Analysis of the learned irrelevance effect in appetitive Pavlovian conditioning

In Experiments 1 and 2 rats received uncorrelated presentations of a light conditioned stimulus (CS) and a food unconditioned stimulus (US) on each day of a preexposure phase. Control subjects received the same number of USs during the first half of preexposure and the same number of CSs during the second. Uncorrelated preexposure retarded inhibitory conditioning. Experiment 3 showed, however, that the different patterns of US preexposure experienced by the two groups could in itself influence the course of subsequent inhibitory conditioning. When this factor was equated by restricting the uncorrelated treatment to the first half of the pre-exposure phase (Experiment 2) or by extending the control treatment throughout the phase (Experiment 4) it was found that uncorrelated preexposure retarded excitatory conditioning, but facilitated inhibitory conditioning. This outcome challenges an interpretation in terms of the concept of learned irrelevance, which predicts that uncorrelated preexposure should retard both forms of conditioning.     

Surveying Environmental Perspectives among Faculty at an Institution of Christian Higher Education

Abstract

Environmental degradation and climate change are frequently in the news, but the Christian perspective is often absent or varied. In this study, faculty at an institution of Christian higher education were surveyed to better understand their perspective and to assess if any particular factor (e.g., gender, school affiliation, or political party) can be linked to a particular environmental worldview. Although faculty held neutral positions on half of the questions, they also reported strong agreement to both pro-environment and pro-human statements. Tensions between prioritizing loving ones’ neighbor (anthropocentrism) and embracing Creation stewardship (ecocentrism) can be resolved with a God-centered theocentric worldview.     

Group size and satisfaction in shop stewards' meetings and management/union consultative committees

Current Psychology - The investigation examined a number of variables previously observed in laboratory studies. Two kinds of groups were studied: shop stewards' meetings, and joint...     

Domain effects in lexical development: learning words for foods and toys

We investigated 3-year-olds’ and adults’ use of domain cues in learning words for solid and nonsolid material entities. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants heard a novel neutral noun (e.g., “my X”) for a standard solid or nonsolid entity described as either a toy or a food. They then were asked to extend the word to one of two other entities. Both options matched the standard in solidity; but one differed from it in an object-relevant property (shape) and the other in a substance-relevant property (color, texture, or smell). Both children and adults were more likely to select the same-shaped entity if the standard was (1) solid than if it was nonsolid, and (2) described as a toy than if it was described as a food. Their interpretations of novel words for material entities were thus affected not only by perceptual information (about solidity) but also by conceptual information (about domain). In Experiment 3, the novel noun was presented in a syntactic context that suggested the solid entity should be interpreted as an object (e.g., “an X”) and that the nonsolid entity should be interpreted as a substance (e.g., “some X”). For adults, these changes largely eliminated the effect of the entity’s domain (toy, food) on interpretation. We interpret these findings in terms of the proposal that domain cues, like solidity cues, furnish information about whether an entity’s structure should be thought of as arbitrary or nonarbitrary and, hence, about whether a word should be interpreted as naming an object or a substance construal.