A revised list of Spanish translations of operant terminology

The experimental analysis of behavior has grown enormously in Latin America within the last decade. This paper offers an updating revision of suggested Spanish translations of operant expressions.     

Effects of neonatal administration of clomiphene citrate on sexual behavior of female rats: a preliminary report

Female rats were treated with the nonsteroidal estrogen antagonist clomiphene citrate for the first 5 days postpartum. The expectation was that clomiphene would influence the sexual development of these animals as is the case with sexually immature animals treated with steroidal compounds. Analysis showed that treatment with clomiphene completely disrupted the adult sexual behavior of the female. In five consecutive days of testing the experimental females were never observed to mate. They were mounted significantly less often than controls, suggesting that the males were less attracted to them than to normal females. The initial suggestion that clomiphene might affect the sexual behavior of females has been supported; however, further research must be done to identify the underlying mechanism of the change.     

LEADER INFLUENCE IN THE ASSESSMENT OF PERFORMANCE

The role requirements of leaders in an assessment group context were manipulated in a laboratory simulation. Discussion leaders (chairholders) either did or did not have first hand contact with an individual who was being assessed. Furthermore, chairholders were either allowed a formal say in the group's decision or were not. As predicted, different configurations of role requirements had an impact on the influence wielded by the chair, as indexed by measures of group process, group decision, accuracy and group member attitudes. Both prior contact and voting rights had direct and interactive effects and served to increase chair influence. Particular role requirement combinations also produced a type of group disruption as reflected in group member ratings of the quality of the session. The results of the study are discussed in forms of implications for the standardization of procedures in assessment center programs.     

Assessment of the relative importance of S+ and S− in rats using differential training on intercurrent discriminations

The present studies assessed the degree of stimulus control exerted by S+ and S? without confoundings of stimulus novelty and stimulus ambiguity. In Experiment 1, rats were trained on two intercurrent simultaneous discrimination problems with nine times more training given on one than the other. Then the animals were given transfer tests with re-paired stimuli. The results showed that S? exerts greater stimulus control than S+ in a two-choice simultaneous discrimination. Experiment 2 provided a test of the possibility that the relative degree of control by S? varies with different amounts of training. Three groups were trained on two intercurrent simultaneous discrimination problems; each group was given 7, 11, or 15 times more training on one problem than the other. Then transfer tests were given with re-paired stimuli. Again the results showed that S? exerts greater stimulus control than S+ in a two-choice simultaneous discrimination.     

Direct versus indirect response-reinforcer relationships in teaching autistic children

One possibility suggested by the literature for maximizing the efficiency of behavior modification procedures concerns the relationship between target behaviors and their reinforcers. Therefore, in this experiment three severely autistic children were taught a total of six new target behaviors (in a multiple baseline design) employing two different response-reinforcer relationships: (1) those where the target behaviors were a direct part of the response chain required to procure a reinforcer (e.g., opening the lid of a container to obtain a food reward inside the container); and (2) those where the target behavior was an indirect part of the chain leading to the reinforcer (e.g., the therapist handing the child a food reward after the child had opened the lid of an empty container). In all cases, the results showed rapid acquisition only when the target behavior was a direct part of the chain leading to the reinforcer. The results are discussed in terms of several possible conceptualizations concerning efficient reinforcement contingencies, and in terms of their implications for teaching autistic children.This investigation was supported by U.S. Public Health Service Research Grants MH 28210 and MH 28231, and by U.S. Office of Education Research Grant G007802084 from the Bureau for the Education of the Handicapped. Portions of the results described in this article were discussed in a presentation at the 13th Annual AABT Convention in San Francisco, 1979. The authors are particularly grateful to Andrew Egel, Roberta Elman, Janis Costello, and Karen Britten, for their helpful comments, and to Jody Fisher and Gina Richman, for their assitance in the data collection.     

Representation of inflected nouns in the internal lexicon

The lexical representation of Serbo-Croatian nouns was investigated in a lexical decision task. Because Serbo-Croatian nouns are declined, a noun may appear in one of several grammatical cases distinguished by the inflectional morpheme affixed to the base form. The grammatical cases occur with different frequencies, although some are visually and phonetically identical. When the frequencies of identical forms are compounded, the ordering of frequencies is not the same for masculine and feminine genders. These two genders are distinguished further by the fact that the base form for masculine nouns is an actual grammatical case, the nominative singular, whereas the base form for feminine nouns is an abstraction in that it cannot stand alone as an independent word. Exploiting these characteristics of the Serbo-Croatian language, we contrasted three views of how a noun is represented: (1) the independent-entries hypothesis, which assumes an independent representation for each grammatical case, reflecting its frequency of occurrence; (2) the derivational hypothesis, which assumes that only the base morpheme is stored, with the individual cases derived from separately stored inflectional morphemes and rules for combination; and (3) the satellite-entries hypothesis, which assumes that all cases are individually represented, with the nominative singular functioning as the nucleus and the embodiment of the noun’s frequency and around which the other cases cluster uniformly. The evidence strongly favors the satellite-entries hypothesis.     

Prevalence and constituency of behavioral disturbance taxonomies in the regular school population

The Bristol Social Adjustment Guides (BSAG) are widely employed in research and in the identification of maladjustment in school children. The BSAG provides scores on several indices including five homogeneous behavioral syndromes and one associated grouping. Field experience suggests that maladjusted children frequently manifest problems in more than one syndrome. In order to discover what patterns of syndromic profiles may commonly exist among children, the data for the most recent revision of the BSAG are reanalyzed. The syndrome scores for all 2,527 5- to 15-year-old regular school children in the standardization sample were grouped into similar profile patterns by hierarchical cluster analysis. Sixteen homogeneous syndromic profile types emerged. The resultant profile types were described on the basis of their component behaviors and examined for membership trends by sex and age groups. Multiple syndromic profiles represented 60% of all maladjusted children.The author wishes to thank Dr. Denis H. Stott, former professor of psychology at the University of Guelph, Ontario, for kindly making the Bristol Social Adjustment Guides data available for this study.