ASSESSMENT AND TREATMENT OF DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR MAINTAINED BY STEREOTYPIC OBJECT MANIPULATION

In the current investigation, 2 participants with mental retardation displayed property destruction and stereotypy, and both responses involved the same materials (e.g., breaking and tapping plastic objects). Three experiments were conducted (a) to indirectly assess the functions of these two responses, (b) to determine their relation to one another, and (c) to develop a treatment to reduce the more serious behavior, property destruction. In Experiment 1, previously destroyed materials were either present or absent, and their presence reduced property destruction but not stereotypy. In Experiment 2, matched toys (ones that produced sensory stimulation similar to stereotypy) were either present or absent, or were replaced by unmatched toys (for 1 participant). Matched toys produced large reductions and unmatched toys produced small reductions in property destruction and stereotypy. In Experiment 3, attempts to pick up undestroyed objects were either blocked or not blocked while matched toys were continuously available. Response blocking reduced property destruction (and attempts), prevented stereotypy, and increased manipulation of matched toys. These results suggest that the two aberrant responses formed a chain (e.g., breaking and then tapping the object), which was maintained by the sensory consequences (e.g., auditory stimulation) of the terminal response, and that previously destroyed material or matched toys made the initial response (property destruction) unnecessary.     

Compassion: An east‐west comparison

Compassion is an emotion that occupies a central position in Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy while it is often a neglected subject in contemporary western philosophy. This essay is a comparison between an Eastern view of compassion based upon Mahāyāna Buddhist perspectives and a western view of the same emotion. Certain principles found in Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy such as the Bodhisattva Ideal, and suffering (dukkha) to name two, are explored for the information they contain about compassion. An essay by Lawrence Blum is taken as representative of a Western view (but not exclusively) and it is analyzed for its shortcomings in light of the Buddhist view. The conclusion briefly describes the value of understanding an eastern view on compassion as a means of filling the void one finds in western medical ethics discourse which focuses so heavily, and redundantly, upon issues such as patient autonomy and paternalism.     

What place does religion have in the ethical thinking of scientists and engineers?

Religion, defined as ‘the idea of a state that transcends ourselves and our world and the working out of the consequences of that idea’, may influence the ethical thinking of scientists and engineers in two ways. The first is at the level of the individual and how personal beliefs affect the choice of research, design or development projects, relationships with other researchers and the understandings of the consequences of research on other aspects of life. The second level is that of the social and cultural setting in which scientists and engineers work; how society decides which research to sponsor, how to apply the results of scientific discovery and which technology it chooses to develop and for what purposes. In neither of these areas is religious belief a necessary condition for scientists and engineers to pursue one course of action rather than another. The existence of religious belief within the individual and society is, though, part of the ethical framework in which scientist and engineers work and therefore something to which attention should be paid. Religion provides a particular perspective on what should be. Conversely science and technology provide information on the nature of the person and the universe in which we live, which must be taken into account when theologians and religious moralists apply their ethical norms and principles.     

Evidence that blocking is due to associative deficit: Blocking history affects the degree of subsequent associative competition

Rats were trained on an appetitive discriminated operant procedure according to a blocking design, in which training with a compound stimulus (A + B) was given with or without prior training with A alone. Stimulus B was then presented in compound with a new stimulus (B + C compound). The ability of Stimulus B to block acquisition of control by Stimulus C was decreased by B having itself been blocked by A during the prior training. The results imply that the mechanism of blocking during the initial blocking procedure was a reduced association between Stimulus B and the reinforcer, and not a performance deficit such as that postulated by comparator models of learning.     

Visual recognition memory for binary pictures: another look

Recognition memory for matrices of 0s and 1s was examined as a function of the number of elements (complexity) and density of those elements within the matrix. It was found that with greater density and lesser complexity, recognition performance improved. This result contradicts an earlier finding of Green and Purohit, who concluded that the more complicated matrices led to better performance. The present study suggests that their conclusion was erroneous and stemmed from failure to control the physical parameters of density and number of elements in the matrix. Implications for the general problem of recognition memory and eye movements are discussed.     

The changing pattern of perceptual analytic strategies and response selection with practice in a two-choice reaction time task

In the experiment reported here the primary hypothesis proposed, which was supported by the data, was that subjects performing a two-choice self-paced serial RT task would learn to change their strategy of perceptual analysis of signals presented to them as they became progressively more practised. Early in practice each signal is identified as a particular state of the display and an appropriate response is then made. Well practised subjects, however, select their responses by reference to the change or constancy between successive displays. This strategy implies that the assumptions made by the generally accepted simple S-R connectionist model of two-choice serial RT may be quite misleading, since the choice of any particular response must be determined not only by the display state but also by what the previous response had been.     

The availability explanation of excessive plausibility assessments

The assessment of hypotheses in hypothesis generation involves a comparison between those hypotheses that have been generated (specified) and those that are not generated (unspecified). Experiment 1 was an investigation of an “availability explanation” for subjects' overconfidence in the probability of specified hypotheses. The conjecture is that subjects have difficulty retrieving unspecified hypotheses from memory. Therefore, the underpopulated set of unspecified hypotheses is assessed as less probable then it actually is and the specified set is assessed as more probable. Two manipulations to increase the availability of unspecified hypotheses were investigated. One involved explicitly requesting subjects to populate the unspecified set; the other was a computer presentation of candidate unspecified hypotheses. Results of experiment 1 were that assessment overconfidence for both experimental groups was reduced. The results support the conjecture that the availability heuristic is at least partially responsible for subjects' overconfidence. The main result of experiment 2 was that the overconfidence bias persisted with different assessment methods for both subject-generated and experimenter-supplied hypotheses.     

Alphanumeric category effects: Evidence against the sufficiency of a localization explanation

The Hatfield Polytechnic, Hatfield, Herts ALIO 9AB, England The experiment utilized a serial choice reaction time (RT) paradigm in which only one alphanumeric stimulus was presented per trial, and the target set consisted of a single identified item. The categorical relationship between the target and nontarget items was varied as a property of blocks of trials. Target and nontarget RTs were smaller when the specified target item (e.g., the number 6) was categorically distinct from the nontargets (e.g., letters) than when it was from the same category (e.g., digits). The processing of catch-trial stimuli (items from the alternate category to the nontargets) and homographie category-ambiguous items was inhibited only in the former, between-category, condition. The results are contrasted with those obtained in visual search tasks. They suggest that a “locational-cue” explanation of alphanumeric category effects is inadequate.     

On the semantic content of subcategorization frames

This paper investigates relations between the meanings of verbs and the syntactic structures in which they appear. This investigation is motivated by the enigmas as to how children discover verb meanings. Well-known problems with unconstrained induction of word meanings from observation of world circumstances suggest that additional constraints or sources of information are required. If there exist strong and reliable parallels between the structural and semantic properties of verbs, then an additional source of information about verb meanings is reliably present in each verb's linguistic context. Five experiments are presented which investigate the following hypothesis regarding the scope of these relations: The closer any two verbs in their semantic structure, the greater the overlap should be in their licensed syntactic structures. To investigate this hypothesis, data of two kinds were collected from different groups of subjects: (a) One group of subjects was asked to judge the semantic relatedness of verbs by selecting the semantic outlier in triads presented to them. (b) A second group of subjects was asked to judge the grammaticality of these same verbs in a large range of syntactic environments. These two types of data were then compared to assess the degree of correspondence in the two partitionings (syntactic and semantic) of the verb set. The findings, overall, support the view that the syntax of verbs is a quite regular, although complex, projection from their semantics. In conclusion, we discuss the kinds of features that are formally marked in syntactic structure and relate these to the problem of verb-vocabulary acquisition in young children.     

An instrumented method for assessment and remediation of stuttering: A single-subject case study

A single-subject experimental design was used to investigate the feasibility of applying non-invasive laboratory instrumentation for examining speech physiology to assessment and biofeedback-based remediation of stuttering. Physiologic assessment facilitated the development of behavioral goals directed at changing respiratory and phonatory behaviors for this subject. Visual biofeedback therapy produced reduction in respiratory discontinuities and increased phonatory continuity, concomitant with reduced perceivable molar dysfluency. Methods used in this case illustrate a variety of options and problems related to clinical use of instrumentation. Results suggest that signals which represent respiratory, phonatory, and articulatory physiologic events may be clinically practical for evaluating and altering perceivable dysfluency.