Methylphenidate and cognitive therapy with add children: A methodological reconsideration

The present doubleblind study examined the effects of methylphenidate, cognitive therapy, and their combination in attention deficitdisordered (ADD) children. Four treatment groups were compared on measures of attentional deployment and cognitive style, tests of academic achievement, and behavioral rating scales. In contrast to a previous study conducted in this laboratory, children in this study were not receiving medication during posttesting. Results were interpreted to suggest that measurable effects of stimulant medication dissipate rapidly upon discontinuation of pharmacotherapy. The combination of methylphenidate and cognitive therapy was not found to be any more efficacious than either of the treatments studied alone. Discussion suggests that medication status at follow-up is an essential feature of research design.This research was supported in full by U.S. Public Health Service Grant No. MH 37-628 from the National Institute of Mental Health, Psychopharmacology Branch, and by Biomedical Research Award No. RR 0715807 from the National Institutes of Health, each awarded to R. T. Brown. Placebo and methylphenidate were supplied by CIBA-GEIGY, Summit, New Jersey. The authors are grateful to Dr. Rute Medenis and the entire staff at the University of Illinois Pediatrics Clinic for their valuable assistance and kind support throughout the project. The authors would also like to thank Avery L. Spunt, R.Ph., College of Pharmacy, University of Illinois, for his assistance in packaging the medication and monitoring compliance; Arthur I. Neyhus, Ph.D., Coordinator of Child Study Facility, University of Illinois at Chicago, for his assistance in evaluation; and J. Scott Allen, Jimmy Bruce, Robert Miller, Michael Mazius, and Steven Orenczuk, for their assistance in training of the children.The contributions of these authors are equal.     

Gender and time variations in medical students' value development

A classic study by Becker and Geer proposed that medical students underwent cycles of value development during medical school. Initially, high levels of humanitarianism declined then re-emerged as students neared graduation. Declines in humanitarianism were accompanied by increased interest in extrinsic rewards. This paper examines value development in medical school for 200 men and women recent graduates. Questionnaire data collected at three times were used to develop scales of students' orientations toward humanitarianism and extrinsic rewards. We find partial verification for value-change patterns described by Becker and Geer, but gender variations are stronger than time variations. Women showed stronger humanitarianism and stronger interest in work conditions at all times than did men. Interest in extrinsic rewards increased for students of both genders but never surpassed humanitarianism in relative importance.The authors appreciate aid in data analysis from Daniel Duross and Tod Sloan and comments on earlier drafts on the paper by Camille Wortman and Roland K. Hawkes. The research was supported partially by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the American Sociological Association Meeting in Detroit.     

Escape from serial stimuli leading to food

If the functional relations governing the strength of a conditioned reinforcer correspond to those obtained with other Pavlovian procedures (e.g., Kaplan, 1984), the termination of stimuli appearing early in the interval between successive food deliveries should be reinforcing. During initial training we presented four key colors, followed by food, in a recurrent sequence to each of 6 pigeons. This established a baseline level of autoshaped pecking. In later sessions, we terminated each of these colors or only the first color for a brief period following each peck, replacing the original color with a standard substitute to avoid darkening the key. Pecking decreased in the presence of the last color in the sequence but increased in the presence of the first. In accord with contemporary models of Pavlovian conditioning, these and other data suggest that the behavioral effects of stimuli in a chain may be better understood in terms of what each stimulus predicts, as measured by relative time to the terminal reinforcer, than in the exclusively positive terms of the traditional formulation (Skinner, 1938). The same model may also account for the initial pause under fixed-interval and fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement.     

Variations in size of the visual field in which targets are presented: An attentional range effect

In Experiment 1, subjects responded with a buttonpress to a target letter O embedded in a pair of vertical lines. A flanker control method was used to constrain the location and size of the initial attentional focus. The target could appear in one of five locations within a particular horizontal range. There were five ranges, varying from 1.7° to 8.6° in visual angle. Reaction time measures to the target exhibited V-shaped curves, with the lowest reaction time corresponding to the location of the initial focus of attention. The slopes of the curves decreased monotonically with target ranges. Reaction time measures at the extreme locations of the five ranges showed no significant increase with eccentricity, indicating that the influence of retinal sensitivity is negligible in this identification task as compared with the influence of other, presumably attentional, processes. Experiment 2 indicated that within a given range the slopes of the reaction time curves are independent of the number of locations probed. Additional evidence for the attentional range effect was given in Experiments 3 and 4, in which the tasks were detection of an asterisk both with and without flanking vertical lines and identification of the letter O with and without flanking lines. These results do not conform to predictions of a shifting focus theory of attention with the velocity of the focus assumed to be constant, or to the predictions of a gradient theory with total processing capacity assumed to be fixed.     

Effects of preparatory information about sensations, threat of pain, and attention on cold pressor distress.

Pain experience is conceptualized as a combination of stimulus sensations (e.g., aching) and emotional distress. In Experiment 1, less distress was reported to cold pressor stimulation by subjects first told about stimulus sensations than by subjects who were uninformed or were told about symptoms of bodily arousal (e.g., tension). Adding a pain warning to sensation information blocked distress reduction, presumably by eliciting an emotional interpretation of the stimulus. In Experiment 2, subjects attending only to hand sensations reported less distress than subjects attending to their bodies. This decrease in the power of the stimulus to provoke emotion is presumably mediated by a schema of hand sensations formed by attention. In Experiment 3, subjects attending to hand sensations early in the immersion and distracting themselves later reported the same low levels of distress as did subjects who attended to hand sensations throughout. Subjects distracted throughout and subjects attending to hand sensations later showed no distress reduction. Therefore, stimulus schematization must precede distress reduction. Implications for distress control are discussed.     

The sin of subjectivism: A reply to Shapiro

Shapiro criticises our book on two grounds. He first outlines a series of mistakes. None of them we believe, in fact, have been made and this is usually quite clear from our book. His second criticism rejects our ‘subjectivist’ approach to measurement. We argue that he misrepresents our methods and fails to grasp their ability both to collect accurate data and deal adequately with possible sources of bias. Indeed in these, in its attention to the dating of both independent and dependent variables, and in the flexibility of its approach to the respondent, we feel our approach is better equipped than other existing instruments to tackle the problem of the aetiological role of psycho-social factors in illness.     

The zone of potential development: implications for intelligence testing in the year 2000

The emphasis of this paper is the practice and interpretation of intelligence testing of educable retarded children. The current and future state of intelligence testing are in terms of three criteria: their predictive, diagnostic and remedial functions. In the first section we consider individual testing formats within a framework of Vygotsky's theory of potential development and the underlying assumptions of that theory concerning task analysis and transferring of training. In section two, we consider the social nature of the testing situation and the degree of contextual support provided for the learner. In the final section we consider Neisser's distinction between academic intelligence and everyday thinking with particular reference to the life adjustment of mildly retarded citizens     

Temporal organization of pattern structure

Two pattern reproduction experiments examined the relations among the figural goodness of a pattern, the organization of two parts within the pattern, and the interpart interval (ISI), which ranged from 40 to 200 msec. If the parts contained connected line segments, performance was slightly better (3%-5% gain in accuracy) at a 40-msec ISI than at a 200-msec ISI. If the parts contained unconnected line segments, reproduction accuracy of the first part declined sharply between 40 and 200 msec. These results were interpreted by assuming that the parts were perceived as a single whole pattern at a 40-msec ISI but as two separate patterns at a 200-msec ISI. One surprising finding, the lack of an interaction between figural goodness and ISI, was explained in terms of a response bias in favor of figural good patterns. A secondary manipulation revealed that a part was more accurately reproduced in a good figure context than in a poor figure context but was most accurately reproduced when it appeared alone.     

Interactive effects of cognitive involvement and response topography upon differential eyelid conditioning to conceptual discriminanda

The purpose of the experiment was to determine some cognitive differences underlying the superior differential conditioning of voluntary-form (V) over conditioned-form (C) responders. Two cognitive activities were hypothesized to be jointly necessary for the superiority of Vs: first, an active development of reinforcement contingency awareness by the subject himself, and, second, an active use of acquired contingency knowledge in predicting UCS occurrences. The first variable was manipulated by asking half of the subjects to "figure out" the contingencies, while the other half were fully informed of them at the start. The second variable was assessed by requiring half of the subjects to engage in a button-pressing US prediction task on each trial. Conditioned discrimination indicated that, as predicted, both of these cognitive activities were required for good performance by Cs, supporting the hypothesis that Cs are normally deficient in these respects. An unpredicted deterioration in discrimination for Vs when both task manipulations were imposed suggested that competition between the Vs' spontaneous cognitive activities and the experimentally imposed ones developed in the high external demand situation.