A comparison of the disturbingness of behaviors related to learning disability and emotional disturbance

Behaviors thought to be characteristic of emotional disturbance or learning disabilities were investigated through ratings of teachers with regard to the relative disturbingness of the behaviors. Obtained differences suggested that behaviors characteristic of emotional disturbance were rated as more disturbing than those of learning disabilities; differences within sets of characteristic behaviors were also indicated. Results are discussed with regard to implications for teacher expectancies and labeling research.     

Object color affects identification and repetition priming

We investigated the influence of color on the identification of both non-studied and studied objects. Participants studied black and white and color photos of common objects and memory was assessed with an identification test. Consistent with our meta-analysis of prior research, we found that objects were easier to identify from color than from black and white photos. We also found substantial priming in all conditions, and study-to-test changes in an object's color reduced the magnitude of priming. Color-specific priming effects were large for color-complex objects, but minimal for color-simple objects. The pattern and magnitude of priming effects was not influenced either by the extent to which an object always appears in the same color (i.e., whether a color is symptomatic of an object) or by the object's origin (natural versus fabricated). We discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical accounts of object perception and repetition priming.     

Symmetry and repetition in perspective

Although ecologically relevant, perspective views of symmetries and repetitions have hardly been investigated. Any symmetry or repetition that is not oriented orthogonally to the line of sight yields perspective distortions on the retina. In this study, these distortions are analyzed in terms of first-order structures (i.e., virtual lines between corresponding points) and second-order structures (i.e., correlation quadrangles formed by two virtual lines). In the literature, these structures have been proposed to guide the detection of fron to parallel symmetry and repetition. But what about perspective views? First, the analysis in this study shows that perspective distorts the retinal first-order and second-order structures of symmetry and repetition differently. Second, the results of two experiments on this distortion difference suggest that, in perspective views, symmetry and repetition detection is not preceded by normalization but occurs directly on the basis of the retinal first-order and second-order structures.     

Measurement of individual differences: lessons from memory assessment in research and clinical practice

An examination of test manuals and published research indicates that widely used memory tests (e.g., Verbal Paired Associates and Word List tests of the Wechsler Memory Scale, Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, and California Verbal Learning Test) are afflicted by severe ceiling effects. In the present study, the true extent of memory ability in healthy young adults was tested by giving 208 college undergraduates verbal paired-associate and verbal learning tests of various lengths; the findings demonstrate that healthy adults can remember much more than is suggested by the normative data for the memory tests just mentioned. The findings highlight the adverse effects of low ceilings in memory assessment and underscore the severe consequences of ceiling effects on score distributions, means, standard deviations, and all variability-dependent indices, such as reliability, validity, and correlations with other tests. The article discusses the optimal test lengths for verbal paired-associate and verbal list-learning tests, shows how to identify ceiling-afflicted data in published research, and explains how proper attention to this phenomenon can improve future research and clinical practice.     

NAMING,THE FORMATION OF STIMULUS CLASSES,AND APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS

The methods used in Sidman's original studies on equivalence classes provide a framework for analyzing functional verbal behavior. Sidman and others have shown how teaching receptive, name-referent matching may produce rudimentary oral reading and word comprehension skills. Eikeseth and Smith (1992) have extended these findings by showing that children with autism may acquire equivalence classes after learning to supply a common oral name to each stimulus in a potential class. A stimulus class analysis suggests ways to examine (a) the problem of programming generalization from teaching situations to other environments, (b) the expansion of the repertoires that occur in those settings, and (c) the use of naming to facilitate these forms of generalization. Such research will help to clarify and extend Horne and Lowe's recent (1996) account of the role of verbal behavior in the formation of stimulus classes.     

Innovation in Guidance: A Mobile Counseling Center

A mobile counseling center staffed by 4 counselors serves high schools in 4 counties of southern Indiana. The operation of the center is designed to enrich, supplement, and improve the quality of counseling services for secondary students of the area. The mobile center also serves as a model to stimulate the development of exemplary and innovative guidance services in regular school programs.     

Metrical information load of lines and angles in line patterns

Summary Acute angles and long lines are more complex than obtuse angels and short lines. This source of complexity is called metrical information, for which a measure was proposed by Leeuwenberg (1982). According to this measure, the metrical information of a static pattern is specified as the sum of the mechanical impulses necessary to move an object according to this pattern. The perceptual relevance of this metrical load was tested in an experiment in which judged complexities were gathered for a number of simple line patterns.     

Functions in biological kind classification

Biological traits that serve functions, such as a zebra's coloration (for camouflage) or a kangaroo's tail (for balance), seem to have a special role in conceptual representations for biological kinds. In five experiments, we investigate whether and why functional features are privileged in biological kind classification. Experiment 1 experimentally manipulates whether a feature serves a function and finds that functional features are judged more diagnostic of category membership as well as more likely to have a deep evolutionary history, be frequent in the current population, and persist in future populations. Experiments 2-5 reveal that these inferences about history, frequency, and persistence account for nearly all the effect of function on classification. We conclude that functional features are privileged because their relationship with the kind is viewed as stable over time and thus as especially well suited for establishing category membership, with implications for theories of classification and folk biological understanding.