A PRELIMINARY PROCEDURE FOR PREDICTING THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF REINFORCEMENT-BASED PROCEDURES

In the current investigation, a modification was made to the preference assessment described by Pace, Ivancic, Edwards, Iwata, and Page (1985) to predict the effects of stimuli when used in a differential-reinforcement-of-other-behavior (DRO) schedule for 2 clients with severe self-injurious behavior (SIB) and profound mental retardation. Based on the results of the preference assessment, three types of stimuli were identified: (a) high-preference stimuli associated with high rates of SIB (HP/HS), (b) high-preference stimuli associated with relatively lower rates of SIB (HP/LS), and (c) low-preference stimuli associated with low rates of SIB (LP/LS). Consistent with the results of the preference assessment, the DRO schedule with HP/HS stimuli resulted in increased SIB, and the DRO schedule with LP/LS stimuli resulted in no changes in SIB. HP/LS stimuli were demonstrated reinforcers but did not result in a change in SIB when used in a DRO schedule. Thus, the stimulus preference assessment may be useful clinically in some situations for predicting both the beneficial and the negative side effects of stimuli in DRO procedures.     

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.     

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 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.     

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.     

Effect of situational factors on the self-attributions of females and males

The simultaneous effects of the sex-role appropriateness of the task and the presence or absence of competition upon the attributions made by males and females were studied with 192 college students. Contrary to predictions, males rated themselves as luckier than females in the competitive conditions. However, as predicted, females made fewer self-serving attributions for the male than the female task.     

An automated eye movement laboratory for on-line electrooculography

This paper describes an automated eye movement laboratory that uses electrooculography (EOG) to study people’s eye movements while they read. An on-line minicomputer processes bioelectric potentials that correspond to saccadic eye movements. Horizontal saccades larger than 1.5 deg of visual angle are detected and analyzed in real-time as they occur. The laboratory is designed for prolonged yet unobtrusive observation of human eye movements during sustained reading periods of minutes or hours. All important functions regarding data collection and data reduction are performed automatically, according to simple procedures that can be applied uniformly and without bias to nearly all subjects that we study. Results from three experiments are cited in order to quantify the performance of the laboratory with respect to four criteria: saccade detection accuracy, measurement accuracy, sensitivity, and the uniformity of these measures over different subjects.     

OVERJUSTIFICATION EFFECTS IN TOKEN ECONOMIES

This study tested the relevance to clinical token economies of the overjustification hypothesis that tangible reward interferes with intrinsic interest in target behaviors and causes such behaviors to be less probable following a period of reinforcement than preceding such a period. The study was carried out in an ongoing token economy for chronic psychiatric patients. Alternated over an 8-week period were weeks of token and no-token reward for one of the program's target behaviors, toothbrushing. Two different amounts of token reward were employed in order to examine whether reward magnitude might influence the presence or extent of overjustification effects. Little evidence was found for the presence of overjustification effects in token economies. However, maintenance of toothbrushing was greater in no-token weeks following weeks of low amounts of token reward than in no-token weeks following weeks of higher amounts of reward. The importance of such complex functional relationships is discussed.     

Helping is not enough: Recipient's reactions to aid as a function of positive and negative information about the self

The present research investigated the effects of experimentally induced positive and negative feedback about the self on the recipient's subsequent reactions to aid. In line with a consistency prediction, subjects given positive feedback who later received aid had lower mood ratings and less favorable self-evaluations than those who were given positive feedback but no subsequent help. Conversely, subjects given negative feedback who later received aid had higher mood ratings and more positive self-evaluations than those who were given negative feedback but no subsequent help. Subjects' evaluations of another individual were characterized by aid main effects, which indicate that an other who helped was evaluated more favorably than an other who did not help. The conceptual and applied implications of these results are discussed.     

Peripheral information extraction: A developmental examination of reading processes

Three experiments examining the information extraction processes are presented. In Experiments I and II, adults and children were presented paragraphs to read and search for specified targets, respectively. Two types of typographical (spatial) manipulations were used: case of the letters within the paragraphs was as normally experienced, or in alternating upper and lower case letters. Spacing between words was either as normal, filled with a neutral symbol, or absent. The response measures were reading and search speed in words per minute. Sensitivity to case (word shape) and space (word boundary) increased as a function of experience and was different for reading compared with search. In Experiment III subjects were asked to judge whether briefly presented pairs of letters were the same or different. Retinal (spatial) location was varied from trial to trial; dependent measure was reaction time. Results showed a developmental progression in response time with complex interactions. Theoretical interpretations of these data are discussed in support of the initial stage of Hochberg's peripheral to cognitive search guidance model.