Sequences of Fixed-Ratio Schedules: The Relative Effects of Reinforcer Magnitude and Ratio Size in the Second Fixed Ratio

The Psychological Record - Four pigeons were given a choice between two sequences of fixed-ratio schedules. The second fixed ratio was a fixed-ratio 5 followed by 2-s access to grain in one...     

Aging and Working Memory Inside and Outside the Focus of Attention: Dissociations of Availability and Accessibility

ABSTRACT

Two experiments used the N-Back task to test for age differences in working memory inside and outside the focus of attention. Manipulations of the difficulty of item-context binding (Experiment 1) and of stimulus feature binding (Experiment 2) were used to create conditions that varied in their demand on working memory, with the expectation that greater demand might increase age differences in focus-switching costs and the search rate outside the focus of attention. Results showed, however, that although age differences were evident in measures of overall speed and accuracy, and the manipulations significantly affected response times and accuracy in the expected direction, the experimental manipulations had no impact on age differences. Findings instead pointed to age-related reductions in accuracy but not speed of focus-switching and search outside the focus of attention. Thus, age-related deficits appear to involve the availability of representations in working memory, but not their accessibility.     

Reinforcer sampling: a technique for increasing the behavior of mental patients

Mental hospital patients in a motivating ward environment were using the available reinforcers less than was desired. A procedure for increasing the frequency of using reinforcers was developed: all patients were required to engage in the reinforcing event each time it was available but the duration of this required participation was limited so that the event was merely sampled. The effect of this required sampling was experimentally evaluated for three different reinforcers: going for a walk, watching a movie, and attending a music session. More patients used each of the three reinforcers and to a greater extent when the sampling procedure was used. Participation was increased even for those patients who had already been using the reinforcers, demonstrating that the technique did more than provide simple familiarization. Some familiarization was involved since the participation was slightly increased even after the sampling procedure was discontinued. The technique appears to be especially applicable when reinforcers are being delivered infrequently.     

Attention and Communication Following TBI: Making the Connection through a Meta-Narrative Systematic Review

Neuropsychology Review - Background and aim: Communication difficulties are one of the hallmark characteristics of adults following traumatic brain injury (TBI), a difficulty that incorporates...     

"Fixed Pie" a la Mode: Information Availability,Information Processing,and the Negotiation of Suboptimal Agreements

Negotiators often make errors in judgment that lead to suboptimal negotiated agreements. Although researchers agree that these errors result from "fixed pie" expectations, there is disagreement regarding how "fixed pie" expectations lead to poor outcomes. One view suggests that suboptimal agreements result when negotiators accurately process faulty and incomplete information (information availability errors); a second view holds that poorly negotiated agreements result when negotiators inaccurately process valid or complete information (information processing errors). The two experiments described in this paper confirmed that negotiators′ "fixed pie" expectations lead to suboptimal agreements via both information availability and information processing errors.     

Inhibition by Reinforcement: Effects of Reinforcer Magnitude and Timeout on Fixed-Ratio Pausing

The Psychological Record - Rats were trained on fixed-ratio schedules with different reinforcer magnitudes (concentrations of sweetened milk), using procedures in which responding was allowed to...     

Visual Attention in Real-World Conversation: Gaze Patterns Are Modulated by Communication and Group Size

Gaze behavior both initiates and maintains conversations, playing a crucial role in real-world collaboration. Hitherto, most findings on social attention stem from research using pictures of faces in the laboratory, however, attention operates differently in the real world. Thus, we know little of how gaze behavior operates in naturalistic interactions. To bridge this gap, we applied mobile eye-tracking to investigate the gaze patterns present in naturalistic conversations. Specifically, we examined gaze behavior of participants in a group of two or five, either sitting together in silence, or engaging in a conversation, in which they took turns either listening or speaking to each other. Results show that participants looked more frequently towards others when the group was communicating compared to when remaining silent, and that they looked at others more frequently when listening compared to when speaking. Furthermore, being part of a dyad led to more social attention being afforded during conversation compared to the group situation, regardless of whether subjects were listening or speaking. Meanwhile, when sitting in silence subjects showed less social gazing in a dyad than in a group of five. Our results provide qualitative and quantitative insights into the patterns of visual attention during dynamic naturalistic conversations.     

Organizational Communication in Emergencies: Using Multiple Channels and Sources to Combat Noise and Capture Attention

This study relies on information theory, social presence, and source credibility to uncover what best helps people grasp the urgency of an emergency. We surveyed a random sample of 1,318 organizational members who received multiple notifications about a large‐scale emergency. We found that people who received 3 redundant messages coming through at least 1 synchronous communication source—for example, phone or face‐to‐face communication—perceived the urgency of the situation the most quickly, whereas those receiving official messages through asynchronous channels—most often text message—had the lowest sense of urgency. Our findings suggest that by understanding people's reactions to various kinds of redundant communication, organizations can design more strategic emergency messages that capture attention.     

关注肿瘤患者的心理健康,提高医患沟通质量

心理健康对于肿瘤患者来说非常重要,医生应该在治疗患者身体疾病的同时,关注他们的心理健康状态,注意医患沟通技巧.不仅有利于患者的康复,也能提高医患沟通质量,促进发展良好的医患关系.     

关注肿瘤患者的心理健康，提高医患沟通质量

心理健康对于肿瘤患者来说非常重要,医生应该在治疗患者身体疾病的同时,关注他们的心理健康状态,注意医惠沟通技巧。不仅有利于患者的康复,也能提高医患沟通质量,促进发展良好的医患关系。     

Time-Out for Sibling Aggression: An Analysis of Effective Durations in a Natural Setting

Abstract

Time-out is a ubiquitous strategy to reduce problem behaviors. The current study sought to find the shortest effective duration(s) of time-out for sibling aggression in a community sample of girls ages 3–7. All participants reached a minimum reduction in sibling aggression of 60% after experiencing a 1-minute time-out. The majority (75%) of participants also demonstrated clear reversals of behavior when returned to the baseline condition. The current findings suggest that a 1-minute time-out may be sufficient for low-level sibling aggression in children as old as seven. Limitations include the presence of a graduate assistant during sibling play and unclear generalizability.     

Functional Equivalence of Sleep Loss and Time on Task Effects in Sustained Attention

Research on sleep loss and vigilance both focus on declines in cognitive performance, but theoretical accounts have developed largely in parallel in these two areas. In addition, computational instantiations of theoretical accounts are rare. The current work uses computational modeling to explore whether the same mechanisms can account for the effects of both sleep loss and time on task on performance. A classic task used in the sleep deprivation literature, the Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT), was extended from the typical 10‐min duration to 35 min, to make the task similar in duration to traditional vigilance tasks. A computational cognitive model demonstrated that the effects of time on task in the PVT were equivalent to those observed with sleep loss. Subsequently, the same mechanisms were applied to a more traditional vigilance task—the Mackworth Clock Task—providing a good fit to existing data. This supports the hypothesis that these different types of fatigue may produce functionally equivalent declines in performance.     

Development of Time Concepts: Differentiating Clock and Calendar from Apparent Durations

To investigate the role of perception and stress on time concepts, the real-time and apparent durations of common events varying in length from 30 s to 4 years were rated by kindergarten through 12th-grade pupils, college students, professors, and stress-impaired adults (N = 1,788). The events were pleasant, neutral or unpleasant; either directly perceptible and of specific duration or perceptually vague; and happened either to oneself or to someone else. Second graders differentiated apparent from real-time durations and, therefore, already had an abstract concept of time. As predicted from differentiation theory (Gibson, E. J., 1969; Gibson, J. J., 1966, 1983), longer durations were acquired later than shorter ones; perceptually-vague durations were acquired later than clearly perceptible ones of similar length; and, as Neisser (1976) also suggested, stress did not lead to regression, nor did the personal-impersonal dimension make a difference during childhood.     

An Ecological Framework for Evaluating Relationship‐Functional Aspects of Youth Mentoring1

The present research examined what is necessary to make youth mentoring effective. Central to the discussion is mentee–mentor relationship quality in relation to program effectiveness. Data were drawn from an ongoing youth mentoring program organized in Hong Kong using a conceptual framework derived from ecological psychology to guide analysis. Data analysis followed a multistage process. Quantitative factor analysis was computed to identify the principal components of the mentee–mentor relationship. Then, to explore subjective meanings of the quantitative findings, in‐depth interviews were conducted with 48 mentees who were randomly selected from the respondents. Further statistical associations and qualitative categorizations were conducted with this subsample to examine the complex relations between the relationship outcomes and the program (functional) outcomes.     

On the Functional Role of Implicit Visual Memory for the Adaptive Deployment of Attention Across Scenes

Although very little visual information is explicitly retained across views, some continuity of processing is afforded by implicit visual memory traces of previous views. These memory traces interact with attentional mechanisms to guide eye movements, cognition, and action. Two different memory mechanisms are described here. First, the deployments of focal attention and eye movements are facilitated towards recently attended features and locations (priming of popout). Second, attention is guided by implicit memory traces of specific visual contexts experienced in the past (contextual cueing). Compared to the visual memory tapped by change blindness tasks, the implicit memory mechanisms of priming of popout and contextual cueing do not require conscious intervention and may exhibit greater memory capacity, longer durability, and higher discriminability. Thus, these implicit traces of past views guide attention and eye movements to allow for effective access (indexing) to a scene's details, hence providing context and continuity to ongoing interactions with the perceptual world.     

Discriminated response and incentive processes in operant conditioning: a two-factor model of stimulus control

Understanding stimulus control generated in instrumental learning requires the direct investigation of discriminated response and reinforcer (incentive) processes acquired exclusively through the response-reinforcer contingencies operating on complex (multicomponent) baselines. Two series of stimulus-compounding studies accomplished this direct investigation. In one series, the independent variable was the relative reinforcement between schedule components; in the second series, it was relative response rate between components. Stimulus-compounding tests revealed that response and incentive processes enhanced each other when in agreement, counteracted each other when in opposition, and produced intermediate results when only one factor was operating. This pattern of results led to the conclusion that these factors were algebraically combining and to the development of a response/incentive matrix reflecting these dynamics. This two-factor analysis was extended to the peak-shift effect in stimulus generalization experiments and to the generation of inhibitory control. Two decades of stimulus compounding and peak-shift research were organized within this two-factor framework, extending this traditional approach to learning to active research areas heretofore not systematically considered in these terms.     

Determinants of pausing under variable-ratio schedules: Reinforcer magnitude, ratio size, and schedule configuration

Pigeons pecked a key under two-component multiple variable-ratio schedules that offered 8-s or 2-s access to grain. Phase 1 assessed the effects of differences in reinforcer magnitude on postreinforcement pausing, as a function of ratio size. In Phase 2, postreinforcement pausing and the first five interresponse times in each ratio were measured as a function of differences in reinforcer magnitude under equal variable-ratio schedules consisting of different configurations of individual ratios. Rates were also calculated exclusive of postreinforcement pause times in both phases. The results from Phase 1 showed that as ratio size increased, the differences in pausing educed by unequal reinforcer magnitudes also increased. The results of Phase 2 showed that the effects of reinforcer magnitude on pausing and IRT durations were a function of schedule configuration. Under one configuration, in which the smallest ratio was a fixed-ratio 1, pauses were unaffected by magnitude but the first five interresponse times were affected. Under the other configuration, in which the smallest ratio was a fixed-ratio 7, pauses were affected by reinforcer magnitude but the first five interresponse times were not. The effect of each configuration seemed to be determined by the value of the smallest individual ratio. Rates calculated exclusive of postreinforcement pause times were, in general, directly related to reinforcer magnitude, and the relation was shown to be a function of schedule configuration.     

Functional Communication Training and Demand Fading Using Concurrent Schedules of Reinforcement

Demand fading, a schedule thinning procedure for escape-maintained behaviors, typically includes an escape extinction component. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of demand fading with alternative reinforcement utilizing concurrent reinforcement schedules without extinction. During demand fading, aggression and requests emitted prior to meeting the task completion criterion were reinforced with short, low-quality breaks, but requests emitted following the task completion criterion were reinforced with long, high-quality breaks. Results suggest that concurrent schedules of reinforcement may be an effective alternative to extinction as a component of demand fading.