Some factors involved in the comparison of response systems: acquisition, extinction, and transfer of head-poke and lever-press Sidman avoidance

Head poking, a suggested natural escape reaction to shock for the rat, was compared to lever pressing in a Sidman avoidance study. Both responses could be emitted at any time, but only one was effective in a given session. Acquisition and extinction of the two responses were compared under both signalled and unsignalled avoidance. Then, a test for transfer was conducted in which acquisition conditions were re-instated, but the effectiveness of the responses was reversed. Three differences between responses were noted: (a) head poking was superior in reducing shock rates under signalled conditions; (b) head poking was more resistant to extinction, especially under signalled conditions; (c) under unsignalled conditions, animals were unable to learn to head poke if they had previously learned to lever press. Findings a and c were pursued in later experiments. Finding a depended on the location of the warning signal with respect to the response system. When the lever press required approach to the warning signal, the head poke was superior. But when the head poke required approach to the warning signal, the two responses were equally effective. Finding c depended on the absence of feedback for head poke during transfer. Two conclusions are offered: first, the two responses appear to obey the same laws when their topographical differences are taken into account. Second, response feedback appears to be more critical in transfer than in original acquisition.     

Discrimination learning as a function of differences in materials: A proposed explanation

The present study affords an explanation for the consistent, but not always statistically significant, pattern showing superior verbal discrimination learning performance for low- as compared to high-frequency words. In a frequency judgment task, it was found that relative to high-frequency words, low-frequency words for which Ss (sixth graders) knew the meanings produced apparent frequency measures consistent with superior verbal discrimination learning, while low-frequency words that were unknown to the children did not. These results, taken together with those based on comparisons of pictures and high-frequency words, lend themselves to a modified Weber’s law interpretation of stimulus material differences in discrimination learning.     

Aspects of language pragmatics and the social perception of lying

Two experiments were conducted in order to examine the influence of linguistic and extralinguistic variables on the attribution of lying. In the first experiment, one of two tape recordings of a target person, who responded either true or false to a list of adjectives, was evaluated by 83 subjects. The subjects' task was to attempt to discover when the target person was not telling the truth. The stimulus tapes were constructed such that the time between the adjective and the target person's response was systematically varied and the adjectives varied on the likability of a person possessing that trait. Overall, it was found that if the target person responded either too quickly or too slowly the subjects attributed his response as a lie more often than if the delay was more intermediate in duration (p<0.01). The adjective likability value in combination with the true or false response of the target person also contributed to the attribution of lying (p<0.01). In the second experiment, the adjectives were rescaled on another dimension thought to influence the attribution of lying: the degree to which the adjective is true of the general population. The results suggest that this new scale is related to the degree to which lie attributions are made.This research was supported in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under Research Grant 1 P01 HD-01762-01 and the National Institute of Mental Health under Research Grant MN 08260.     

The behavioral treatment of a “transsexual” preadolescent boy

Behavioral treatment procedures were developed to suppress feminine sex-typed behaviors and to increase masculine sex-typed behaviors in an 8-year-old boy with “childhood cross-gender identity.” The boy's clinical history paralleled the retrospective reports of adult transsexuals, including (1) feminine voice inflection and predominantly feminine content in speech, (2) verbal self-reference as “sissy” and “fag” and statements about his preference to be a girl, (3) feminine hand and arm gestures and “swishy” gait, (4) an aversion to masculine play activities, (5) a strong preference for girl playmates and taking a feminine role in play and role-playing, and (6) improvised cross-dressing. With a multiple-baseline intrasubject design across stimulus environments and across behaviors, the subject was treated sequentially in the clinic, at home, and in the school. The boy's mother was trained to administer a token economy program in the home, and the school teacher was taught to apply a response-cost procedure in the classroom. The initial treatment effects were found to be largely response specific and stimulus specific, necessitating treatment for a number of behaviors in the three major environments. Followup data 12 months after treatment termination suggest that the boy's sex-typed behaviors have become essentially normalized. This treatment holds promise for correcting pathological gender identity development in boys and for relieving the associated emotional adjustment problems.     

Auditory overselectivity in autistic children

Autistic and normal children were trained to respond to a complex stimulus containing two auditory components. After the discrimination was acquired, the individual components were presented separately, allowing assessment of the extent to which the child's responding was controlled by one or both of the cues. The autistic children, unlike the normal children, provided evidence for stimulus overselectivity in that 6 of 8 autistic subjects responded to only one of the components. These results are consistent with those of previous studies which showed that when autistic children are presented with a complex visual or multiple-modality stimulus, they selectively respond to only one component of the complex. The present results extend the stimulus overselectivity hypothesis to the situation where all of the stimuli occur within the auditory modality. It is suggested that auditory overselectivity may partially account for autistic deficits in speech comprehension.     

A developmental study of recognition of pictures and nouns

Children at four age levels (4, 6, 8, and 10 years) were given continuous recognition tasks using concrete noun, abstract noun, and pictorial stimuli in a 4 × 3 factorial design. Pictures were recognized significantly better than concrete and abstract nouns at the 4- and 6-year age levels and significantly better than abstract nouns at the 8- and 10-year age levels. This supported Paivio's contention that pictures are easier to remember than words because of a greater possibility of dual encoding, while Rohwer's contention that there is a shift in recognition memory development received no support. There were no significant differences between recognition of concrete and abstract nouns at any age level, which opposed the findings from adult studies and suggested that Paivio's theoretical orientation would have to be extended in order to account for developmental data. Recognition for both concrete and abstract nouns was found to be linear and increasing significantly with age, but no age trends for picture recognition were found.     

Differentiation of press durations with upper and lower limits on reinforced values

Rats received food following lever-press durations between t and t+t′ sec where t was 2, 4, or 8 sec and t′ was 0.25t, 0.50t, or 1.00t sec. Modal press durations were greater than t but less than t+t′ in all cases. Distributions of press durations were lower and broader for larger values of t. Lower t′/t ratios produced lower median press durations and relatively narrower press-duration distributions. Median press duration was a power function of t within a t′/t ratio condition, corresponding to previous results for latency, interresponse time, and response durations.     

The effect of memory color on form identification

Previous studies have demonstrated that a form’s identity affects the phenomenal hue of that form. This effect has been attributed to the operation of the “memory color” phenomenon. The present study was proposed to assess the effect of “memory” or characteristic color on form identification. Results indicate that memory color, rather than interacting with the object in such a manner as to aid identification, induces a bias toward identification of an object of the memory color.     

Iconic memory and its relation to perceptual processing and other memory mechanisms

Research on iconic memory is reviewed. Specific issues discussed include the duration of the icon, effects of stimulus variables, types of information lost, selection, processing capacity, and scanning. More general issues include the level of encoding in the icon and its relation to short-term memory. It is also argued that a number of experiments do not show what they were intended to show because of possible methodological problems. The view is developed that iconic memory is postretinal but uncoded; nor is it influenced directly by strategies or subsequent mechanisms.