State-dependent recall decrements with moderate doses of alcohol

Thirty-two adult volunteers were asked to memorize a simplified geographical map, visually displayed, together with an auditorially presented 19-item set of instructions regarding a particular route. During this session, half the subjects were sober and half were under the effects of a moderate dose of alcohol (mean blood alcohol concentration = 81mg/100ml). Twenty-four hours later they were tested under the same or different conditions. Learning performance on Day 1 was unaffected by alcohol. Learning transfer (tested on Day 2) was equally good when subjects were intoxicated during both sessions or were sober during both sessions. There were significant decrements in recall on Day 2, when subjects were in a different drug state. This ‘dissociation of learning’ was found to be symmetrical in that the recall decrement was the same whether the initial learning was acquired in a sober or a drugged state.     

Behavioral thresholds for tones during infancy

An adaptive up-down tracking procedure was used in combination with a visually reinforced head turn response to examine auditory sensitivity for 500, 2000, and 8000-Hz tone bursts in infants 6 to 18 months of age. Six- and 10-month-old infants were tested with headphone presentation of stimuli, while 10-, 14, and 18-month-olds were tested in sound field. Infant threshold estimates for both headphone and sound field were within 15 dB of adult comparisons for all frequencies and age groups. Six-month-olds were significantly less sensitive to the 8000-Hz tone than to either of the lower frequency stimuli, but older infants demonstrated approximately equal sensitivity for all three frequencies tested.     

Fine-tuning theory to the needs of the world: Responding to Heller et al.

Comments on the Heller et al. telephone intervention with isolated elderly women are presented. The importance of addressing contextual factors involved in assessments of social support in community samples is discussed. Comparisons are drawn between the assessment of social support among an elderly sample and an assessment of social support among a sample of chronic illness patients. Three key issues are discussed: (a) Is a little support better than no support and is a little all we really need? (b) Is family support more important than friend support, at least to this population? (c) Can long-term relationships be replaced?     

Attitudes toward women and their work roles: Effects of intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientations

This study examined the effects of personal religious orientation, religious denomination, and gender on attitudes toward women and their work roles using a sample of 263 single undergraduate university students. Subjects with a high intrinsic religious orientation put significantly more emphasis on family than career in their anticipated general lifestyle relative to those with a low intrinsic religious orientation. Subjects with a high intrinsic religious orientation were also more likely to anticipate the female spouse spending less time in a profession during the children's early years. Males showed more traditional attitudes toward women than females, but there were no gender effects on measures of preferred general lifestyle, preferred child-care distribution, or preferred career involvement for the wife. Subjects belonging to mainline and conservative denomination did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward women or their work roles.     

Alcohol-induced state-dependent learning: Differentiating stimulus and storage hypotheses

State-dependent effects of alcohol have been demonstrated in animals and man. Most studies have used tasks for which accurate performance typically requires that stimulus input was adequately stored initially and that the items were retrieved at the time of testing. Thus an alcohol-induced decrement in performance could be due to impaired storage, impaired retrieval, or both. The purpose of this experiment was to distinguish between stimulus and storage hypotheses of state-dependent learning (SDL). Sixteen subjects were used in a 2×2 design in which the task involved the learning and recall of a 19-item ‘route’ map. During initial learning, all subjects were sober. Immediately after learning, half the subjects were given a moderate dose of alcohol. Twenty-four hours later, all subjects were tested for recall under the same or different conditions. Greater retention was found for those subjects whose drug states were the same in memory storage/consolidation and retrieval. Thus an alcohol state effective during the memory consolidation interval following acquisition appears to be a sufficient condition for producing SDL. In this context, SDL might be better termed state-dependent memory storage and retrieval. The implications of these results for the aetiology and treatment of alcohol dependence are discussed.     

Temporal control of behavior and the power law

The performance of rats and pigeons under fixed-interval schedules was studied in two experiments. The duration of postreinforcement pause was a declining proportion of fixed-interval duration. For pigeons this was true both when the duration of the reinforcer was fixed and when it was increased in direct proportion to increases in fixed-interval duration; the longer reinforcer durations did, however, lengthen the postreinforcement pause at higher schedule values. A quantitative analysis of data from Experiments 1 and 2 and from other studies showed that fractional exponent power functions described the relationship between postreinforcement pause and fixed-interval value; similar functions have previously been observed in studies of temporal differentiation. It was concluded that power functions reflect a direct causal, rather than artifactual, relationship between performance and the temporal requirements of reinforcement schedules.