Instantiation of verbs

Two experiments are reported in which it is shown that (1) if subjects are presented with sentences containing general verbs, more specific verbs may be better recall cues for those sentences than the general verbs themselves, (2) in a recognition test using the same sort of materials subjects recognize the sentence that actually occurred, not a version with a more specific verb substituted. These results show that people instantiate when they encode verbs, but they rule out a simple recoding explanation of instantiation. Two alternative theoretical analyses of instantiation are presented and discussed.     

The television camera used to measure movement

A method is described in which the signals from a vidicon television camera are converted into vertical and horizontal voltage coordinates to reference the position of a moving target. Although limited in frequency response, the device is capable of measuring various types of movement activity.     

Children''s self-initiated approach to spiders

Seventeen school children were invited to stay in the presence of a harmless spider for 4 minutes under instructions which were designed mildly to encourage touching the spider but which left open a clear alternative of not touching. Subjects confronted the spider in dyads which differed in composition in terms of fear-level and sex of subjects. The main finding was that boys did not show any more approach when paired with girls, thus confirming previous negative findings in this regard. Other findings were that boys showed more approach than girls, level of fear interacted with sex of subject, and ‘fearless’ but not ‘fearful’ subjects showed more approach with repeated experience.     

TOWARD A METHODOLOGY OF WITHDRAWAL DESIGNS FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF RESPONSE MAINTENANCE

Single-case experimental designs have advanced considerably in the evaluation of functional relationships between interventions and behavior change. The systematic investigation of response maintenance once intervention effects have been demonstrated has, however, received relatively little attention. The lack of research on maintenance may stem in part from the paucity of design options that systematically evaluate factors that contribute to maintenance. The present paper discusses three design options potentially useful for the investigation of response maintenance. These include: (a) the sequential-withdrawal, (b) the partial-withdrawal, and (c) the partial-sequential withdrawal designs. Each design is illustrated and potential limitations are discussed.     

The use of biofeedback techniques with school-aged children exhibiting behavioral and/or learning problems

This article reviews 44 studies that investigated the efficacy of biofeedback techniques in treating childhood behavioral and learning disorders. Although the data suggest that children can learn voluntary control over a variety of physiological processes, methodological flaws make it impossible to specify the mechanisms responsible for such learning. Further, the data do not suggest that biofeedback techniques are superior to more conventional treatments in remediating learning or behavioral disorders. Suggestions for future research focus upon the elimination of methodological weaknesses, the use of more stringent diagnostic criteria, and the use of more sophisticated biofeedback equipment and procedures.     

Eye movements and variations in reading time

Summary Passages of prose were constructed which obeyed a stylistic convention referred to as dovetailing. For a given pair of sentences the final position of the first, and the initial position of the second, had the same referent. It was shown that critical dovetailed lines of text were read more rapidly than lines containing the same information, but lacking sequential structure. Degrading text by obscuring all interword spaces removed this reading time advantage. Analysis of subjects' eye movements during reading suggested that reading facilitation, induced by dovetailing, may result, not only from higher-order structural properties of text, but also from local features (particularly word-length information and associative relationships between words) known to influence eye movements.