Contextual Control in Visuospatial Perspective‐Taking Skills in Adults with Intellectual Disabilities

The aim of this study was to teach left/right (Experiment 1) and near/far (Experiment 2) discrimination with reference both to self and to another person. The procedures used involved teaching discrimination in expressive language (speaker behavior) and then testing the transfer of learning into receptive language (listener behavior). A total of six intellectually disabled adults took part in the study, four in Experiment 1 and two in Experiment 2. The results showed that the subjects learned the target behavior in expressive language and performed correctly in tests to confirm the transfer of learning to receptive language. Experiments to analyze the function of the stimuli involved in receptive language share a certain amount of common ground with research into conditional discrimination under contextual control. The procedures used in such experiments may additionally enhance the teaching of visuospatial perspective‐taking skills. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stage and Contextual Approaches to Development in Professional Supervision

This paper discusses supervision as a means of professional and personal development in adulthood and analyzes its relevant mechanisms and processes. By using several theoretical concepts of development the stage and contextual approaches to supervision are discussed. While the stage approach describes the movement of supervisee, supervisor, and supervision relationship along perceivable and predictable stages, the contextual approach understands the development of an adult as a progression towards increased differentiation and integration of some of its functions, to which experiences, the context of one's life, and one's own activity contribute a great deal.     

认知发展研究趋势的探讨

该文阐明了认知科学、建构主义和新皮亚杰学派对认知发展研究的影响,着重论述了新皮亚杰学派对认知发展研究的新趋势及主要观点,并对这些趋势予以了较为详尽的评述,以期为认知发展心理学家重新审视和思考原有认知发展理论假设的合理性、提出新的假设和新的研究方向有所启示。     

Acquisition of Reading and Intellectual Development Disorder

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - We propose a review of the literature of the studies investigating reading acquisition in intellectual deficiency (ID), with particular focus on the...     

Contextual conditioning

Eastern and Western interpretations of contextual control of phasic conditional responses (transswitching) are contrasted. The Eastern (Asratyan, 1965) approach emphasizes the role of the tonic conditional stimulus and the (hypothetical) tonic response it evokes. The Western (Lachnit, 1986) approach emphasizes the role of compound conditional stimuli. Although Lachnit showed that transswitching-like results can be obtained without a tonic stimulus, attempts to simulate transswitching experiments using a computer model of the Rescorla-Wagner theory (Kimmel and Lachnit, 1988) have shown that predictions from the theory approximate empirical results in human classical conditioning only when the tonic stimulus is given far greater weight than the phasic stimulus. In other words, only when the Rescorla-Wagner theory is made more like Asratyan’s theory, can the compound conditional stimulus approach account for real empirical transswitching data.     

Contextual cues in selective listening

Two messages were presented dichotically and subjects were asked to “shadow” whatever they heard on one ear. Somewhere in the middle the two passages were switched to the opposite ears. Subjects occasionally repeated one or two words, at the break, from the wrong ear, but never transferred to it for longer than this. The higher the transition probabilities in the passage the more likely they were to do this. One explanation might be that the “selective filter” (Broadbent, 1958) acts by selectively raising thresholds for signals from the rejected sources rather than acting as an all-or-none barrier.     

Longitudinal Changes in Intellectual Development in Children with Fragile X Syndrome

Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine the development of intellectual functioning in 145 school-age pairs of siblings. Each pair included one child with Fragile X syndrome (FXS) and one unaffected sibling. All pairs of children were evaluated on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition (WISC-III) at time 1 and 80 pairs of children received a second evaluation at time 2 approximately 4 years later. Compared to their unaffected siblings, children with FXS obtained significantly lower percentage correct scores on all subtests of the WISC at both time points. During the time between the first and second assessments, the annual rate of intellectual development was approximately 2.2 times faster in the unaffected children compared to the children with FXS. Levels of the fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP) were highly associated with intellectual ability scores of the children with FXS at both time points (r=0.55 and 0.64 respectively). However, when gender, age, and the time between assessments were included as covariates in the structural equation model, FMRP accounted for only 5% of the variance in intellectual ability scores at time 1 and 13% of the variance at time 2. The results of this study suggest that slower learning contributes to the low and declining standardized IQ scores observed in children with FXS.     

Contextual cueing in preview search

Frequently finding a target in the same location within a familiar context reduces search time, relative to search for objects appearing in novel contexts. This learned association between a context and a target location requires several blocks of training and has long-term effects. Short-term selection history also influences search, where previewing a subset of a search context shortly before the appearance of the target and remaining distractors speeds search. Here we explored the interactions between contextual cueing and preview benefit using a modified version of a paradigm from Hodsoll and Humphreys (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31(6), 1346–1358, 2005). Participants searched for a T target among L distractors. Half of the distractors appeared 800 ms before the addition of the other distractors and the target. We independently manipulated the repetition of the previewed distractors and the newly added distractors. Though the previewed set never contained the target, repetition of either the previewed or the newly added context yielded contextual cueing, and the effect was greater when the previewed context repeated. Another experiment trained participants to associate the previewed context with a target location, then disrupted the association in a testing phase. This disruption eliminated contextual cueing, suggesting that learning of the previewed context was associative. These findings demonstrate an important interaction between distinct kinds of selection history effects.

     

Contextual variations in implicit evaluation

In the present research, the authors examined contextual variations in automatic attitudes. Using 2 measures of automatic attitudes, the authors demonstrated that evaluative responses differ qualitatively as perceivers focus on different aspects of a target's social group membership (e.g., race or gender). Contextual variations in automatic attitudes were obtained when the manipulation involved overt categorization (Experiments 1-3) as well as more subtle contextual cues, such as category distinctiveness (Experiments 4-5). Furthermore, participants were shown to be unable to predict such contextual influences on automatic attitudes (Experiment 3). Taken together, these experiments support the idea of automatic attitudes being continuous, online constructions that are inherently flexible and contextually appropriate, despite being outside conscious control.     

Contextual effects in duration experience

The role of contextual factors on duration estimates was investigated, employing 6 time intervals ranging from 15 to 35 sec (demarcated by the onset and termination of a display panel of lights). When compared with earlier research, the results suggest that duration estimates are affected by the context of the stimulus intervals with regard to other stimuli in the series. Specifically, those stimuli that were overestimated when they were the shortest members of the series were underestimated when they were the longest intervals of the stimulus series. In addition, a lengthening effect was observed: duration estimates increased over blocks of trials for all stimulus intervals.     

Contextual effects in social judgment

Judges were asked to evaluate the overall performance of hypothetical students, given their scores on two examinations. The distribution of total scores was manipulated in order to investigate the loci of contextual effects. The interaction between the two exams was reversed by manipulation of the distribution. When the distribution of total scores was positively skewed, judgments showed a convergent interaction as a function of the two exams; when the distribution was negatively skewed, the interaction was divergent. The data were consistent with the hypothesis that the distribution of total scores affects only the transformation from integrated impressions to overt responses. This transformation (judgment function) was well-described by an extension of range-frequency theory. The finding that the interaction can be manipulated by changing the stimulus distribution has methodological implications for the popular interpretation of interactions or lack thereof. A good model may be improperly rejected or a bad one improperly retained through lack of attention to contextual effects.     

Contextual dependencies in motor skills

The development of contextual dependencies during motor skill acquisition was examined. Environmental context was varied along intentional and incidental dimensions. Intentional stimuli were defined as essential for achieving skilled performance, whereas incidental stimuli were defined as those that have the potential to become associated with specific tasks due to their selective presence in the learning environment. Experiment 1 demonstrated the occurrence of contextual dependencies for the learning of four-key typing sequences. Contextual dependencies were diminished in Experiment 2 when the number of keys used in the sequences was reduced. In Experiment 3, a retention condition was incorporated, in which both the intentional and the incidental stimuli were not available; this confirmed that task difficulty mediated the development of contextual dependencies. These findings are discussed with respect to the incorporation of environmental contextual stimuli with memorial representations of movement information.     

Contextual effects in difference judgments

Manipulating stimulus spacing, stimulus frequency, or stimulus range usually affects intensity judgments. In six experiments, I investigated the locus of analogues of these contextual effects in a “difference” estimation task. When all stimuli elicited the same taste quality, stimulus distribution affected the scale values only when water was included in the stimulus set (Experiments 1–3). When the subjective ranges of two taste qualities were manipulated, different scale values were obtained for the separate qualities in the two conditions (Experiment 4). Manipulation of the expected response distribution did not affect the scale values or the responses (Experiments 5–6). It is concluded that shifts in stimulus distributions or stimulus ranges result in shifts in subjective scale values. The contextual effects can be interpreted as relative shifts of a number of gustatory continua, with water lying on a separate continuum. Proposed is a model for context-dependent judgments, consisting of four stages: stimulus classification, stimulus placement, continuum placement, and continuum projection.     

Contextual dependencies in predictive learning

Two experiments assessed contextual dependencies in a predictive-learning task. Subjects learned to associate each of four pictorial stimuli with the occurrence or non-occurrence of a specific outcome. Each of these stimuli, the intentional stimuli, was presented against one of two different visual (Experiment 1) or auditory (Experiment 2) context stimuli. These context stimuli were incidental: subjects were not explicitly instructed to pay any attention to them and each of them in isolation was not predictive of the outcome. During acquisition and testing, subjects expressed the expected relationship between intentional stimulus and outcome by an appropriate key press. At test, intentional stimuli were presented either with the same contextual stimulus as also present during acquisition (same trials), or with the other one (switched trials). The response latency was slower on switched trials than on same trials in each experiment, a result extending previous findings on the effect of environmental contextual stimuli on task performance. Results are discussed in the framework of contextual occasion setting and habituation to contextual stimuli.     

Contextual dependencies in predictive learning

Two experiments assessed contextual dependencies in a predictive-learning task. Subjects learned to associate each of four pictorial stimuli with the occurrence or non-occurrence of a specific outcome. Each of these stimuli, the intentional stimuli, was presented against one of two different visual (Experiment 1) or auditory (Experiment 2) context stimuli. These context stimuli were incidental: subjects were not explicitly instructed to pay any attention to them and each of them in isolation was not predictive of the outcome. During acquisition and testing, subjects expressed the expected relationship between intentional stimulus and outcome by an appropriate key press. At test, intentional stimuli were presented either with the same contextual stimulus as also present during acquisition (same trials), or with the other one (switched trials). The response latency was slower on switched trials than on same trials in each experiment, a result extending previous findings on the effect of environmental contextual stimuli on task performance. Results are discussed in the framework of contextual occasion setting and habituation to contextual stimuli.     

Contextual conditional discriminations

Three experiments used a discriminated operant procedure to study conditional discrimination learning in rats. The first experiment showed that rats were capable of learning a biconditional discrimination in which two contexts served as conditional cues signalling the reinforcement contingencies associated with two discriminative stimuli. The discrimination was learned equally well when one discriminative stimulus signalled food, the other its absence, and when one stimulus signalled food, the other extinction plus mild footshock.

In Experiment 2 it was shown that prior training on such a conditional discrimination enhanced the subsequent context specificity of simple conditioning relative to control groups of animals for whom the prior training had not been conditional. Experiment 3 showed that a reversal of the significance of one pair of discriminative stimuli produced no spontaneous reversal in performance to a second, target, pair.

The pattern of results is best accounted for by an analysis of contextual conditional discrimination learning in terms of stimulus configurations and offers no support for the notion that rats may learn a general conditional rule or set.