Comparing skill acquisition under varying onsets of differential reinforcement: A preliminary analysis

The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effect of implementing differential reinforcement at different times relative to the onset of teaching new skills to learners with autism spectrum disorder. Specifically, we first determined the most efficient differential reinforcement arrangement for each participant. Using the most efficient arrangement, we evaluated if differential reinforcement from the immediate onset, early onset, or late onset is the most efficient for learners to acquire a new skill. Three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder who have a history of receiving intervention based on the principles of applied behavior analysis participated in this study. The immediate onset of differential reinforcement resulted in the most efficient instruction in 6 of 7 comparisons. The results are discussed in light of previous studies and suggestions for future research are provided.     

Infant positioning: A brief review

The American Academy of Pediatrics (2016a) has made several recommendations regarding the safe positioning of infants by caregivers, including placing infants in a supine position for sleep and in prone for supervised periods of tummy time. However, caregivers may have difficulty adhering with these recommendations. A small, but growing, number of behavior analytic studies have examined these infant safety recommendations and strategies for increasing adherence. This review describes behavior analytic research on infant positioning and provides suggestions for future research.     

Age-related differences and the role of augmented visual feedback in learning a bimanual coordination pattern

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of aging and the role of augmented visual information in the acquisition of a new bimanual coordination pattern, namely a 90° relative phase pattern. In a pilot study, younger and older adults received augmented visual feedback in the form of a real-time orthogonal display of both limb movements after every fifth trial. Younger adults acquired this task over three days of practice and retained the task well over periods of one week and one month of no practice while the older adults showed no improvement at all on the task. It was hypothesized that the amount of augmented information was not sufficient for the older adults to overcome the strong tendency to perform natural, intrinsically stable coordination patterns, which consequently prevented them from learning the task. The present study evaluated the age-related role of augmented visual feedback for learning the new pattern. Participants were randomly assigned within age groups to receive either concurrent or terminal visual feedback after every trial in acquisition. In contrast to the pilot study, all of the older adults learned the pattern, although not to the same level as the younger adults. Both younger and older adults benefitted from concurrent visual feedback, but the older adults gained more from the concurrent feedback than the younger adults, relative to terminal feedback conditions. The results suggest that when learning bimanual coordination patterns, older adults are more sensitive to the structure of the practice conditions, particularly the availability of concurrent visual information. This greater sensitivity to the learning environment may reflect a diminished capacity for inhibitory control and a decreased ability to focus attention on the salient aspects of learning the task.     

The Families and Democracy Project

The Families and Democracy Project moves family therapists and other professionals into the community via a critique of traditional provider/consumer models of family services, a set of principles about the civic engagement of families in partnership with professionals, and a set of public practices for working on community problems. We describe the Families and Democracy model and three specific projects. We distinguish the model from traditional hierarchical and collaborative models of working with families. And we discuss lessons we have learned, and our plans to take this work to its next developmental stage.     

Smiling and relative status in news photographs

To test the hypothesis that lower social status is associated with more smiling, the authors used newspaper photographs and their associated news stories as the basis for scoring the smiling and relative social status of the 2 individuals in each photograph. Independent raters judged smiling and 5 dimensions of relative status for 496 individuals in 248 newspaper photographs. There was no relation between status and smiling, although status and smiling were both related to other variables such as gender, age, and story valence. These findings add to a growing body of evidence that there is no generalized relation between smiling and status.     

Correlations for organizational,nonorganizational, and intrinsic religiosity with social support among intercollegiate athletes

The present study was a preliminary examination of the correlations among organizational, nonorganizational, and intrinsic religiosity and social support as measured by the Duke Religion Index and the Nonsupport scale of the Personality Assessment Inventory for 105 intercollegiate athletes (51 women). Scores among these measures were not correlated (-.05 to -.14).     

The dynamics of intention retrieval and coordination of action in event-based prospective memory

Event-based prospective memory requires responding to cues in the environment that are associated with a previously established intention. Some researchers believe that intentions reside in memory with an above baseline level of activation, a phenomenon called the intention superiority effect. The authors of this study predicted that intention superiority would be masked by additional cognitive processes associated with successful event-based prospective memory. These additional processes include noticing the cue, retrieving the intention, and coordinating intention execution with the ongoing activity. In 3 experiments, intention superiority was demonstrated by faster latencies to the ongoing activity on failed prospective trials and the existence of the additional processes was demonstrated by slower latencies on successful trials. This study demonstrates the importance of investigating the microstructure of the cognitive components involved with processing and responding to an event-based prospective memory cue.     

Overt and covert object-based attention

To examine the role of perceptual object representations in the control of eye movements and attention, a pair of experiments adapted the object-cuing paradigm of Egly, Driver, and Rafal (1994) to require eye movements. Displays were pairs of adjacent rectangles, each containing two characters. Observers were asked to make a speeded judgment of a target character’s orientation, and a cue was provided prior to target/distractor onset to indicate the target’s likely location. Gaze-contingent presentation of target and distractors was used to demand overt scanning of displays. Eye movements during task performance evinced two forms of object-based effects. First, saccades following fixation on an invalidly cued item were more likely to be made within the cued rectangle than between rectangles. Second, saccades within the cued rectangle were preceded by shorter dwell times than saccades between rectangles. Extrafoveal processing of stimuli within the cued rectangle, however, was not facilitated, suggesting that covert attention was not allocated more densely within the cued than within the uncued object.     

The demands of an ongoing activity influence the success of event-based prospective memory

Four experiments were conducted to evaluate whether event-based prospective memory would be sensitive to the concurrent demands of the ongoing activity in which intention-related cues were embedded. In Experiments 1 and 2, random alternation between two judgments in the ongoing task reduced prospective memory as compared with having a single task throughout. In Experiment 3, participants' making two binary judgments on every trial resulted in worse prospective memory than did their making single four-alternative judgments. In Experiment 4, participants' making two related judgments resulted in better prospective memory than did their making two unrelated judgments. The results are consistent in spirit with a production rule account of the processing resources that are available when intention-related cues are encountered. Therefore, event-based prospective memory can inversely covary with the cognitive demands of the ongoing activity.