Oral overcorrection: side effects and extended applications.

Experiment 1: In a specialized daycare program the use of oral overcorrection (contingent toothbrushing with an oral antiseptic) to suppress one child's thumbsucking at Language Time was found to suppress the behavior of another child who was not treated but who witnessed the target child's treatment. Experiment 2: The main effects of oral overcorrection were replicated. Contingent overcorrection threats (warnings), used independently, were then shown to suppress thumbsucking behavior that had returned to its baseline level. These effects were maintained one month after the threats were discontinued, but they did not generalize to other activity periods, particularly Nap Time. Experiment 3: Contingent threats were found to suppress the persistent nap-time thumbsucking of the child from Expt 2. Increments in certain other (nonoral) inappropriate behaviors were correlated with the suppression of thumbsucking. Threats to use oral overcorrection contingent upon nonoral misbehaviors at Nap Time were not effective. However, the actual use of oral overcorrection for these categories of nonoral misbehavior served to suppress these behaviors. Experimental controls combined treatment reversal and multiple baseline single-subject designs.     

Toward a theory of automatic information processing in reading

A model of information processing in reading is described in which visual information is transformed through a series of processing stages involving visual, phonological and episodic memory systems until it is finally comprehended in the semantic system. The processing which occurs at each stage is assumed to be learned and the degree of this learning is evaluated with respect to two criteria: accuracy and automaticity. At the accuracy level of performance, attention is assumed to be necessary for processing; at the automatic level it is not. Experimental procedures are described which attempt to measure the degree of automaticity achieved in perceptual and associative learning tasks. Factors which may influence the development of automaticity in reading are discussed.     

Case-like categories in children: The actor and some related categories

Case categories were investigated using a method in which pictures are presented accompanied by a sentence describing the scene: Preschool children learn to put tokens on the objects in the pictures according to the role each object plays in the scene as described. Generalization trials explore what the children include within the various roles. Children rapidly learn to associate tokens with case-like categories during the training phase, and readily transfer to new stimuli in generalization trials. The experiments demonstrate that children have a broad Actor category. The Actor “does” the action, and Actors are not necessarily animate. However, animacy is a class property of stimuli to which the children were very sensitive. There was evidence that User and Instrument are subcategories of Actor that are differentiated only when a sentence contains both. The data also suggest a Locative category, and Patient as a category of the grammatical object. Finally, the children appeared to treat subjects of predicate adjectives as a separate category, here called the Subject of Attribution, distinct from Actor, and functionally independent of objects of transitive verbs.     

Neonates' heart rate,sucking rhythm,and sucking amplitude as a function of the sweet taste

In previous studies of human newborn sucking, the effects of increasing fluid sweetness and/or volume included a decrease in sucking rate within sucking bursts and, paradoxically, an increase in heart rate. To determine whether the heart rate increase can be attributed to increased sucking amplitude for sweeter fluids, sucking and heart rates of 20 full-term infants were studied. Half sucked for three consecutive 2-min periods, first receiving small drops of water for each suck, then no fluid, then 15% sucrose. The other half experienced the reverse order. The results for sucking and heart rate were consistent with previous studies; sucking rates within bursts were slowest for sucrose and fastest for no fluid. Heart rate was higher for sucrose than for the other fluid conditions, however, only in the water-first group. The heart rate increase was significant on statistical tests which controlled for sucking amplitude as well as for several other motor variables. Sucking amplitude itself varied with fluid sweetness in the water-first group only, in which it was highest for water. There were more total sucks, longer sucking bursts, and less time between successive bursts under the sucrose condition. Multivariate statistics helped establish a set of dependent variables—sucking rate within bursts, total number of sucks, and heart rate—which most parsimoniously describes the effects of fluid sweetness. A hedonic explanation of the response of newborns to sweetness is thus reiterated.     

Performance structures: A psycholinguistic and linguistic appraisal

Two lines of research—one in psycholinguistics and one in linguistics—are combined to deal with a long-standing problem in both fields: why the “performance structures” of sentences (structures based on experimental data, such as pausing and parsing values) are not fully accountable for by linguistic theories of phrase structure. Two psycholinguistic algorithms that have been used to predict these structures are described and their limitations are examined. A third algorithm, based on the prosodic structures of sentences is then proposed and shown to be a far better predictor of performance structures. It is argued that the experimental data reflect aspects of the linguistic cognitive capacity, and that, in turn, linguistic theory can offer an illuminating account of the data. The prosodic model is shown to have a wider domain of application than temporal organization per se, accounting for parsing judgments as well as pausing performance, and reflecting aspects of syntactic and semantic structure as well as purely prosodic structure. Finally, the algorithm is discussed in light of language processing.     

Memory without organization: Properties of a model with random storage and undirected retrieval

A very simple spatial model of memory storage and retrieval is described, analyzed, and discussed. The postulated memory is without organization in the sense that neither the place of storage nor the order of search during retrieval is influenced by the nature of the information being stored or retrieved. The memory consists of a three-dimensional space containing a large number of homogeneously distributed loci at which data may be stored. Data received near each other in time are stored at nearby locations. Access is by an undirected expanding-sphere search. The model exhibits a wide variety of quantitatively and qualitatively humanlike behavior with respect to both standard learning and forgetting paradigms and with respect to frequency effects and other phenomena in word processing.     

An analysis of the word-superiority effect

It is easier to decide which of two letters was presented tachistoscopically if the critical letter was in a word rather than in a scrambled word. We showed that this word-superiority effect holds just as strongly for pronounceable nonwords as for words, even when the critical letters are constant over all trials. This finding rules out word meaning and familiarity as variables accounting for the effect. In addition, it was found that the superiority of pronounceable stimuli holds for two-letter stimuli as well as four, and it is therefore concluded that the effect is not due to a memory limitation. An explanation of the effect in terms of the use of additional acoustic information is ruled out by showing that the effect was not diminished when the two possible words sounded exactly alike. An experiment using correctly and incorrectly spelled chemical formulas suggested that spelling regularities, regardless of pronounceability per se, account for the superiority effect. Finally, when decisions about two critical letters must be made on each trial, the correlation between being correct on one and on the other is higher for pronounceable stimuli under some conditions.     

Control of selective echolalia via the instatement of a general alternative response

Treatment for echolalic responding has been limited to the training of a small number of correct responses and limited stimulus verbalizations by the experimenter, leaving the possibility that the introduction of novel stimuli could result in the reoccurrence of echolalia. In the present study an 11-year-old severely retarded male's echolalic responding to questions that he could not answer correctly was controlled by instating a general alternative response, “I don't know.” The subject continued to respond correctly to questions that he could answer. indicating that the general alternative response had been appropriately discriminated. A Baseline. Treatment. DRO. Treatment design indicated that the subject's echolalic responding, as well as the appropriate use of the general alternative response, was under experimental control. Generalization of the experimental results to the subject's regular day-care setting was accomplished by having the staff verbally punish all echolalic responses and then restate the question to the subject until a non-echolalic answer had been emitted. Implications of these findings and suggestions for combining previous treatment procedures for echolalia with the general alternative response procedure were offered.     

Conditioned inhibition of fear: Evidence for a competing response mechanism

In two experiments, inhibitory conditioning was attempted by presenting a discrete CS in a neutral stimulus environment shortly following the termination of either shock (Experiment 1) or a second discrete CS which had been paired in a forward manner with shock (Experiment 2). Evidence of successful inhibitory conditioning was mixed in Experiment 1, where the properties of the CS were assessed within an escape-from-fear procedure. Postresponse presentations of the CS enhanced performance, whereas the presentation of the CS prior to responding did not have the expected degrading effect on performance. In Experiment 2, the inhibitory properties of the CS were assessed by combining this stimulus with an excitatory CS and presenting the compound to rats engaged in a water-reinforced licking response. Less response suppression was found in reaction to this compound relative to three separate comparison conditions, thus witnessing the success of the inhibitory-conditioning procedure used. The common assumption that inhibitory conditioning results from the nonreinforcement of a CS in a situation where reinforcement is expected, i.e., one which contains previously reinforced cues, is not supported by these data, for no previously reinforced cues were simultaneously presented with the CS during inhibitory training. The data are in agreement with a conditioned antagonistic-response interpretation of inhibitory conditioning.     

The ambiguous-cue problem: The effects of reduced similarity between trials and the schedule of reinforcement

In a series of seven experiments pigeons were trained on the two-choice ambiguous-cue problem that contains PA and NA trials. On PA trials choice of P (the positive stimulus) was reinforced and choice of A (the so-called ambiguous stimulus) was not reinforced; on NA trials choice of A was reinforced and choice of N (the negative stimulus) was not reinforced. When the two types of trials were distinguished by only the presence of P or N and each trial was terminated by one response, subjects quickly attained high levels of performance on NA trials but showed only chance levels of performance on PA trials. PA performance was markedly improved when a variety of additional stimuli distinguished the two types of trials and when a variety of schedules of intermittent reinforcement were employed; these manipulations had little effect on NA performance.     

The role of visual and semantic codes in object naming

Three experiments investigated the effects of familiarity, practice, and stimulus variability on naming latencies for photographs of objects. Latencies for pictures of objects having the same name decreased most with practice when the same picture was always used to represent a given object (Condition Ps-Ns), less if different views of the same object were used (Condition Pv-Ns), and least if pictures of different objects having the same name were used (Condition Pd-Ns). In all cases, however, the effect of practice was significant. The savings in naming latency associated with practice on Conditions Ps-Ns and Pv-Ns showed almost no transfer to condition Pd-Ns, even though the same responses were being given before and after transfer. However, practice on Condition Ps-Ns transferred completely to Condition Pv-Ns. Name frequency affected latency in all conditions. The frequency effect decreased slightly with practice.These results are related to several alternative models of the coding processes involved in naming objects. It is concluded that at least three types of representation may be necessary: visual codes, nonverbal semantic codes, and name codes. A distinction is made between visual codes that characterize two-dimensional stimuli and those that characterize three-dimensional objects.     

Critical procedural variables related to the physiological effects of progressive relaxation: a review.

Twenty-five investigations of the physiological effects of progressive relaxation training were classified according to whether relaxation was found to be superior or equivalent to control conditions. The two sets of studies differed significantly on number of training sessions and in the use of taped vs live administration of training, and they tended to differ in the use of normal vs patient samples. The likelihood of producing significant physiological reductions via progressive relaxation appears to be greater when multi-session, subject-controlled training is conducted with subjects for whom physiological activity contributes to a presenting. clinical problem.     

Stimulus control of free-operant avoidance: The contribution of response rate and incentive relations between multiple-schedule components

The associations formed in the components of a multiple schedule can be classified as (1) stimulus-response (S-R) associations and (2) stimulus-reinforcer (S-S^R) associations. The present experiments sought to determine the individual contribution of these S-R and S-S^R associations to stimulus control by manipulating them independently. Responses postponed shocks by 25 sec in the presence of a tone alone and a light alone in all experiments. The contingencies programmed in the absence of both tone and light established a reference for the S-R and S-S^R associations in tone and in light. All four possible combinations of signalling response increase or decrease together with incentive increase or decrease were studied. Although the influence of the contingencies operating in the absence of tone and light was difficult to detect from response rates in tone or light, presenting tone and light together revealed clear effects. Response rates in tone and light together relative to those in either alone depended upon the contingency operating in the absence of tone and light. Stimulus-response and stimulus-reinforcer associations appeared to counteract each other when in opposition and combine together to enhance each other when in agreement. This suggested that the associations of a stimulus to response and to incentive combine algebraically in determining stimulus control. An algebraic analysis in terms of the S-R and S-S^R associations conditioned to the stimulus elements comprising the training and test stimuli accounted for the observed patterns of data.