Now you see me,now you don't: evidence that chimpanzees understand the role of the eyes in attention

Chimpanzees appear to understand something about the attentional states of others; in the present experiment, we investigated whether they understand that the attentional state of a human is based on eye gaze. In all, 116 adult chimpanzees were offered food by an experimenter who engaged in one of the four experimental manipulations: eyes closed, eyes open, hand over eyes, and hand over mouth. The communicative behavior of the chimpanzees was observed. More visible behaviors were produced when the experimenter's eyes were visible than when the experimenter's eyes were not visible. More vocalizations were produced when the experimenter's eyes were closed than when they were open, but there were no differences in other attention getting behaviors. There was no effect of age or rearing history. The results suggest that chimpanzees use the presence of the eyes as a cue that their visual gestures will be effective.     

The effect of the physical characteristics of cues and targets on facilitation and inhibition

The present experiment was conducted in order to examine the role of cue—target discriminability on early occurring attentional cuing effects and late occurring inhibition of return (IOR). The experiment used a single target stimulus in conjunction with three different cue stimuli. The cues were the same as the target, different in color, shape, and luminance to the target, or did not spatially overlap with the target. At shorter stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; 100 and 200 msec), attentional cuing effects were only found with the nonoverlapping cues. However, at longer SOAs (400 and 800 msec), approximately equal IOR effects were found with all three types of cues. The results indicated that the physical characteristics of the cues and targets affected the pattern of reaction times at the shorter SOAs but not at the longer SOAs. The conclusion is that the biphasic pattern of early facilitation and late inhibition following a peripheral cue should not be considered the definitive signature of the peripheral cuing paradigm.     

Young children’s age-of-acquisition estimates for spoken words

This study was concerned with the impact of stimulus familiarity on young children's ability to recognize spoken words and make explicit judgments about them. In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds made age-of-acquisition (AOA) estimates for a set of words that were very similar to estimates made by older children and adults. In Experiment 2, young children's picture recognition, mispronunciation detection, and vocabulary monitoring performance all varied systematically with these AOA estimates and with a stimulus-type (intact-mispronounced) manipulation. Subjective AOA estimates (whether from children or from adults) proved to be a better predictor of performance than did two objective familiarity measures and subjective imageability. These results point to considerable metalexical knowledge on the part of young children or explicit sensitivity regarding their own vocabulary knowledge. In addition, the results lend some support to the notion that actual AOA contributes to subjective AOA estimates.     

TOWARD THE DEVELOPMENT OF STRUCTURED CRITERIA FOR INTERPRETATION OF FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS DATA

Using functional analysis results to prescribe treatments is the preferred method for developing behavioral interventions. Little is known, however, about the reliability and validity of visual inspection for the interpretation of functional analysis data. The purpose of this investigation was to develop a set of structured criteria for visual inspection of multielement functional analyses that, when applied correctly, would increase interrater agreement and agreement with interpretations reached by expert consensus. In Study 1, 3 predoctoral interns interpreted functional analysis graphs, and interrater agreement was low (M = .46). In Study 2, 64 functional analysis graphs were interpreted by a panel of experts, and then a set of structured criteria were developed that yielded interpretive results similar to those of the panel (exact agreement = .94). In Study 3, the 3 predoctoral interns from Study 1 were trained to use the structured criteria, and the mean interrater agreement coefficient increased to .81. The results suggest that (a) the interpretation of functional analysis data may be less reliable than is generally assumed, (b) decision-making rules used by experts in the interpretation of functional analysis data can be operationalized, and (c) individuals can be trained to apply these rules accurately to increase interrater agreement. Potential uses of the criteria are discussed.     

Women's development through personal knowing

Striking intuitive experiences may influence women to become active in working for social and political change and to pursue nontraditional career goals. These moments of insight, referred to a experiences of personal knowing, are the subject of this qualitative study of 100 excerpts from women's memoirs, journals and autobiographies. Personal knowing in these narratives includes an important personal insight, strong affect, an altered state of consciousness, suddenness and physical sensations. The first person narratives studied demonstrate that women spontaneously write about personal knowing to explain their motivations, life choices and self-development.Personal knowing experiences, which are often considered trivial or exceptional, are discussed as significant developmental events which combine cognition and affect and may occur throughout the life cycle.     

An examination of word frequency and neighborhood density in the development of spoken-word recognition

In this study, the effects of word-frequency and phonological similarity relations in the development of spoken-word recognition were examined. Seven-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and adults listened to increasingly longer segments of high- and low-frequency monosyllabic words with many or few word neighbors that sounded similar (neighborhood density). Older children and adults required less of the acoustic-phonetic information to recognize words with few neighbors and low-frequency words than did younger children. Adults recognized high-frequency words with few neighbors on the basis of less input than did all three of the children’s groups. All subjects showed a higher proportion of different-word guesses for words with many versus few neighbors. A frequency × neighborhood density interaction revealed that recognition is facilitated for high-frequency words with few versus many neighbors; the opposite was found for low-frequency words. Results are placed within a developmental framework on the emergence of the phoneme as a unit in perceptual processing.     

The relationship between differential stimulus relatedness and implicit measure effect sizes

Implicit measures have been hypothesized to allow researchers to ascertain the existence and strength of relations between stimuli, often in the context of research on attitudes. However, little controlled behavioral research has focused on whether stimulus relations, and the degree of relatedness within such relations, are indexed by implicit measures. The current study examined this issue using a behavior‐analytic implicit‐style stimulus relation indexing procedure known as the Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST). Using a matching‐to‐sample (MTS) procedure to train stimulus equivalence relations between nonsense syllables, the number of iterations of the procedure was varied across groups of participants, hence controlling stimulus relatedness in the resulting equivalence relations. Following final exposure to the MTS procedure, participants completed a FAST. Another group of participants was exposed to a FAST procedure with word pairs of known relatedness. Results showed that increasing relatedness resulted in a linear increase in FAST effect size. These results provide the first direct empirical support for a key process‐level assumption of the implicit literature, and offer a behavior‐analytic paradigm within which to understand these effects. These results also suggest that the FAST may be a viable procedure for the quantification of emergent stimulus relations in stimulus equivalence training.