish animal-like sounds, to condition vocalization rate, and to shape a small vocabulary of syllables, but not to gain discriminative control over word emission. Using varied reinforcers, e.g., candy, praise, repetitions other own responses, and hand clapping with a 13-yr-old girl (C), it was possible to condition rate of verbalization, to establish appropriate mimicking, and to establish naming of five pictures. The results were consistent with the findings of Salzinger et al. (1965) and with those of Kerr et al. (1965).     

Visuospatial and verbal memory in mental arithmetic

Working memory allows complex information to be remembered and manipulated over short periods of time. Correlations between working memory and mathematics achievement have been shown across the lifespan. However, only a few studies have examined the potentially distinct contributions of domain-specific visuospatial and verbal working memory resources in mental arithmetic computation. Here we aimed to fill this gap in a series of six experiments pairing addition and subtraction tasks with verbal and visuospatial working memory and interference tasks. In general, we found higher levels of interference between mental arithmetic and visuospatial working memory tasks than between mental arithmetic and verbal working memory tasks. Additionally, we found that interference that matched the working memory domain of the task (e.g., verbal task with verbal interference) lowered working memory performance more than mismatched interference (verbal task with visuospatial interference). Findings suggest that mental arithmetic relies on domain-specific working memory resources.     

The impact of verbal instructions on goal-directed behaviour

It is common to use verbal instructions when performing complex tasks. To evaluate how such instructions contribute to cognitive control, mixing costs (as a measure of sustained concentration on task) were evaluated in two task-switching experiments combining the list and alternating runs paradigms. Participants responded to bivalent stimuli according to a characteristic explicitly defined by a visually presented instructional cue. The processing of the cue was conducted under four conditions across the two experiments: Silent Reading, Reading Aloud, Articulatory Suppression, and dual mode (visual and audio) presentation. The type of cue processing produced a substantial impact on the mixing costs, where its magnitude was greatest with articulatory suppression and minimal with reading aloud and dual mode presentations. Interestingly, silently reading the cue only provided medium levels of mixing cost. The experiments demonstrate that relevant verbal instructions boost sustained concentration on task goals when maintaining multiple tasks.     

Modification of verbal behavior through variable interval reinforcement in a quasi-therapy situation

Principles from the operant conditioning laboratory were applied to the verbal behavior of female college students. An experimental setting was designed to replicate a psychotherapist's office, and subjects were seen daily in a study using a functional research design. Variable interval reinforcement was employed to modify the rate of emission of positive self-reference statements. Results demonstrated that the verbal, scheduled reinforcement exerted a definite, marked effect on the verbal behavior of the subjects. All subjects conditioned to the schedules. Sequence of scheduling did not appear to be a significant variable. The feasibility of employing such techniques in actual psychotherapy is discussed.     

Personality differences in mental imagery and the effects on verbal memory

This study examined the effects of extraversion and neuroticism on participants’ reported vividness of visual imagery and on their memory performance for concrete and abstract nouns. Groups of extraverts (n = 15) and introverts (n = 15) were selected from a larger original sample and asked to remember a series of concrete and abstract nouns, including a set of lexically ambiguous concrete homonyms (e.g., earth = 1. planet, 2. soil). Extraverts reported more vivid imagery than introverts but this did not translate into better recall for extraverts, even for concrete stimuli. Recall was best for unambiguous concrete nouns, followed by concrete homonyms, then abstract nouns. While initial analyses suggested that there was an interaction between extraversion and the type of word presented, later analyses revealed that neuroticism was the main driver in differences in recall between different word types. While differences in recall were best explained by context availability theory (Schwanenflugel, 1991) rather than dual coding theory (Paivio, 1991), questions remain about the power of either theory to explain the role of individual differences in personality on recall, particularly given that imagery vividness effects were related to extraversion while differences in recall were related to neuroticism. The implications of these findings for future research and theoretical development are discussed.     

Interference between verbal concept formation and spatial mental rotation in female subjects

In this study the relation between spatial cognition and verbal intelligence abilities was examined in case of 52 women. Interference between mental rotation performance and verbal intelligence scores was found. Women with good verbal abilities have lower scores in mental rotation tasks than subjects with poorer verbal abilities. This finding is in accordance with some basic models of a dual-coding system. The spatial functions represented in mental rotation interfered with verbal-based concept formation and lexical knowledge in college women.     

Some aspects of verbal conditioning in psychiatric patients

Using a modification of a verbal conditioning technique reported by Tafiel (1955) it was found that only schizophrenics and normals showed evidence of conditioning, neurotics and depressives showing changes not differing from chance. There was greater evidence of conditioning among Ss aware of the contingency between response and reinforcement, and some tentative evidence for relationships of anxiety and extraversion with verbal conditioning.     

Implications of mental image processing in the deficits of verbal information coding during normal aging]

Our study specifies the contributions of image generation and image maintenance processes occurring at the time of imaginal coding of verbal information in memory during normal aging. The memory capacities of 19 young adults (average age of 24 years) and 19 older adults (average age of 75 years) were assessed using recall tasks according to the imagery value of the stimuli to learn. The mental visual imagery capacities are assessed using tasks of image generation and temporary storage of mental imagery. The variance analysis indicates a more important decrease with age of the concretness effect. The major contribution of our study rests on the fact that the decline with age of dual coding of verbal information in memory would result primarily from the decline of image maintenance capacities and from a slowdown in image generation.     

Some analyses of the verbal encoding deficit of alcoholic Korsakoff patients

Two experiments were designed to assess Korsakoff patients' ability to encode verbal information on the basis of its physical, nominal and semantic properties. The first investigation employed Wickens' release from proactive interference (PI) technique; a procedure that allows an assessment of a subject's ability to encode verbal information on the basis of its semantic properties. It was discovered that on tasks involving only a rudimentary verbal analysis, such as the ability to discriminate letters from numbers, the Korsakoff patients demonstrated a normal release from PI. However, on tasks that required a more sophisticated level of semantic encoding, such as those based on taxonomic class inclusion, the patients failed to show release from PI. The second investigation employed Posner's reaction time technique which assesses a subject's ability to encode the physical and nominal properties of simple verbal materials (letters). The results of this study showed that Korsakoff patients are impaired on even these rudimentary encoding tasks, which led to the proposal that Korsakoff patients' semantic encoding deficit might stem from an initial impairment in the speed at which physical and nominal properties of verbal information are analyzed.     

The elimination of visible behaviour from social interactions: Effects on verbal,nonverbal and interpersonal variables

The study intended to test a number of implications of the alleged communicative functions of nonverbal behaviours. Four sets of specific hypotheses were defined under the general expectation of important effects of the suppression of visible behaviours from a channel of communication. Pairs of subjects were requested to interact either face-to-face or through a wooden screen depriving them of reciprocal visibility. Dependent variables comprised nonverbal behaviours, indices of paralinguistic, syntactic, grammatical and content aspects of the speech, and ratings of the partner and of the interpersonal situation. In spite of the number and variety of measurements, differences in line with the predictions were extremely rare. It is concluded that, better than the communicative ones, other functions such as assistance to the speech encoding processes, probably account for the abundance of nonverbal behaviours among speaking subjects.