Visual discrimination learning in the killer whale (Orcinus orca)

Trial-and-error and errorless training procedures were used to train two killer whales on a simple visual discrimination problem. Both whales demonstrated difficulties in solving the problem under trial-and-error training. The relative effectiveness of the two training procedures is evaluated.     

Contributions of Teleoanalytic Theory and Techniques to School Counseling

Counselor educators should be concerned with presenting varied theoretical approaches to school counseling. This article develops the teleoanalytic position and acquaints the reader with Adlerian concepts and procedures. 10 assumptions for understanding personality are set forth. Unique counseling procedures that develop from this rationale, such as Early Recollections, Family Constellation, and “The Hidden Reason,” are described.     

Decision latencies of “same” and “different” judgments

When a subject is asked to judge whether two stimuli are “same” or“different,” the time he takes to reach the decision same is frequently unequal to the time he takes to reach the decision different. We studied this discrepancy as a function of several variables, including stimulus modality, “codability” vs.“noncodability” of test stimuli, interstimulus interval, and discrimination difficulty. Results of four different experiments performed on a total of 111 subjects showed codability and discrimination difficulty to be the most important factors. Stimuli that are codable (i.e., which can be categorized by absolute judgment) yield a shorter latency for decision same, and noncodable stimuli (i.e., those requiring a reference stimulus for categorization) yield a longer latency for decision same. The modality of test stimuli, the prothetic or metathetic nature of the dimension to be judged, and simultaneous vs. successive presentation of the stimuli appear not to be crucial factors.     

An infrared device for detecting locomotor activity

An electronic device for detecting locomotor activity in the home cage of small animals is described. The system involves a dense array of infrared (IR) beams designed to function as switches and capable of penetrating plastic walls of standard rodent cages without operational decrement. The device is reasonably inexpensive, is simple to calibrate, can be used with groups of animals, may be used for extended periods without maintenance, and is reliable with different cages.     

The value of action and inference in dynamic decision making

The use of action- versus judgment-oriented decision strategies in a dynamic decision task is investigated. Subjects engaged in a simulated medical decision-making task, where the goal is to select treatments in order to cure patients suffering from an unknown disease. The experiment manipulated two task factors that were predicted to influence the effectiveness and efficiency of action- and judgment-oriented strategies: (1) the availability of a decision aid that promotes the interpretability of outcome feedback in the task and (2) the level of risk associated with treatment choices, which influences the opportunity for corrective actions to compensate for earlier decision errors. Results indicated that these manipulations did in fact influence performance. However, most subjects did not use action-oriented strategies even when they would have led to superior performance. Possible explanations for this finding are discussed and the implications for theoretical accounts of strategy acquisition and selection are considered.     

Allocation of attention in texture segregation, visual search, and location-precuing paradigms

Is there a common mechanism (or set of mechanisms) that controls the allocation of spatial attention in texture segregation, visual search, and location-precuing tasks? This question was addressed by comparing data from our previous research on location-cuing and search tasks with data from a new set of experiments on texture segregation, in which a common set of stimuli was used across the three paradigms. However, when we ranked the scores for the targets on texture segregation speed, search rate, and improvement due to precuing effects, agreement between these measures was less than perfect. Further analyses of these results led to the following conclusions: (a) speed of texture segregation is affected by perceptual aspects of the display other than the attentional salience of a particular target; (b) visual search rate and the size of precuing effects are strongly related over most of the set of targets we used; and (c) some cases in which search rate was not consistent with size of precue effects may be related to the presence of nearby distractors in the search task.