The temporal course of the frustration effect

General activity subsequent to reward (R) and nonreward (N) was monitored at 5-sec intervals with a stabilimeter in the runway goal box. Activity of never-rewarded control Ss was also measured. In Expt 1 it was found that the frustration effect (difference between N- and R-trial activities) disappeared after about 40 sec of goal box confinement. This disappearance of the frustration effect was due to activity increase on R trials rather than activity decrease on N trials as a function of time. Comparison of N-trial activity with control group activity indicated that frustration does not dissipate within 60 sec. Expt 2 investigated activity following reward and nonreward as a function of reward magnitude. Evidence from these experiments suggests that the late R-trial activity increase results from frustration, possibly conditioned to apparatus cues on N trials.     

Limits to preference and the sensitivity of choice to rate and amount of food

Studies of choice holding food‐amount ratio constant while varying food‐rate ratio within sessions showed that local changes in preference depend on relative amount of food. The present study investigated whether sensitivity of choice to food‐rate ratio and sensitivity to food‐amount ratio are independent of one another when food‐rate ratios are varied across sessions and food‐amount ratios are varied within sessions. Food deliveries for rats’ presses on the left and right levers were scheduled according to three different food‐rate ratios of 1:1, 9:1, and 1:9; each food‐rate ratio lasted for 106 sessions and was arranged independently of seven food‐amount ratios (7:1, 6:2, 5:3, 4:4, 3:5, 2:6, and 1:7 food pellets) occurring within sessions in random sequence. Each amount ratio lasted for 10 food deliveries and was separated from another by a 60‐s blackout. Sensitivity to rate ratio was high (1.0) across food deliveries. Sensitivity to amount ratio was low when food rates were equal across alternatives, but was high when rate ratio and amount ratio opposed one another. When rate ratio and amount ratio went in the same direction, choice ratio reached an elevenfold limit which reduced sensitivity to approximately zero. We conclude that three factors affect sensitivity to amount: (1) the limit to preference, (2) the equal effect on preference of amounts greater than four pellets, and (3) the absence of differential effects of switches in amount in the equal‐rates (1:1) condition. Taken together, these findings indicate that rate and amount only sometimes combine independently as additive variables to determine preference when amount ratios vary frequently within sessions.     

Precocious quantitative cognition in monkeys

Basic quantitative abilities are thought to have an innate basis in humans partly because the ability to discriminate quantities emerges early in child development. If humans and nonhuman primates share this developmentally primitive foundation of quantitative reasoning, then this ability should be present early in development across species and should emerge earlier in monkeys than in humans because monkeys mature faster than humans. We report that monkeys spontaneously make accurate quantity choices by 1 year of age in a task that human children begin to perform only at 2.5 to 3 years of age. Additionally, we report that the quantitative sensitivity of infant monkeys is equal to that of the adult animals in their group and that rates of learning do not differ between infant and adult animals. This novel evidence of precocious quantitative reasoning in infant monkeys suggests that human quantitative reasoning shares its early developing foundation with other primates. The data further suggest that early developing components of primate quantitative reasoning are constrained by maturational factors related to genetic development as opposed to learning experience alone.     

Faking revisited: Exerting strategic control over performance on the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure

Across four studies, we demonstrate that effects obtained from the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure, like those obtained from other indirect procedures, are not impervious to strategic manipulation. In experiment 1, we found that merely informing participants to “fake” their performance without providing a concrete strategy to do so did not eliminate, reverse, or in any way alter the obtained outcomes. However, when those same instructions orientated attention toward the core parameters of the task, participants spontaneously derived a strategy that allowed them to eliminate their effects (experiment 2). When the participants were provided with a viable response strategy, they successfully reversed the direction of their overall Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure effect (experiment 3). By refining the nature of those instructions, we managed to target and alter individual trial‐type effects in isolation with some success (experiment 4).     

Don’t Ever Do That! Long-term Duties in <Emphasis Type="Italic">PD</Emphasis><Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">e</Emphasis></Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">L</Emphasis>

This paper studies long-term norms concerning actions. In Meyer’s Propositional Deontic Logic (PD _e L), only immediate duties can be expressed, however, often one has duties of longer durations such as: “Never do that”, or “Do this someday”. In this paper, we will investigate how to amend PD _e L so that such long-term duties can be expressed. This leads to the interesting and suprising consequence that the long-term prohibition and obligation are not interdefinable in our semantics, while there is a duality between these two notions. As a consequence, we have provided a new analysis of the long-term obligation by introducing a new atomic proposition I (indebtedness) to represent the condition that an agent has some unfulfilled obligation. Presented by Jacek Malinowski     

The processing of auditory and visual recognition of self-stimuli

This study examined self-recognition processing in both the auditory and visual modalities by determining how comparable hearing a recording of one’s own voice was to seeing photograph of one’s own face. We also investigated whether the simultaneous presentation of auditory and visual self-stimuli would either facilitate or inhibit self-identification. Ninety-one participants completed reaction-time tasks of self-recognition when presented with their own faces, own voices, and combinations of the two. Reaction time and errors made when responding with both the right and left hand were recorded to determine if there were lateralization effects on these tasks. Our findings showed that visual self-recognition for facial photographs appears to be superior to auditory self-recognition for voice recordings. Furthermore, a combined presentation of one’s own face and voice appeared to inhibit rather than facilitate self-recognition and there was a left-hand advantage for reaction time on the combined-presentation tasks.     

Tolerance to and residual effects of cocaine in squirrel monkeys depend on reinforcement-schedule parameter.

Lever pressing by 4 squirrel monkeys was maintained under a three-component multiple fixed-ratio schedule of food presentation; components differed with respect to ratio size. For each monkey, acute administration of cocaine (0.03 to 1.3 mg/kg, i.m.) produced dose-dependent decreases in overall response rate in each component. During repeated daily administration of 1.0 mg/kg of cocaine, tolerance developed to the rate-decreasing effects under each of the ratio contingencies, but developed to a greater extent and was evident in earlier parts of sessions for performance under the smaller ratios. Response rates of 2 monkeys increased above nondrug control levels despite the putative reinforcer not being consumed during the session. When saline or a smaller dose of cocaine was substituted for 1.0 mg/kg, response rates often were suppressed below nondrug control-level responding. This suppressive effect was observed in each monkey and was more likely to be observed and/or to be of greater magnitude in large-ratio components for 3 of the 4 monkeys. When saline was administered chronically at the end of the chronic-drug phase, response rates remained suppressed in the large-ratio component for 2 of the monkeys. There was, therefore, a schedule-dependent dissociation between behavioral tolerance and the residual effects: Tolerance was greater when small ratios were arranged, whereas the residual effects were more pronounced when larger ratios were arranged.     

Sex differences in spontaneous alternation and open-field behavior of hamsters: Habituation differences

With a minimal intratrial interval, male golden hamsters spontaneously alternated significantly less often in a T-maze than females. Since there was no sex difference in choice latencies, the alternation difference could not be accounted for by longer intertrial intervals experienced by males. Instead, the difference was ascribed to faster rates of habituation to novelty in females because they showed greater between-sessions declines in open-field ambulation than males. From an analysis of rearing scores it was concluded that attempts to escape from the apparatus may have been the principal motivating influence in both the T-maze and open field.