A WATER-PROMPTING PROCEDURE FOR THE TREATMENT OF URINARY INCONTINENCE

Based on clinical observations of a naturally occurring phenomenon, a water-prompting procedure was used to facilitate toilet training with a 9-year-old boy with profound mental retardation. Other frequently used toilet-training procedures were either ineffective or were associated with increased self-injury. The water-prompting treatment package may increase continence by eliciting and reinforcing urination under specific stimulus conditions.     

Acculturation Attitudes in Plural Societies

Dans les sociétés culturellement diversifiés, les individus peuvent présenter des attitudes relatives à leurs relations avec les autres et les groupes. Ces attitudes (dites "attitudes d'acculturation") sont liées à des prises de position sur deux problèmes généraux posés à toute personne en acculturation: la préservation culturelle de son propre groupe et le contact avec les autres groupes. On définit les attitudes d'assimilation, d'intégration, de séparation et de marginalisation, puis on les mesure dans plusieurs groupes en acculturation d'Australie et du Canada (les indigènes, les immigrants et les groupes ethniques implantés). On donne la validité et la fidélité des échelles d'attitude, puis on analyse les relations des échelles entre elles par rapport aux deux problèmes sous-jacents que sont la préservation et le contact. Enfin, quelques-unes des applications pratiques des attitudes d'acculturation sont envisagées.     

Imago Dei – Imitatio Dei

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

A COMPARISON OF SENSORY INTEGRATIVE AND BEHAVIORAL THERAPIES AS TREATMENT FOR PEDIATRIC FEEDING DISORDERS

We compared the effects of escape extinction (EE) plus noncontingent reinforcement (NCR) with sensory integration therapy as treatment for the feeding problems of 2 children. Results indicated that EE plus NCR was more effective in increasing acceptance, decreasing inappropriate behavior, and increasing amount consumed relative to sensory integration for both children. The results are discussed in terms of the challenges of evaluating sensory‐integration‐based treatments, and the reasons why component analyses of multicomponent treatments like sensory integration are important.     

Spatio-temporal priority revisited: the role of feature identity and similarity for object correspondence in apparent motion

We live in a dynamic environment in which objects change location over time. To maintain stable object representations the visual system must determine how newly sampled information relates to existing object representations, the correspondence problem. Spatiotemporal information is clearly an important factor that the visual system takes into account when solving the correspondence problem, but is feature information irrelevant as some theories suggest? The Ternus display provides a context in which to investigate solutions to the correspondence problem. Two sets of three horizontally aligned disks, shifted by one position, were presented in alternation. Depending on how correspondence is resolved, these displays are perceived either as one disk "jumping" from one end of the row to the other (element motion) or as a set of three disks shifting back and forth together (group motion). We manipulated a feature (e.g., color) of the disks such that, if features were taken into account by the correspondence process, it would bias the resolution of correspondence toward one version or the other. Features determined correspondence, whether they were luminance-defined or not. Moreover, correspondence could be established on the basis of similarity, when features were not identical between alternations. Finally, the stronger the feature information supported a certain correspondence solution the more it dominated spatiotemporal information.     

Generation of referring expressions: assessing the Incremental Algorithm

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of 'one-shot' referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that the success of the IA depends substantially on the 'preference order' (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO.