Antecedent Selection: Comparing Simplified and Typical Verbal Antecedents for Children with Autism

This study measured the differential effects of simplified and typical verbal antecedents on acquisition of picture discriminations for four preschool children with autism. During baseline probes, participants emitted no correct selection responses to pictures of common stimuli during either simplified or typical verbal antecedent conditions. Using an adapted alternating treatments design during training, instructors presented a simplified verbal antecedent (i.e., “Give me car”) or a typical verbal antecedent (i.e., “One of these is a car. Which one is it?”), and differentially reinforced participants’ correct selection responses given the target picture and two non-targets. Results showed that one participant emitted more correct responses during simplified than typical verbal antecedent conditions, one participant emitted more correct responses during typical than simple verbal antecedent conditions, and there was no clear difference for the other two participants.     

Referential Set Presentation Effects on Complementation by 6-Year-Olds

What difficulties do children encounter when responding to complementation instructions? The responses of 50 children to six complementation requests were examined. For half of the children, the objects in the referential set were pooled, and for the other half, they were physically separated by category (pencils were presented in a pencil box, buttons in a sewing kit, and balls of yarn in a knitting basket). Reinforcing the identifying status of the semantic property by separating the objects into categories led to an increase in the number of responses bearing on the subset designated in the instructions (e.g., in response to “Give me everything that is not a black button,” the children handed over only the nonblack buttons). In contrast, older children gave responses based on the entire set. The meaning attributed by children to object properties and the effects of that attribution on processing mode merit further study.     

A community psychology of object meanings: Identity negotiation during disaster recovery

What do material goods intended for personal consumption mean to community? We use the extreme example of natural disaster recovery in a community to explore this question. Our work describes how members make sense of material objects that transition from private to public possessions (damaged goods) and public to private possessions (donated goods). By blending consumer and community psychology perspectives with our narratives, we employ a three-dimensional framework for analyzing object meanings: (1) material objects as agents of communitas (a shared sense of “we”), (2) material objects as agents of individualism (a focus on “me”), and (3) material objects as agents of opposition (the “we” that speaks for “me” and “us” versus “them”). This theoretical frame allows us to show how different conceptions of identity lead to conflicting meanings of objects within community, and to explain how and why object meanings shift as objects move across time and space from private to public and from scarcity to abundance. We also provide implications for coping with disasters that consider collective and individual identities as well as oppositional stances in between.     

Fluctuations in recall across successive test trials

The purpose of the experiment was to determine whether item fluctuation (intertrial forgetting and spontaneous recovery) depends upon the time allowed for recall and/or the demand characteristics of the experimental situation (manipulated via instructions to S). One hundred. and forty-four university undergraduates studied a 36-item list and then had two successive recall trials which were 9, 36, or 144 sec in duration. On the second recall trial, Ss were instructed to recall previously recalled items only (“old”), previously nonrecalled items only (“new”), or both previously recalled items and previously nonrecalled items (“both”). The results suggest two conclusions: (1) Although recall trial duration affects the overall amount of recall, it does not affect the amount of item fluctuation; and (2) an instruction to recall only “old” items or to recall only “new” items results in suppression of the nonrequested items without a corresponding facilitation for the requested items.     

Evasion, private events, and pragmatism: A Reply to Moore's response to my review of Conceptual Foundations of Radical Behaviorism

Moore's screed in response to my review of his book uses several rhetorical tricks to counter criticism without actually addressing it: he tries to preempt the transparency of his own orthodoxy by groundlessly accusing me of orthodoxy; he caricatures my criticisms to make them appear obviously wrong; he professes lack of understanding so as to dodge having to attempt a genuine response; and he engages in pejorative labeling to dismiss the criticisms without analysis. From a scientific and pragmatic point of view, private events are a mistake, precisely because they are private. They cannot serve as independent variables, as Moore suggests, because they cannot be measured; “private independent variable” is a contradiction in terms. When we carefully examine locutions like “observe” and “report on,” we discover that they entail only public verbal and nonverbal behavior, not objects and not private events as objects. A person in pain is not reporting on anything, is engaging in public verbal and nonverbal pain‐behavior, and an infant or a dog may be considered to be in pain. The public behavior is all that matters, because determining whether a person is really in pain privately is impossible. The same is true of any private event, and the control of the public behavior on which the verbal community comments lies in the public environment. We cannot have two sets of principles, one for verbal behavior and one for nonverbal behavior or one for humans and one for other animals.     

Conflict in object affordance revealed by grip force

Viewing objects can result in automatic, partial activation of motor plans associated with them—“object affordance”. Here, we recorded grip force simultaneously from both hands in an object affordance task to investigate the effects of conflict between coactivated responses. Participants classified pictures of objects by squeezing force transducers with their left or right hand. Responses were faster on trials where the object afforded an action with the same hand that was required to make the response (congruent trials) compared to the opposite hand (incongruent trials). In addition, conflict between coactivated responses was reduced if it was experienced on the preceding trial, just like Gratton adaptation effects reported in “conflict” tasks (e.g., Eriksen flanker). This finding suggests that object affordance demonstrates conflict effects similar to those shown in other stimulus–response mapping tasks and thus could be integrated into the wider conceptual framework on overlearnt stimulus–response associations. Corrected erroneous responses occurred more frequently when there was conflict between the afforded response and the response required by the task, providing direct evidence that viewing an object activates motor plans appropriate for interacting with that object. Recording continuous grip force, as here, provides a sensitive way to measure coactivated responses in affordance tasks.     

Curious Objects: How Visual Complexity Guides Attention and Engagement

Some things look more complex than others. For example, a crenulate and richly organized leaf may seem more complex than a plain stone. What is the nature of this experience—and why do we have it in the first place? Here, we explore how object complexity serves as an efficiently extracted visual signal that the object merits further exploration. We algorithmically generated a library of geometric shapes and determined their complexity by computing the cumulative surprisal of their internal skeletons—essentially quantifying the “amount of information” within each shape—and then used this approach to ask new questions about the perception of complexity. Experiments 1–3 asked what kind of mental process extracts visual complexity: a slow, deliberate, reflective process (as when we decide that an object is expensive or popular) or a fast, effortless, and automatic process (as when we see that an object is big or blue)? We placed simple and complex objects in visual search arrays and discovered that complex objects were easier to find among simple distractors than simple objects are among complex distractors—a classic search asymmetry indicating that complexity is prioritized in visual processing. Next, we explored the function of complexity: Why do we represent object complexity in the first place? Experiments 4–5 asked subjects to study serially presented objects in a self-paced manner (for a later memory test); subjects dwelled longer on complex objects than simple objects—even when object shape was completely task-irrelevant—suggesting a connection between visual complexity and exploratory engagement. Finally, Experiment 6 connected these implicit measures of complexity to explicit judgments. Collectively, these findings suggest that visual complexity is extracted efficiently and automatically, and even arouses a kind of “perceptual curiosity” about objects that encourages subsequent attentional engagement.     

Temporal buffering and visual capacity: The time course of object formation underlies capacity limits in visual cognition

Capacity limits are a hallmark of visual cognition. The upper boundary of our ability to individuate and remember objects is well known but—despite its central role in visual information processing—not well understood. Here, we investigated the role of temporal limits in the perceptual processes of forming “object files.” Specifically, we examined the two fundamental mechanisms of object file formation—individuation and identification—by selectively interfering with visual processing by using forward and backward masking with variable stimulus onset asynchronies. While target detection was almost unaffected by these two types of masking, they showed distinct effects on the two different stages of object formation. Forward “integration” masking selectively impaired object individuation, whereas backward “interruption” masking only affected identification and the consolidation of information into visual working memory. We therefore conclude that the inherent temporal dynamics of visual information processing are an essential component in creating the capacity limits in object individuation and visual working memory.     

Living in with Normal Families

Connie Hansen participated in my project, “Methodology for Studying Family Interaction,” in the mid 1960s. One of the purposes of that project was to compare several groups of families, including “normals.” Connie suggested that it might provide a rich source of data if she were to “live in” with a few of the “normal” families and observe them day to day on their own territory. (A year or so before, Dr. Jules Henry had given a talk to the MRI staff about living-in with “schizogenic” families, and I believe that Connie had discussed her idea with him.) Connie was an experienced family therapist — she was one of Virginia Satir's first students — and a most perceptive observer. She lived with three “normal” families for a week each during 1966–67; she was excited by the wealth of material and exhausted by the experience. She tried to develop a group of central themes from her data and gave me a preliminary draft of a paper in 1969. It clearly contained a number of important observations about the complexities and subtleties of family systems and some beginning attempts at conceptualization. She struggled for years to clarify and elaborate on her material. Several times she sent me portions and fragments of new drafts, each with additional insights, but she was never satisfied with her efforts. It seems a fitting tribute to Connie — she died early in 1979 — to attempt to put together her various drafts. We wanted to publish this very important material in a readable form and yet still preserve the immediateness, enthusiasm, and vividness of her observations. I hope, that if she were to read it, she would not be overly critical of this final draft. JULES RISKIN, M.D. It is a special privilege for me to participate in this posthumous publication of Connie Hansen's unique contribution to the further knowledge of family interaction. She died before the material could be published. I feel particular gratitude to the young woman who entered my first training program in 1961 at the Mental Research Institute. This was a time when such training seemed “far out” and was regarded as “probably only a fad.” She was willing to face the risks inherent to her professional standing by choosing to do this training. It was this same courage together with her imagination and curiosity and her willingness to document her experience without judging it that resulted in the article now being published. Farewell, Connie, and thank you for your presence in my life. VIRGINIA M.SATIR     

Self as a second-order object: Reinterpreting the Jamesian “Me”

Existing definitions of the self can be lumped into three groups: self as self-reflectivity, self as self-concept, and self as the individual. This article traces current disagreements over the definition of the self to a crucial ambiguity in William James's original delineation of the “Me.” Implicit in James's delineation was a distinction between first-order objects and second-order objects: while first-order objects are things as they are, independent of the perception of a knowing subject, second-order objects are things as perceived by a knowing subject. This article makes this distinction explicit and argues that the self is a second-order object associated with the first-person or “emic” perspective. Defined as the empirical existence of the individual (first order) perceived by the individual as “me” or “mine” (second order), the self is distinguished from the “I” which is the mental capacity for self-reflection; the self-concept which is the mental representation of the individual's existence; and the individual which is the empirical referent of the self-concept. As a second-order object, the “Me,” i.e., the self, is the unity of the existence and perception of the individual.     

Size matters: Bigger is faster

A largely unexplored aspect of lexical access in visual word recognition is “semantic size”—namely, the real-world size of an object to which a word refers. A total of 42 participants performed a lexical decision task on concrete nouns denoting either big or small objects (e.g., bookcase or teaspoon). Items were matched pairwise on relevant lexical dimensions. Participants' reaction times were reliably faster to semantically “big” versus “small” words. The results are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms, including more active representations for “big” words, due to the ecological importance attributed to large objects in the environment and the relative speed of neural responses to large objects.     

The effects of sex-Typed labeling on preschool children's information-Seeking and retention

When preschool children are exposed to novel objects, will their tactual and verbal information seeking about these objects and the amount of information they remember about these objects be influenced by whether an adult labels them as things “for girls” or “for boys”? The findings reveal that children actually explored less frequently, asked fewer questions, and recalled the names of objects less frequently when the objects were labeled for the opposite sex than when they were labeled either for their own sex or for both sexes. The results are discussed both in terms of implications for adults who aim to broaden the scope of learning available to children and in terms of the need for additional research to clarify the relation between sex-typed labeling and memory mechanisms involved in facilitating or inhibiting recall.     

Physicalism and the sortalist conception of objects

Many hold an Aristotelian metaphysic of objects: fundamentally, objects fall under sortals and have persistence conditions befitting their sort. Though sometimes offered as a theory of material objects, I argue this view is in fact incompatible with physicalism. Call a ‘sortal’ a kind of object, a ‘sortal identity’ a particular’s nature specified in sortal terms, and ‘sortal properties’ properties that are determined by an object’s sortal identity, such as its persistence conditions. From here the argument runs as follows. Something is physical only if it is physically fundamental or is determined by what is physically fundamental (P1), but sortal identities and properties are neither physically fundamental (P2) nor determined by the physically fundamental (P3). I defend each premise in turn. P1 falls out of the standard conception of physicalism. Rejecting P2 is tantamount to positing Aristotelian substantial forms and formal causes—which are themselves incompatible with physicalism. I defend P3 by showing that extant solutions to “the grounding problem”—the problem of showing how (nonfundamental) sortal properties are determined by (nonsortal) physical properties—are either physicalistically unacceptable, or else physicalistically acceptable but opposed to the sortalist metaphysic.     

Growing Up With Hatred: A Psychoanalytic Developmental Perspective

This article looks at how hatred affects development: how children may come to hate, the impact of hatred on a child’s development, the evolving awareness of hatred, and how we may try to insulate a child from being the object of hatred and prejudice. What is suggested is that we aid children in developing a “not REALLY me” me; one akin to the “me” that a psychoanalyst develops in response to being the object of transference.     

Are objects required for object-files? Roles of segmentation and spatiotemporal continuity in computing object persistence

Two central tasks of visual processing are (1) to segment undifferentiated retinal images into discrete objects, and (2) to represent those objects as the same persisting individuals over time and motion. Here we explore the interaction of these two types of processing in the context of object files—mid-level visual representations that “stick” to moving objects on the basis of spatiotemporal properties. Object files can be revealed by object-specific preview benefits (OSPBs), wherein a “preview” of information on a moving object speeds the recognition of that information at a later point when it appears again on the same object (compared to when it reappears on a different moving object), beyond display-wide priming. Here we explore the degree of segmentation required to establish object files in the first place. Surprisingly, we find that no explicit segmentation is required until after the previews disappear, when using purely motion-defined objects (consisting of random elements on a random background). Moreover, OSPBs are observed in such displays even after moderate (but not long) delays between the offset of the preview information and the onset of the motion. These effects indicate that object files can be established without initial static segmentation cues, so long as there is spatiotemporal continuity between the previews and the eventual appearance of the objects. We also find that top-down strategies can sometimes mimic OSPBs, but that these strategies can be eliminated by novel manipulations. We discuss how these results alter our understanding of the nature of object files, and also why researchers must take care to distinguish “true OSPBs” from “illusory OSPBs”.     

ON THE REINFORCING EFFECTS OF THE CONTENT OF VERBAL ATTENTION

During a functional analysis, a boy with autism and oppositional defiant disorder displayed destructive behavior that was maintained by attention in the form of verbal reprimands (e.g., “Don't hit me”). In a second analysis, contingent verbal reprimands produced higher rates of the behavior than contingent statements that were unrelated to the target response (e.g., “It is sunny today”), suggesting that some forms of attention were more reinforcing than others. A treatment based on these analyses reduced the behavior to near-zero levels.     

Frida Kahlo and Object Choice: A Daughter the Rest of Her Life

I argue that the entry into the triangular “oedipal” situation for girls does not necessitate a change in object, as Freud proposed, but an addition of object. My argument rests on different strands in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking: an appreciation of the complexity of internal objects, a reconsideration of the concept of bisexuality, an understanding of the role of multiple identifications in gender identity and object choice, and a reexamination of the triangular situation for girls. I focus on the life of Frida Kahlo—as revealed in biographies, journals, and art—to elucidate the layering of internal object choices. I conclude that object choice—heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual—represents a composite or compromise formation.     

The gender-stereotyped nature of christmas toys received by 36-, 48-, and 60-month-old children: A comparison between nonrequested vs requested toys

This research provides normative information on the gender-stereotyped nature of Christmas toys that children received from their parents. A list of over 500 toys was obtained from the parents of 86 children between the ages of 31 and 65 months. The toys were rated and placed into gender-stereotyped groups, and were categorized into child requested or nonrequested groups. It was found that the children had considerable input into the types of toys they received from their parents for Christmas, requesting approximately one half of the toys. Toys the children requested were judged to be more gender stereotyped than nonrequested toys. Very few boys received either requested or nonrequested toys considered stereotyped for the opposite sex. In contrast, one third of the girls received at least one toy judged to be stereotyped for the opposite sex. Also, boys appeared to develop sex-typed interests in toys at an earlier age than girls, and they requested 72%, 76%, and 75% gender-stereotyped toys in the corresponding age groups of 36-, 48-, and 60-months. The girls' sex-typed interests in toys lagged behind the boys', with girls requesting 29%, 51%, and 73% gender-stereotyped toys for the same age groups. In the nonrequested condition, parents selected types of toys judged to be traditionally more sex role neutral and emphasized musical instruments, art supplies, and educational toys for their sons and educational toys for their daughters.     

Establishing equivalence–equivalence analogical relations via tact and listener training

We investigated the role of verbal behavior on the emergence of analogy-type responding as measured via equivalence–equivalence relations. In Experiment 1, 8 college students learned to label arbitrary stimuli as, “vek,” “zog,” and “paf”, and in Experiment 2, 8 additional participants learned to select these stimuli when hearing their names in an auditory–visual matching-to-sample (MTS) task. Experimenters tested for the emergence of relational tacts (i.e., “same” and “different”) and equivalence–equivalence relations (analogy tests) via visual–visual MTS. Half of the participants were exposed to a think-aloud procedure. Even though they all passed analogy tests while tacting stimuli relationally, only participants exposed to tact training (Experiment 1) did so without the need for remediation. The results of these experiments confirm that individual discriminative and relational control of stimuli established through verbal behavior training is sufficient to produce equivalence–equivalence analogical responding, advancing the analysis of complex cognitive (problem-solving) phenomena.     

ESTABLISHING GENERATIVE YES/NO RESPONSES IN DEVELOPMENTALLY DISABLED CHILDREN

We evaluated the effects of two procedures for teaching four developmentally disabled children to respond yes/no appropriately. During baseline, tutoring was conducted in which five known items were individually presented with the question, “Is this a_____?”, followed either by access to requested items or by remedial prompting contingent on responding. When tutoring did not improve performance, instruction was embedded in the regular classroom activities. In this condition, items requested by students were either presented or withheld on the basis of their response to the question, “Do you want ______?”. Increases in correa responding were confirmed by a multiple-baseline design across all four students and were maintained with the introduction of new items. However, generalization to “Is this a_____?” questions did not occur in the tutoring setting until specifically programmed. Subsequently, students also demonstrated appropriate yes/no responding to questions involving actions, possession, and spatial relations.