Errors in auditory direction-finding after compensation for visual re-arrangement

Ss walked about out of doors wearing laterally displacing prisms, and sound-attenuating muffs. Errors occurred in an auditory localization task during exposure to visual displacement. With continued exposure these errors tended to disappear after about 108 min. The errors disappeared earlier when muffs were not worn.     

Relationships,not boundaries

The authors find it more useful to payattention to relationships than to boundaries.By focusing attention on bounded, individualpsychological issues, the metaphor ofboundaries can distract helping professionalsfrom thinking about inequities of power. Itoversimplifies a complex issue, inviting us toignore discourses around gender, race, class,culture, and the like that support injustice,abuse, and exploitation. Making boundaries acentral metaphor for ethical practice can keepus from critically examining the effects ofdistance, withdrawal, and non-participation.The authors describe how it is possible toexamine the practical, moral, and ethicaleffects of our participation in relationshipsby focusing on just relationships rather thanon boundaries. They give illustrations andclinical examples of relationally-focusedethical practices that derive from a narrativeapproach to therapy.     

Short-term retention of lexical-semantic representations: implications for speech production

Patients with semantic STM deficits have difficulty comprehending sentences that require the retention of several lexical-semantic representations prior to their integration into higher-level propositions (Martin, 1995: Martin & Romani. 1994). In Experiment 1, patients with a semantic retention deficit had difficulty with the same type of constructions in speech production, namely noun phrases with one or two prenominal adjectives. Their performance improved when they could produce the nouns and adjectives in sentence form, which placed smaller demands on lexical-semantic retention. In Experiment 2 these patients were better able to produce syntactically complex sentences than the prenominal adjective phrases having an equal number of content words, indicating that the findings in Experiment 1 could not be attributed to syntactic complexity. These patients produced more pauses in the sentence constructions in Experiments 1 and 2, suggesting that the timing of such productions is abnormal. In contrast, patient EA, with a phonological retention deficit, performed better than the patients with a semantic retention deficit on the AN phrases despite having a smaller STM span. She showed no significant benefit of producing sentence compared to phrase constructions, and also made fewer and shorter pauses than the other patients. These findings support the multiple capacities view of verbal working memory and suggest that the same semantic retention capacity used in language comprehension is used in speech production.     

Improving Public Perception of Behavior Analysis

The potential impact of behavior analysis is limited by the public’s dim awareness of the field. The mass media rarely cover behavior analysis, other than to echo inaccurate negative stereotypes about control and punishment. The media instead play up appealing but less-evidence-based approaches to problems, a key example being the touting of dubious diets over behavioral approaches to losing excess weight. These sorts of claims distort or skirt scientific evidence, undercutting the fidelity of behavior analysis to scientific rigor. Strategies for better connecting behavior analysis with the public might include reframing the field’s techniques and principles in friendlier, more resonant form; pushing direct outcome comparisons between behavior analysis and its rivals in simple terms; and playing up the “warm and fuzzy” side of behavior analysis.