The stimulus range effect: Evidence for top-down control of sensory intensity in audition

The influence of intensity range on the perceived magnitude of a stimulus is well documented and usually attributed to response biases. Recent studies, however, have suggested that the range effect might be sensory in origin. To test this notion, we had one set of subjects compare loudness intervals in three conditions : a broad-range condition (15 tones, 23–95 dB SPL), a soft shortrange condition (the lowest 10 tones from the broad-range condition), and a loud short-range condition (the highest 10 tones). Nonmetric scaling showed that the broad-range and loud short-range conditionshad identical loudness functions, However, the second derivative of the loudness function was larger for the soft short-range condition than fox the broad-range condition. This pattern of results is consistent with the notion of a nonlinear ampler whose gain and degree of nonlinearity are adjusted under top-down control, so as to prevent distortion and increase discriminabztity.     

Behavior, Attitudes, and Cognitions of Anger-Prone Individuals

This research explored facets of anger based on a multidimensional-associationistic conceptualization (Berkowitz, 1994) that includes antecedents, behavior, cognitions, and experiential response dimensions. High and low anger-prone individuals responded to six audiotaped situations validated in previous work to be anger provoking. Participants evaluated their own audiotaped responses, as did peer judges. Participants also completed the Social Problem Solving Inventory (SPSI) and the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) and they reported on the effect of anger experiences in their lives. Neither self nor peer ratings of the audiotaped responses differentiated the behavior of anger groups. High and low anger-prone individuals, however, differed in the way that they viewed the consequences of their behavior and how anger affected them in general. Furthermore, high anger-prone individuals had elevated levels of pathology on eight of the nine scales of the BSI and scored significantly lower on the SPSI. Results are discussed in terms of assessment of anger proneness, its relationship to psychopathology and implications for future work.     

Binocular vision enhances phase discrimination by filtering the background.

Previous studies have shown that the detectability of a noise-masked target can be enhanced under stereoscopic viewing when the target's interocular disparity differs from that of the noise. This enhanced detectability can be accounted for by a model postulating that the binocular system linearly sums the left-eye and right-eye views of a visual scene. This model also predicts enhanced phase discrimination under specifiable interocular disparities of target and noise. Two experiments were conducted in which subjects were asked to discriminate between two luminance patterns (target and foil) that differed only in phase. The target patterns were constructed by summating two vertical sinusoidal gratings in which the phase difference between the higher and the lower spatial frequency gratings was 45 degrees. The foils contained the same two component frequencies, with a phase difference of -45 degrees. Thus, targets and foils were mirror images of one another. The ability of subjects to discriminate between these stereoscopically viewed mirror-image patterns was investigated under two sets of interocular disparities: those that, according to our model, would unmask one or both spatial frequency components, and those that would leave both components masked by the noise. Phase discrimination was enhanced only when both component frequencies of the target and foil were unmasked. The implications of these findings for template-matching and phase-discrimination models of pattern discrimination are considered.     

A Posture of Reciprocity: A Practical Approach to Collaboration Between Professionals and Parents of Culturally Diverse Backgrounds

The current emphasis on developing culturally responsive services for families of children with disabilities from culturally diverse backgrounds informs the need for professional self-awareness whereby professionals learn to recognize not only the cultural specificity of personal values and beliefs but also of their professional practice. We describe an approach, the posture of reciprocity, that enables professionals to acquire this level of cultural awareness. Examples to illustrate applications of the posture are provided.     

Sequences of spaced responses: Behavioral units and the role of contiguity

Sequences of temporally spaced responses were reinforced to investigate the effects of delay of reinforcement on the formation of functional behavioral units. In Experiment 1, rats' two- and three-response demarcated sequences of left and right lever presses were reinforced such that different response distributions would occur depending on whether the sequences themselves or individual responses were functional units. The matching law could thus be obeyed either by individual responses or by sequences, but not by both; intermediate results were possible. Both regular (nonretractable) and retractable levers were used; the retractable levers precluded the occurrence of insufficiently spaced responses. At a minimum interresponse time of 5 s for regular levers and 7 s for retractable ones, matching results were intermediate, with greater evidence of sequence conditionability in the two-response sequences than in the three-response sequences. In Experiment 2, the required minimum interresponse spacing for two-response retractable-lever sequences was varied in an attempt to locate the sequence matching threshold. This attempt was unsuccessful, but the sequences (instead of individual responses) more closely obeyed the matching law. In the shortest spaced condition, conditional probability data on Lag 1 sequence emission order showed marked, highly similar patterning for all rats, indicating sequential control of the sequences. Post hoc definition of the behavioral unit in these studies is ambiguous. Although reinforcement contiguity was important, aspects of the results could support both molar- and molecular-level interpretations.     

Student MEL software support for instructors and teaching assistants in research methods course

A number of common problems plague the teaching of the undergraduate research methods course, from the training of teaching assistants to providing meaningful experimental materials to handling data acquisition and analysis. The Student Micro Experimental Laboratory (MEL) offers a systematic approach to the management of a computerized research methods laboratory course by combining high-quality experiments in many areas of psychology with background materials to help the instructor and teaching assistant. The software presents and collects data from 28 experiments. The data can be analyzed for single subjects and for classes as a whole. Students can rapidly implement new experiments in a variety of paradigms. An expanding library of experiments created by students and instructors should provide an expanding environment for teaching experimental research methods. Instructor’s materials provide background information, discussion questions, and data analysis for all experiments. The student workbook provides discussion of the background of the experiment, details of the methodology, and questions addressing various aspects of experimental design and interpretation of data.     

Intersubjectivity without subjectivism

Paper read at meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy on 13 October 1990.     

The contribution of morphology to word recognition

Summary Evidence of morphological processing was investigated in three word recognition tasks. In the first study, phonological ambiguity of the base morpheme in morphologically complex words of Serbo-Croatian was exploited in order to evaluate the claim that the base morpheme serves as the unit by which entries in the lexicon are accessed. An interaction of base morpheme ambiguity and affix characteristics was obtained and this outcome was interpreted as evidence that all morphological constituents of a word participate in lexical access. In the second study, facilitation due to morphological relatedness of prime and target was observed with Serbo-Croatian materials in the lexical decision and naming versions of the repetition priming task and results were interpreted as evidence of a morphological principle of organization among wholeword forms in the lexicon. In the third study, morphological affixes of both English and Serbo-Croatian words were segmented from a source word and affixed to a target word more rapidly than phonemically matched controls. Results suggest that the morphological constituents of complex words are available in some word recognition tasks and that morphological knowledge is represented in the speaker's lexicon.     

Size of critical band in infants, children, and adults

Masked thresholds at two signal frequencies (0.8 and 4 kHz) were obtained from listeners aged 6.5 months, 2 years, 5 years, and 20.5 years in the presence of constant spectrum level, narrowband maskers of differing bandwidths. Consistent with the classical results of Fletcher (1940), masked threshold for all age groups increased with bandwidth up to a critical width, beyond which further increases in bandwidth were ineffective in increasing threshold. These critical widths (estimates of critical band size) did not change substantially with age (critical widths for infants were no more than 50% larger than those of adults) despite substantial changes in masked thresholds with age. Thus, contrary to previous claims, changes in auditory filter width cannot account for developmental changes in masked or absolute thresholds.