The effects of distributed training on retention of operant conditioning in human infants

Long-term retention of operant footkicking acquired in the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm was assessed as a function of the distribution of training time. In the first study, 3-month-old infants were trained for either one 18-min session or for two 9-min or three 6-min sessions separated by 24-hr intervals. All infants exhibited retention during a test administered immediately after training, but only those trained in a single session continued to perform the conditioned response during cued-recall tests 7 or 14 days later. Infants trained in three sessions showed no evidence of remembering the contingency even after a week. A warm-up decrement, seen in the day-to-day performance of infants in the distributed conditions, was eliminated in the second study by the interpolation of a nonreinforcement period at the outset of daily sessions. This procedure also enhanced long-term retention such that infants trained in three 6-min session now remembered the contingency for 14 days and did not differ from infants who had received a single 18-min session. Whether distributed training facilitates or impairs long-term retention appears to depend on the opportunity for infants to acquire a sufficient number (or kind) of effective retrieval cues during original learning.     

The inter-domain among personality and cognition variables in people who commit murder

The inter-domain among personality (MMPI) and cognition (intelligence) variables in a sample of 137 males charged with first degree or capital murder was examined through canonical analysis. Race was included as a control variable. Two significant canonical correlations were found which contribute to an understanding of the relationship between personality and cognition in violent people. These variates were identified as Problem-solving Focus and Introspective Self-focus. Results also suggest that these inter-domain variates explain the relationship between personality and cognition variables to a greater degree for black murderers than for white murderers.     

Personality characteristics of the users of corporal punishment in the schools

The Rokeach Dogmatism Scale and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire were correlated with educator-reported use of corporal punishment. Respondents were from a medium-size school system in Tennessee. Results indicated that closed-mindedness, as measured by the Rokeach scale, and Neuroticism, as measured by the Eysenck Scale, were highly correlated with reported use of corporal punishment. Of the remaining two dimensions of personality measured by the Eysenck questionnaire, Extraversion was found to be moderately correlated with reported use of corporal punishment while Psychoticism showed no significant relationship. A significant negative correlation was found between years of experience in teaching and use of corporal punishment. Frequency of physical punishment used on an educator when he/she was in grades K-12 was positively correlated with reported use of corporal punishment. Heavy users of corporal punishment tended to be relatively inexperienced, close-minded, neurotic, and impulsive as compared to their peers who did not use corporal punishment.     

Late onset of alcoholism among older midwestern men in treatment

60 men were administered a questionnaire to assess whether the prevalence of alcoholism in men over 60 years of age in alcoholism treatment centers parallels the reported rates of late-onset for one-third or more alcoholics. Analysis showed 11% of the subjects were of late onset while 33% were quasilate onset. There were no significant differences in the life stress between alcoholics of early and later onset.     

Vocal changes in stutterers and nonstutterers when speaking to children

Within the last few years, considerable attention has been devoted to the possibility that the amelioration of stuttering in many novel speaking conditions is a function of vocal changes with or without accompanying modifications in prosodic expression. These formulations have made reference primarily to conditions in which stutterers were induced into one or another novel speech pattern by an external stimulus such as masking noise, a rhythmic cue, or by instructions to sing, or read in unison with another speaker. In contrast, far less attention has been paid to other ameliorative conditions that lack a novel external stimulus or special instructions that direct the stutterer to speak in some unique manner. Speaking or reading to a child is an example of this latter type of condition. The present study was conducted to see if nine adult stutterers and a matched group of nonstutterers would evince vocal changes as they read aloud to another adult, a child, and a child and adult together. There was also a fourth control condition wherein the subjects read to one of the experimenters. Dependent measures of disfluency and stuttering, fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency deviation, fluent reading rate, and peak vocal sound pressure level were made and treated statistically. The major findings of this study indicated that, relative to the control condition, both subject groups exhibited several vocal changes when reading to a child alone and to a child and adult together. In addition, the stutterers experienced a reduction in disfluency, but only when reading to the child alone. The normal speakers exhibited too few disfluencies in the control condition for any meaningful change to occur in that dependent variable. The fact that the stutterers evinced vocal changes in both experimental conditions but a significant drop in disfluency in just one bears importantly on hypotheses that emphasize vocal changes in conditions that ameliorate stuttering.     

Models of word recognition

Major hypotheses about the processes involved in word recognition are reviewed and then assessed through four experiments. The purpose of the first experiment was to examine some basic aspects of the processing of words, pseudowords, and nonwords, and beyond that, to discover basic differences in their processing that might underlie the word advantage. The second experiment was designed to assess the contribution of whole-word and letter cluster cues to the word advantage. Finally, Experiments III and IV were focused on the question of whether the word advantage can be wholly explained in terms of response bias or sophisticated guessing. Taken together, the results of these experiments were most compatible with criterion bias models. A version of the criterion bias model is suggested wherein the word advantage is attributed to interfacilitation among single letter and lexical units in memory.