Escape from serial stimuli leading to food

If the functional relations governing the strength of a conditioned reinforcer correspond to those obtained with other Pavlovian procedures (e.g., Kaplan, 1984), the termination of stimuli appearing early in the interval between successive food deliveries should be reinforcing. During initial training we presented four key colors, followed by food, in a recurrent sequence to each of 6 pigeons. This established a baseline level of autoshaped pecking. In later sessions, we terminated each of these colors or only the first color for a brief period following each peck, replacing the original color with a standard substitute to avoid darkening the key. Pecking decreased in the presence of the last color in the sequence but increased in the presence of the first. In accord with contemporary models of Pavlovian conditioning, these and other data suggest that the behavioral effects of stimuli in a chain may be better understood in terms of what each stimulus predicts, as measured by relative time to the terminal reinforcer, than in the exclusively positive terms of the traditional formulation (Skinner, 1938). The same model may also account for the initial pause under fixed-interval and fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement.     

Variations in size of the visual field in which targets are presented: An attentional range effect

In Experiment 1, subjects responded with a buttonpress to a target letter O embedded in a pair of vertical lines. A flanker control method was used to constrain the location and size of the initial attentional focus. The target could appear in one of five locations within a particular horizontal range. There were five ranges, varying from 1.7° to 8.6° in visual angle. Reaction time measures to the target exhibited V-shaped curves, with the lowest reaction time corresponding to the location of the initial focus of attention. The slopes of the curves decreased monotonically with target ranges. Reaction time measures at the extreme locations of the five ranges showed no significant increase with eccentricity, indicating that the influence of retinal sensitivity is negligible in this identification task as compared with the influence of other, presumably attentional, processes. Experiment 2 indicated that within a given range the slopes of the reaction time curves are independent of the number of locations probed. Additional evidence for the attentional range effect was given in Experiments 3 and 4, in which the tasks were detection of an asterisk both with and without flanking vertical lines and identification of the letter O with and without flanking lines. These results do not conform to predictions of a shifting focus theory of attention with the velocity of the focus assumed to be constant, or to the predictions of a gradient theory with total processing capacity assumed to be fixed.     

Effects of preparatory information about sensations, threat of pain, and attention on cold pressor distress.

Pain experience is conceptualized as a combination of stimulus sensations (e.g., aching) and emotional distress. In Experiment 1, less distress was reported to cold pressor stimulation by subjects first told about stimulus sensations than by subjects who were uninformed or were told about symptoms of bodily arousal (e.g., tension). Adding a pain warning to sensation information blocked distress reduction, presumably by eliciting an emotional interpretation of the stimulus. In Experiment 2, subjects attending only to hand sensations reported less distress than subjects attending to their bodies. This decrease in the power of the stimulus to provoke emotion is presumably mediated by a schema of hand sensations formed by attention. In Experiment 3, subjects attending to hand sensations early in the immersion and distracting themselves later reported the same low levels of distress as did subjects who attended to hand sensations throughout. Subjects distracted throughout and subjects attending to hand sensations later showed no distress reduction. Therefore, stimulus schematization must precede distress reduction. Implications for distress control are discussed.     

The sin of subjectivism: A reply to Shapiro

Shapiro criticises our book on two grounds. He first outlines a series of mistakes. None of them we believe, in fact, have been made and this is usually quite clear from our book. His second criticism rejects our ‘subjectivist’ approach to measurement. We argue that he misrepresents our methods and fails to grasp their ability both to collect accurate data and deal adequately with possible sources of bias. Indeed in these, in its attention to the dating of both independent and dependent variables, and in the flexibility of its approach to the respondent, we feel our approach is better equipped than other existing instruments to tackle the problem of the aetiological role of psycho-social factors in illness.     

The zone of potential development: implications for intelligence testing in the year 2000

The emphasis of this paper is the practice and interpretation of intelligence testing of educable retarded children. The current and future state of intelligence testing are in terms of three criteria: their predictive, diagnostic and remedial functions. In the first section we consider individual testing formats within a framework of Vygotsky's theory of potential development and the underlying assumptions of that theory concerning task analysis and transferring of training. In section two, we consider the social nature of the testing situation and the degree of contextual support provided for the learner. In the final section we consider Neisser's distinction between academic intelligence and everyday thinking with particular reference to the life adjustment of mildly retarded citizens     

Temporal organization of pattern structure

Two pattern reproduction experiments examined the relations among the figural goodness of a pattern, the organization of two parts within the pattern, and the interpart interval (ISI), which ranged from 40 to 200 msec. If the parts contained connected line segments, performance was slightly better (3%-5% gain in accuracy) at a 40-msec ISI than at a 200-msec ISI. If the parts contained unconnected line segments, reproduction accuracy of the first part declined sharply between 40 and 200 msec. These results were interpreted by assuming that the parts were perceived as a single whole pattern at a 40-msec ISI but as two separate patterns at a 200-msec ISI. One surprising finding, the lack of an interaction between figural goodness and ISI, was explained in terms of a response bias in favor of figural good patterns. A secondary manipulation revealed that a part was more accurately reproduced in a good figure context than in a poor figure context but was most accurately reproduced when it appeared alone.     

Interactive effects of cognitive involvement and response topography upon differential eyelid conditioning to conceptual discriminanda

The purpose of the experiment was to determine some cognitive differences underlying the superior differential conditioning of voluntary-form (V) over conditioned-form (C) responders. Two cognitive activities were hypothesized to be jointly necessary for the superiority of Vs: first, an active development of reinforcement contingency awareness by the subject himself, and, second, an active use of acquired contingency knowledge in predicting UCS occurrences. The first variable was manipulated by asking half of the subjects to "figure out" the contingencies, while the other half were fully informed of them at the start. The second variable was assessed by requiring half of the subjects to engage in a button-pressing US prediction task on each trial. Conditioned discrimination indicated that, as predicted, both of these cognitive activities were required for good performance by Cs, supporting the hypothesis that Cs are normally deficient in these respects. An unpredicted deterioration in discrimination for Vs when both task manipulations were imposed suggested that competition between the Vs' spontaneous cognitive activities and the experimentally imposed ones developed in the high external demand situation.     

An examination of secondary reinforcement,operant conditioning,and status envy hypotheses in relation to sex-role ideology

A series of predictions concerning adult sex-role ideology was derived from three theoretical approaches commonly applied to the sex-role development of children: secondary reinforcement, operant conditioning by peers, and status envy. Relevant data were collected by means of a questionnaire administered to 635 students at two regional state universities and to nonstudent adults in the surrounding communities. Of these, 226 were classified as having a distinctive contemporary or traditional sex-role ideology by means of a short test developed and validated by the authors for this purpose. Discriminant analyses indicated that each theoretical approach differentiated between contemporary and traditional subjects at levels significantly better than chance. However, the status envy approach, as modified by social learning theory, was most effective and correctly classified 85% of the females and 93% of the males according to their sex-role ideologies. Alternative explanations of results are discussed and an eclectic model is advocated.The authors would like to express their sincere appreciation to Dr. Barbara Wallston for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and to Jan Curley for computer assistance.     

Toward a theory of intelligence: Contributions from research with retarded children

One approach to the understanding of intelligence is through research with retarded children and adults. Any characterization of the way(s) in which they differ from nonretarded individuals results in a specification of important components of intelligence. In this paper, we deal with two general areas of research. In one, centering on the role of control processes in memory and problem-solving situations, we argue that research with the retarded has succeeded in identifying a major component of intelligence. The results from a large number of experiments lead us to the conclusion that a hallmark of intelligence is the ability to generalize information from one situation to another, and that this ability in turn depends upon effective “executive control.” In areas where less research with retarded individuals has been doen, we suggest that comparative/developmental work is necessary to gain a better understanding of the processes in question. We illustrate this point by discussing some work aimed at locating individual differences in parameters representing basic components of general information-processing systems.