Pupillary dilation as a measure of attention: a quantitative system analysis

It has long been known that the pupil dilates as a consequence of attentional effort. But the function that relates attentional input to pupillary output has never been the subject of quantitative analysis. We present a system analysis of the pupillary response to attentional input. Attentional input is modeled as a string ofattentional pulses. We show that the system is linear; the effects of input pulses on the pupillary response are additive. The impulse response has essentially a gamma distribution with two free parameters. These parameters are estimated; they are fairly constant over tasks and subjects. The paper presents a method of estimating the string of attentional input pulses, given some average pupillary output. The method involves the technique of deconvolution; it can be implemented with a public-domain software package, Pupil.     

Advanced computing in psychology

In 1984, the National Science Foundation began a large initiative to provide the scientific community with access to Class VI computers. With the support of the NSF Program on Memory and Cognitive Processes, the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences invited a group of scientists to a workshop that considered the advanced computational needs of several areas of psychological, behavioral, and cognitive sciences. This paper presents a summary of the conference deliberations.     

The informativeness and frequency of presentation of a social stimulus as determinants of its efficacy as a reinforcer

It was demonstrated that variations in the informativeness of a social stimulus place important limitations on the generality of the proposition that deprivation heightens, while satiation lowers, responsiveness to a social stimulus. Using 60 children 5 to 6 years of age as subjects, a social stimulus (“good”) was presented at either a high or a low frequency in one of three information-value contexts (high, medium, or low). Immediately following the exposure treatment the same social stimulus was employed as a reinforcer of nonpreferred responses in a two-choice discrimination learning task. The findings indicated that the heightened efficacy of deprivation relative to satiation only held for low information value; when initial information value was high the subsequent efficacy of a social stimulus was enhanced by its initial recurrent usage. Trend analyses revealed that the effects of variations in information value were strongest within the high-frequency-of-praise treatment. Possible mechanisms underlying the significant Information Value × Frequency interaction were discussed.     

Mood and personality: A search for the causal relationship1

Previous findings of correlations between mood and personality variables were noted. It was suggested that the establishment of a causal relationship was crucially important, not merely to the understanding of how mood is related to personality but to the conceptualization of mood as a source of error in personality measurement as well. A prior attempt to establish a causal role for mood failed, but may have done so for methodological reasons. The present study investigated the influence of a mood manipulation on personality measures. There was also an opportunity to replicate prior correlational findings independent of the effect of the mood manipulation. College students were asked to think of happy, sad, or affectively neutral events and then filled out several personality measures. A manipulation check confirmed that different moods were induced by this procedure. The prior correlations between mood and personality variables were replicated, but the mood manipulation did not affect any of the personality measures. The implications of these results for personality measurement and for the relation between mood and behavior were discussed.     

What i think and feel: A revised measure of children's manifest anxiety

The 1956 adaptation for children of Taylor's Manifest Anxiety Scale, the Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale, was revised to meet current psychometric standards. A 73-item revision draft was administered to 329 school children from grades 1 to 12. Based on item-analysis criteria for r_bis.4 and .30p.70, 28 anxiety items were retained along with 9 of the original 11 Lie scale items. A cross-validation sample of 167 children from grades 2, 5, 9, 10, and 11 produced a KR₂₀ reliability estimate of .85. Anxiety scores did not differ across grade or race. Females scored significantly higher than males. For the Lie scale, significant differences appeared by grade and race. No sex differences were obtained on the Lie scale. The resulting scale appears useful for children in grades 1 to 12 and may aid in future studies of anxiety as well as assisting the clinician in the understanding of individual children.     

Comparative evaluation of computer-based tachistoscopes

Various methods of implementing a computer-based tachistoscope are compared. Software considerations are emphasized, but hardward issues are also examined. Three types of systems are identified: file-driven systems, sets of callable subroutines, and special languages. All have advantages in some circumstances. A system of callable subroutines is favored, together with a file-driven system written in the host language using the subroutines.     

Introduction

A series of eight papers is introduced on methods of using a computer system as a tachistoscope. Comparisons are based on the type of display and the type of software.     

Agoraphobia and the hyperventilation syndrome

One of the causes of agoraphobic complaints is the fear of having an attack of physical complaints in public places. The Hyperventilation Syndrome (HVS) with its diverse symptoms seems to fit well in this model. Hyperventilation symptoms are threatening, because for most subjects they occur unexpectedly and without a clear reason. An investigation was made into how often the HVS and the agoraphobic syndrome appeared together and into the causal relationship between both syndromes. About 60% of the agoraphobic patients suffered from hyperventilation complaints and about 60% of the HVS patients were agoraphobic. Most patients mentioned the fear of having an attack as an important reason for their agoraphobic complaints, and this applied especially in the case of the HVS.     

Diachronic causal constitutive relations

Mechanistic approaches are very common in the causal interpretation of biological and neuroscientific experimental work in today’s philosophy of science. In the mechanistic literature a strict distinction is often made between (intralevel) causal relations and (interlevel) constitutive relations, where the latter cannot be causal. One of the typical reasons for this strict distinction is that constitutive relations are supposedly synchronic whereas most if not all causal relations are diachronic. This strict distinction gives rise to a number of problems, however. Our end goal in this paper is to argue that it should be given up, at least in the context of the biological and the psychological sciences. To that effect, we argue that constitutive relations in this context are diachronic, thus undermining the aforementioned reason. We offer two cases from scientific practice in which constitutive relations are regarded as both diachronic and causally efficacious, review three existing ways of dealing with the apparent diachronic nature of interlevel relations in mechanisms and propose a new account of diachronic, causal constitutive relevance.

     

Are Arabic numerals processed as pictures in a Stroop interference task?

In a picture-word interference task, picture naming is interfered by an incongruent word, but word naming is hardly hindered by the presence of an incongruent picture. In this study, we investigated whether Arabic digits are processed more like pictures or like words. We report two experiments in which Arabic digits and verbal numerals were confronted in a Stroop task. Arabic digit naming is interfered by the presence of an incongruent verbal numeral, while naming the verbal numeral is not influenced by the presence of an incongruent Arabic digit. In a second experiment, we excluded the hypothesis that the results are due to ignoring the Arabic digits: interferences from an incongruent distracter were similar for both notations in a semantic classification task. It seems that an asemantic conversion for Arabic digits is too slow to influence naming times, and that Arabic digit naming, like picture naming, is semantically mediated.