A comparison of olfactory adaptation among seven odorants and their relationship with several physicochemical properties

A study was made comparing olfactory sensitivity before and after 100 sec of adaptation for stimuli representing several odorant classes with varying physicochemical properties. Measures taken were absolute detection thresholds and magnitude estimates of suprathreshold stimuli. Significant rank-order correlation coefficients (<.90) were found between nonadapted and adapted absolute detection thresholds, vapor pressure, and percent adaptation.     

A method for studying visually guided perception and learning in newborn macaques

A maintenance technique was developed in which neonatal monkeys obtain all liquid food by placing their heads in a face mask mounted on their cage wall. Complete self-feeding required only 3-6 days for animals started at birth. Once under a self-feeding Schedule, operant responses were shaped to study visual perception, visually guided motor performance, and discrimination learning at ages much younger than those allowed by most alternative methods. Dark rearing, with the only source of visual input being through the face mask eyeholes, allowed the E to control completely the neonate’s visual experiences and its opportunities for visual-motor responding. The method has proven useful in rhesus monkey newborns for studying adaptation to prismatic displacement at 30 days of age, and to performance on CRF, FI, and FR reinforcement schedules.     

Intermodality relations in localization in blind and sighted people

Developmental data were gathered on the relative importance of vision, audition, and proprioception in determining spatial direction in a conflict situation. Age trends did not support the hypothesis that information from different modalities becomes better differentiated with age. In a follow-up study, blind children of different ages were tested under auditory-proprioceptive conflict conditions. No age changes were found. The possibility of a visual involvement in auditory and proprioceptive localization is discussed.     

Personality Correlates of the High School Experiences of Prospective Teachers

Data pertaining to aspects of their high school experiences were provided by 192 female students who had successfully completed the teacher preparation program at the College of Education, University of Texas. This information was used as the basis for defining groups which were then compared on a wide variety of measures of personality and student teaching performance. A number of significant relationships were found. It was concluded that the simple facts regarding students' high school experiences may be relevant to career commitment in teaching.     

Selective fatigue in the human motor system

Summary If the form of simple movements as well as the muscles involved are coded by place, it should be possible selectively to fatigue form-specific and muscle-specific neurons, whereby muscle-specific units are supposed to control homologous muscles on both sides of the body. In two experiments both kinds of selective fatigue effects were observed by the use of movements of different forms and with different fingers of both hands. These effects showed up in the variability of movement times only, but not in their mean.     

The role of visual experience in knowledge of spatial layout

Adventitiously blinded, congenitally blind, and sighted adults made relative distance judgments in a familiar environment under three sets of instructions—neutral with respect to the metric of comparison, euclidean (straight-line distance between landmarks), and functional (walking distance between landmarks). Analysis of error scores and multidimensional scaling procedures indicated that, although there were no significant differences among groups under functional instructions, all three groups differed from one another under euclidean instructions. Specifically, the sighted group performed best and the congenitally blind group worst, with the adventitiously blind group in between. The results are discussed in the context of the role of visual experience in spatial representation and the application of these methods for evaluating orientation and mobility training for the blind.     

Background and career orientations of women with mathematical aptitude

A “person-thing” career motivation continuum was tested as a model for structuring this investigation of the personal characteristics and career influences of women in mathematics who entered teaching or nonteaching careers. Women mathematicians who chose to teach were hypothesized to be more person-oriented in career development (i.e., they would be more influenced in the development of career interest by people). In contrast, women who chose careers in mathematically oriented fields, until recently considered nontraditional for their sex (engineering, physical science, accounting, economics, computer science), were expected to be more attracted to the “ideas” or “things” of mathematics.This hypothesis was tested in its null form by comparing personality traits and career influences for two groups of university senior women. Each group was composed of 30 subjects who had elected at least 24 semester credit hours in mathematics. Subjects were randomly selected after individuals were first stratified into two groups, according to whether they chose teaching or nonteaching careers in math-related areas.Second order personality traits derived from subjects' responses to Cattell's 16 PF Questionnaire were employed to assess personality differences. A biographical questionnaire was utilized for collecting data relative to career-influence factors. Multivariate analysis of variance and chi square statistical models were employed for data analysis.The two groups differed significantly in overall personality profiles. This difference was related to the nonteaching group's having scored significantly higher (than did the teaching group) on both the creativity and independence personality factors. Related to career influence, the nonteaching women appeared to develop their interests in mathematics somewhat earlier than did their counterparts who chose to teach. Women teachers were more attracted to their careers because of the influence of people engaged in mathematically oriented work. More of the nonteaching women cited influences associated with mathematics, itself, such as books, demonstrations and independent studies, as paramount in their career decision-making. Also, men were seen as more influential in fostering their career development by the non-teaching group, while in contrast, the teachers chose women as more influential in the development of their interests in mathematics.These findings appear to support the “person-thing” hypothesis associated with the development of career interests for women in mathematics.     

Age-at-acquisition and word recognition

Recent investigations have shown that the latency in object naming is affected by when in life the naming word is learned—the age-at-acquisition of the naming word. The present study investigated the effect of age-at-acquisition in the recognition of tachistoscopically presented words. It was found that, with word frequency controlled, words judged to be of early acquisition had a significantly lower recognition threshold than words judged to be of later acquisition.     

Failure of instructional set to affect completeness of taste adaptation

The effect of task instructions on taste adaptation was investigated in two experiments. In the first experiment, three groups of subjects received a 3-min flow of salt solution, over the anterior dorsal tongue surface and periodically gave magnitude estimates of its intensity. Each group had previously received different instructions suggesting the appropriate outcome of the adaptation experiment. Not all subjects showed adaptation, and the instructions had no significant differential effects. In the second experiment, subjects who were practiced in judging pulsatile taste stimuli were instructed to rate the intensity of a continuous salt stimulus as it disappeared, but this produced no increased adaptation. Several possible hypotheses are presented to account for this repeatedly observed failure of many subjects to completely adapt to taste stimuli.     

Position,direction, and their perceptual integrality

Subjects were shown an arrow inside a rectangle and were asked to decide on either its vertical direction (up vs. downl or its height (high vs. low) as quickly as possible. Whenever vertical direction was criterial, height was irrelevant, and vice versa. In four conditions, the irrelevant dimension (1) did not vary, (2) covaried positively with the criterial dimension, up with high and down with low, (3) covaried negatively with the criterial dimension, up with low and down with high, or (4) varied orthogonally with the criterial dimension. Height and vertical direction satisfied one of W. R. Garner’s prerequisites for “integral” dimensions in that Condition 4 took longer than Condition 1. But Condition 2 was faster than 1, and 3 was slower than 1, a pattern unlike those of other known integral dimensions. The positive correlation in Condition 2 facilitates, and the negative correlation in 3 interferes, it is argued, because height and vertical direction have interpretations with components in common or in conflict. This research was supported in part by Grant MH 20021 from the National lnstitute of Mental Health.