Teaching generalization of purchasing skills across community settings to autistic youth using videotape modeling.

Three young autistic adults were trained to purchase items. Training was conducted in one setting with concurrent generalization probes taken in three community stores. Training in one setting failed to produce generalization to the three probe settings. Generalization training, which consisted of viewing videotapes of models who purchased items in the probe settings and answering questions about the models'' responses, was then introduced. Training with the videotapes resulted in generalization to the three community stores. Results of the use of videotapes as a cost-effective means to program generalization in community training programs are discussed.     

Group psychotherapy with grandparents rearing their emotionally disturbed grandchildren

This paper discusses the increasing incidence of grandchildren being raised by grandparents, and describes a clinical service developed to assist grandparents in rearing their emotionally disturbed grand-children. The development of a cohesive working group and the active involvement of grandparents for support as well as self-understanding is demonstrated.     

Blind man draws using diminution in three dimensions

Can the principle of convergence in three spatial dimensions be reflected in drawings by the congenitally blind? A man who had been totally blind since birth was asked to draw scenes such as a tabletop with three cubes receding to the observer’s left side. He used converging lines to show the tops of the cubes receding in depth. He drew the cubes to the left smaller than the cube in front of the observer. He drew faces of cubes to the left with tilted lines, pointing to below the front face of the cube in front. The result approximates three-point perspective. We note that the directions of objects from a vantage point in touch converge much as they do in vision.     

Foreshortening, convergence and drawings from a blind adult

Esref is a congenitally totally blind man, practiced in drawing. He was asked to draw solid and wire cubes situated in several places around his vantage point. He used foreshortening of receding sides and convergence of obliques, in approximate one-point perspective. We note that haptics provides information about the direction of objects--the basis of perspective.     

Helping behavior in a rural and an urban setting: professional and casual attire

This study assessed differences in helping behavior in a rural versus an urban location when directed toward either a professionally or a casually dressed woman. Convenience samples included 40 men and 40 women (10 people of each sex assigned to each condition: rural and professional, rural and casual, urban and professional, and urban and casual). A 21-yr.-old female confederate dropped an envelope near each target helper individually and recorded number of seconds for the target helper to retrieve or point out the dropped item. Analysis indicated significantly faster helping occurred in the rural than in the urban location and that men helped the confederate more often than women. No difference in frequencey of help was related to kind of attire.     

Similarity comparisons with remembered and perceived magnitudes: Memory psychophysics and fundamental measurement

At the outset, subjects learned to associate a label with each element in a set of perceptual magnitudes (visual extents), using traditional paired-associate learning methods. Subsequently, on some trials, subjects indicated which pair of two pairs of labels corresponded to the more similar perceptual referents, and, on other trials, they selected the more dissimilar pair. It is shown that these similarity comparisons satisfy the axioms (transitivity and intradimensional subtractivity) necessary to conclude that they are based on computation of the difference of the differences of analogue-based interval scale representations.The findings also permitted refutation of the idea that memory for elementary percepts arises from their reperception. Notably, the memory exponent was 0.697, but the perception exponent was 0.546, and the reperception idea requires that the memory exponent be the square of the perception exponent (0.546²=0.298). Symbolic distance effects and enhanced response time-based semantic congruity effects, typically found with binary comparisons, extend the range of commonalties found between perceptual and memory psychophysics.     

Adult Influence on the Participation of Peers Without Disabilities in Peer Support Programs

Three peers without disabilities who volunteered to serve as peer supports and were identified by general education teachers as having academic difficulties were studied across three conditions. In baseline, a peer without disabilities worked alone, while the student with severe disabilities was supervised by an adult. In the Peer Support condition, peers without disabilities worked with the student with severe disabilities, and both individuals were supervised by an adult. In the Adult Involvement condition, peers without disabilities were supervised by an adult as in the Peer Support condition, but peers worked separately from the student with severe disabilities. Dependent measures included the active engagement of peers without disabilities and students with severe disabilities, and social interactions between students and peers. Our data indicate that the Peer Support and Adult Involvement conditions resulted in higher, but similar, levels of active engagement for two of three peers without disabilities when compared to baseline. For the third peer, high levels of active engagement occurred across all conditions. Active engagement varied across students with severe disabilities, but was typically highest in conditions where peers without disabilities were involved. For all students with severe disabilities, social interactions were more frequent and longer in the Peer Support condition.     

Blind children recognizing tactile pictures respond like sighted children given guidance in exploration

Theory of tactile pictures argues that untrained blind subjects can recognize raised, outline pictures. It contends the blind person’s knowledge of the shapes of common objects is like that of the sighted, and the blind person’s pictorial abilities use the same principles as the sighted person’s. To test this theory, blind children (aged 8–13) and blindfolded age-matched sighted children were asked to identify raised-line drawings of common objects. Their performances were correlated. In addition, the blind children identified more than sighted children exploring the pictures actively, but the same number of pictures as sighted children who were given passive, guided exploration. We argue blind and sighted children use the same principles to identify the pictures, but the blind have superior exploration skills. The differences in the effects of exploration skills on recognition scores are minimized when the sighted children are given guidance, since the sighted children then have efficient contact with the displays, and the performance of the sighted and the blind is then governed by the same principles, without one group benefitting from advantages in exploration skills.