Perceptions of Training-Related Factors and Personal Variables as Predictors of Transfer Implementation Intentions

A number of factors influence the outcomes of computer skills training and the likelihood of successful transfer. The first empirical test of a conceptual model of training transfer sought to explain how trainees' perceptions of various in-training transfer-enhancing activities such as overlearning, fidelity, stimulus variability, principles-meaningfulness, self-management activities, relapse prevention, and goal setting would predict the self-efficacy and implementation intentions (rather than actual transfer outcomes) of computer skills trainees. As expected, posttraining self-efficacy and transfer enhancing activities both predicted transfer implementation intentions. Pretraining self-efficacy also significantly predicted posttraining self-efficacy, trainees' level of learning during training and transfer enhancing activities, providing support for the conceptual model of training transfer.     

Transcending the Quantitative‐Qualitative Divide With Mixed Methods Research: A Multidimensional Framework for Understanding Congruence and Completeness in the Study of Values

Quantitative research dominates published literature in the helping professions. Mixed methods research, which integrates quantitative and qualitative methodologies, has received a lukewarm reception. The authors address the iterative separation that infuses theory, praxis, philosophy, methodology, training, and public perception and propose a dimensional viewpoint as a framework for successful integration of mixed methods research. This dimensional perspective demonstrates that mixed methods research techniques are necessary but not sufficient to study spiritual, ethical, and religious value issues. Research of career development, “best practices,” nature‐nurture, and prayer illustrate weaknesses and opportunities for evaluating dimensional mixed methods approaches.     

Grand Unified Theories of the Brain Need Better Understanding of Behavior: The Two-Tiered Emergence of Function

Abstract

Over the last few decades, neuroscience and various associated disciples have expanded enormously in terms of output, tools, methods, concepts, and large-scale projects. In spite of these developments, the principles underlying brain function and behavior are yet only partially understood. We claim that brain functioning requires the elucidation of the rules associated with all possible task realizations, rather than targeting the activity underlying a specific realization. A first step in that direction was taken by approaches focusing on dynamical structures underlying task performances, as exemplified by coordination dynamics. Its theoretical foundation owes much to Haken’s synergetics, which provides a formalism through which the degrees of freedom associated with high-dimensional systems may be effectively reduced to one or a few functional variables in the vicinity of phase transitions. The recent theoretical development of structured flows on manifolds (SFM) allows the employment to a potentially broader range of applications. Here we expand the SFM framework and propose that the emergent two-tiered fast–slow dynamics may be a basic mathematical organization underlying the architecture of brain and behavior dynamics. Finally, along a few examples, we illustrate how this framework allows for the incorporation of notions cardinal to ecological psychology.     

Performance on ratio and interval schedules with matched reinforcement rates

In the first study, rats were trained to pull a chain on a schedule (RPI) that regulates the probability of reinforcement to maintain a constant average reinforcement rate without differentially reinforcing long inter-response times (IRTs). Although the response rate was sensitive to the overall rate of reinforcement, performance was unaffected by variations between 1 and 50 in the IRT memory size used in programming the schedule. In the second study, two groups of animals performed on either a random-interval (RI) schedule or a RPI schedule, with reinforcement rates determined by those generated by a third group performing on a random ratio (RR) 20 schedule. The RI group responded at a lower rate than the RPI group, which, in turn, responded at a lower rate than the RR group, even though the three groups experienced comparable rates of reinforcement. The fact that the RPI group responded at a lower rate than the RR group suggests that the standard response rate difference observed between ratio and interval schedules, which have been matched for reinforcement rate, cannot be attributed solely to the fact that conventional interval schedules differentially reinforce long IRTs.