DEVELOPING FLUENCY AND ENDURANCE IN A CHILD DIAGNOSED WITH ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER

We examined the effect of a teaching method on skill fluency and on‐task endurance of a 9‐year‐old boy who had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. An academic task that occurred at low fluency during 10‐min baseline sessions was taught to fluency. When responding was not yet fluent, brief reversals to baseline showed that the learner's rate of responding decreased and that he did not spend entire sessions on task. However, once a fluency goal had been reached, responding remained fluent and he remained on task in the third reversal condition.     

Individual differences and the use of nonspecifying variables in learning to perceive distance and size: Comments on McConnell, Muchisky, and Bingham (1998)

McConnell, Muchisky, and Bingham (1998) showed that observers are able to judge the distance and size of falling, rolling, and swinging balls and that performance improves after practice with feedback. They concluded that observers use information that specifies the spatial scales of the different event types—namely, event duration in combination with event-specific constants. The improvement was interpreted as the calibration of the event-specific constants. We argue that their analyses should have considered the use of optical variables that do not specify the to-be-perceived metrics and individual differences in variable use. Furthermore, we propose convergence on the more useful variables as an alternative explanation for the observed improvement. The viability of these arguments is demonstrated with an experiment in which participants are trained with feedback to judge the distance and size of freely falling balls.     

On emotionally intelligent time travel: individual differences in affective forecasting ability

In two studies, the authors examined whether people who are high in emotional intelligence (EI) make more accurate forecasts about their own affective responses to future events. All participants completed a performance measure of EI (the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test) as well as a self-report measure of EI. Affective forecasting ability was assessed using a longitudinal design in which participants were asked to predict how they would feel and report their actual feelings following three events in three different domains: politics and academics (Study 1) and sports (Study 2). Across these events, individual differences in forecasting ability were predicted by participants' scores on the performance measure, but not the self-report measure, of EI; high-EI individuals exhibited greater affective forecasting accuracy. Emotion Management, a subcomponent of EI, emerged as the strongest predictor of forecasting ability.     

The Relations of Effortful Control and Impulsivity to Children's Sympathy: A Longitudinal Study

The relations of children's (n = 214 at Time 1; M age = 6 years at Time 1) dispositional sympathy to adult-reported and behavioral measures of effortful control (EC) and impulsivity were examined in a longitudinal study including five assessments, each two years apart. Especially for boys, relatively high levels of EC and growth in EC were related to high sympathy. Teacher-reported impulsivity was generally modestly negatively related to measures of teacher-reported sympathy for boys, and a decline in impulsivity was linked to boys’ sympathy. Some findings suggested a positive association between impulsivity and children's self-reported sympathy. EC, especially when reported by teachers, was more often a unique predictor of sympathy than was impulsivity. Results generally support the argument that sympathetic individuals, especially boys, are high in EC and that EC is a more consistent predictor of sympathy than impulsivity.     

Establishing a generalized repertoire of helping behavior in children with autism

The present study used a multiple baseline across participants design to assess whether 4 children with autism could learn a generalized repertoire of helping adults with different tasks through the use of a multicomponent teaching package. Different helping responses were taught in the presence of multiple exemplars of discriminative stimuli drawn from experimenter-defined categories of helping behavior (e.g., locating objects, putting away items, setting up an activity). During the training condition, video models, prompting, and reinforcement were used. The results showed that all 4 children learned to emit appropriate helping responses in the presence of discriminative stimuli from the helping categories used during training. Generalization of helping responses was observed in the presence of untrained discriminative stimuli during additional probe conditions. Additional pre- and postintervention generalization trials showed that the frequency of helping responses also increased in the presence of novel stimuli, in a novel setting, and with a novel instructor.     

Using vision and dynamic touch to perceive the affordances of tools

The information that people use to perceive whether a tool is suitable for a certain task depends on what is available at a given time. Visually scanning a tool and wielding it each provide information about the functional attributes of the tool. In experiment 1, we investigated the relative contributions of vision and dynamic touch to perceiving the suitability of various tools for various tasks. The results show that, when both vision and dynamic touch are available, the visual information dominates. When limited to dynamic touch, ratings of suitability are constrained by the inertial properties of the tool, and the inertial properties that are exploited depend on the task. In experiment 2, we asked whether the manner in which a tool is manipulated in exploration depends on the task for which it is being evaluated. The results suggest that tools are manipulated in ways that reflect intentions to perceive particular affordances. Exploratory movements sometimes mimic performatory movements.