Maternal styles in infant psychotherapy: Treatment and research implications

Infant psychotherapy, in which the mother is requested to follow the baby's activities without initiating or directing, is described. Mothers demonstrate different styles of involvement with their infants: a protective mode, a prohibitive mode, a competitive mode, and other ways of interfering with their infants' tendency to explore the environment. Attempts to analyze such factors as position, distance and movement are discussed. Research for recording and analyzing the movement of infant and mother dyads is proposed.     

Determinants ofthe perception of sagittal motion

This study examines the change in the perceived distance of an object in three-dimensional space when the object andlor the observer’s head is moved along the line of sight (sagittal motion) as a function of the perceived absolute (egocentric) distance of the object and the perceived motion of the head. To analyze the processes involved, two situations, labeled A and B, were used in four experiments. In Situation A, the observer was stationary and the perceived motion of the object was measured as the object was moved toward and away from the observer. In Situation B, the same visual information regarding the changing perceived egocentric distance between the observer and object was provided as in Situation A, but part or all of the change in visual egocentric distance was produced by the sagittal motion of the observer’s head. A comparison of the perceived motion of the object in the two situations was used to measure the compensation in the perception of the motion of the object as a result of the headmotion. Compensation was often clearly incomplete, and errors were often made in the perception of the motion of the stimulus object. A theory is proposed, which identifies the relation between the changes in the perceived egocentric distance of the object and the tandem motion of the object resulting from the perceived motion of the head to be the significant factor in the perception of the sagittal motion of the stimulus object in Situation B.     

A formal cognitive model of the go/no-go discrimination task: evaluation and implications

This article proposes and tests a formal cognitive model for the go/no-go discrimination task. In this task, the performer chooses whether to respond to stimuli and receives rewards for responding to certain stimuli and punishments for responding to others. Three cognitive models were evaluated on the basis of data from a longitudinal study involving 400 adolescents. The results show that a cue-dependent model presupposing that participants can differentiate between cues was the most accurate and parsimonious. This model has 3 parameters denoting the relative impact of rewards and punishments on evaluations, the rate that contingent payoffs are learned, and the consistency between learning and responding. Commission errors were associated with increased attention to rewards; omission errors were associated with increased attention to punishments. Both error types were associated with low choice consistency. The parameters were also shown to have external validity: Attention to rewards was associated with externalizing behavior problems on the Achenbach scale, and choice consistency was associated with low Welsh anxiety. The present model can thus potentially improve the sensitivity of the task to differences between clinical populations.     

Older adults as adaptive decision makers: evidence from the Iowa Gambling Task

Older adults process emotional information differently than younger adults and may demonstrate less of a negativity bias on cognitive tasks. The Iowa Gambling Task designed by A. Bechara, H. Damasio, D. Tranel, and A. R. Damasio (1997) has been used to examine the integration of emotion and cognition in a risky-choice decision task and may give insight into differences in the decision-making strategies in younger and older adults. Eighty-eight younger adults (18-34 years) and 67 older adults (65-88 years) completed the Iowa Gambling Task. Using a theoretical decomposition of the task designed by J. R. Busemeyer and J. C. Stout (2002), the authors found that both groups were successful at solving the task but used very different strategies that reflected each group's strength. For younger adults, that strength was learning and memory. For older adults, that strength was an accurate representation of wins and losses (valence).     

A dynamic, stochastic, computational model of preference reversal phenomena

Preference orderings among a set of options may depend on the elicitation method (e.g., choice or pricing); these preference reversals challenge traditional decision theories. Previous attempts to explain these reversals have relied on allowing utility of the options to change across elicitation methods by changing the decision weights, the attribute values, or the combination of this information--still, no theory has successfully accounted for all the phenomena. In this article, the authors present a new computational model that accounts for the empirical trends without changing decision weights, values, or combination rules. Rather, the current model specifies a dynamic evaluation and response process that correctly predicts preference orderings across 6 elicitation methods, retains stable evaluations across methods, and makes novel predictions regarding response distributions and response times.     

College students, tattoos, and sexual activity

This research examined the association of having a tattoo and engaging in premarital sexual intercourse. Data gathered from a convenience sample of 450 college students indicated that tattooed respondents were substantively and significantly more likely to be sexually active than nontattooed college students. Tattooed men became sexually active at a significantly earlier age than nontattooed men but no such difference was found between tattooed and nontattooed college women.     

The conceptual basis of function learning and extrapolation: Comparison of rule-based and associative-based models

The purpose of this article is to provide a foundation for a more formal, systematic, and integrative approach to function learning that parallels the existing progress in category learning. First, we note limitations of existing formal theories. Next, we develop several potential formal models of function learning, which include expansion of classic rule-based approaches and associative-based models. We specify for the first time psychologically based learning mechanisms for the rule models. We then present new, rigorous tests of these competing models that take into account order of difficulty for learning different function forms and extrapolation performance. Critically, detailed learning performance was also used to conduct the model evaluations. The results favor a hybrid model that combines associative learning of trained input—prediction pairs with a rule-based output response for extrapolation (EXAM).