CHANGING PROTECTIVE AND RISKY BEHAVIORS TO PREVENT CHILD-TO-PARENT TRANSMISSION OF CYTOMEGALOVIRUS

Child-to-parent transmission of cytomegalovirus may be reduced by increasing protective behaviors (handwashing and glove use) and decreasing risky behaviors (intimate contact between child and parent). This study showed that an educational intervention resulted in increases in reported and objective measures of protective behaviors and decreases in reported risky behaviors. Further study must determine if changes in protective and risky behavior are maintained and prevent cytomegalovirus transmission.     

Testing a stochastic foraging model in an operant simulation: Agreement with qualitative but not quantitative predictions

An operant simulation of foraging through baited and empty patches was studied with 4 pigeons. On a three-key panel, side keys were designated as patches, and successive opportunities to complete 16 fixed-ratio 10 schedules on side keys were defined as encounters with feeders. In a random half of the patches in any session, some of the fixed-ratio 10 schedules yielded reinforcement (baited feeders) and the other schedules yielded nonreinforcement (empty feeders). In the other half of the patches, all feeders were empty. Pigeons could travel between patches at any time by completing a fixed-ratio schedule on the center key. An optimal foraging model was tested in Experiments 1 and 2 by varying center-key travel time and number of baited feeders in baited patches. The ordinal predictions that number of feeders visited in empty patches would increase with travel time and decrease as number of baited feeders increased were supported, but pigeons visited far more feeders in empty patches than the optimal number predicted by the model to maximize energy/time. In Experiment 3, evidence was found to suggest that the number of empty feeders encountered before the first baited feeder in baited patches is an important factor controlling leaving empty patches.     

Unit price as a useful metric in analyzing effects of reinforcer magnitude.

In this paper, we applied the behavioral-economic concept of unit price to the study of reinforcer magnitude in an attempt to provide a consistent account of the effects of reinforcer magnitude on behavior. Recent research in the experimental analysis of behavior and in behavioral pharmacology suggests that reinforcer magnitude interacts with the schedule of reinforcement to determine response rate and total consumption. The utility of the unit-price concept thus stems from its ability to quantify this interaction as a cost-benefit ratio (i.e., unit price = characteristics of the schedule of reinforcement divided by magnitude of reinforcement). Research employing the unit-price concept has shown that as unit price increases, a positively decelerating function exists for consumption (i.e., a function with an increasingly negative slope, when plotted on log coordinates) and a bitonic function exists for response rate. Based on these findings, the present analysis applied the unit-price concept to those studies of reinforcer magnitude and drug self-administration that examined the effects of reinforcer magnitude on response rate using simple schedules of reinforcement (e.g., fixed-ratio schedule). This resulted in three findings: (a) Reinforcer-magnitude manipulations and schedule manipulations interact in a manner that can be quantified in terms of unit price as benefit and cost factors, respectively; (b) different reinforcer-magnitude manipulations are functionally interchangeable as benefit factors in the unit-price ratio; and (c) these conclusions appear warranted despite the differences in reinforcers (food or drug), species (dogs, monkeys, or rats), and schedules (interval or ratio), and despite the fact that these studies were not designed for a unit-price analysis. In methodological terms, these results provide further evidence that employing the unit-price concept is a parsimonious method for examining the effects of reinforcer magnitude. In theoretical terms, these results suggest that a single process may underlie the effect of combined reinforcer-magnitude and schedule manipulations.     

Some relationships between the information function of IRT and the signal/noise ratio and reliability coefficient of classical test theory

It is shown that IRTs information function for an item is functionally related to local versions of classical test theories' signal/noise ratio and reliability coefficient.     

Coming to terms with stress: Effects of stress location in sentence processing

The purpose of this research was to determine the role of syllabic stress in language processing during the early on-line processing of speech and later in the representation of a sentence in memory. Experiment 1 used a syllable monitoring task while Experiment 3 used a probe task in which subjects heard a sentence and then were asked to determine whether a probe syllable had occurred in the sentence. In the monitoring task, stressed syllables were detected more rapidly in word-initial position, but unstressed syllables were detected more rapidly in word-final position. Stress facilitation in initial syllables was strongly related to high relative F0, but not to changes in perceived vowel quality as assessed in Experiment 2. This pattern is interpreted as evidence that lexical stress is used on-line to guide lexical access and/or lexical segmentation. The probe task of Experiment 3 showed stress facilitation in both positions, indicating that stress is independently retained in the postperceptual representation of a sentence.The research reported in this paper was supported by grant 80-0416 to Harvard University (Peter C. Gordon, Principal Investigator) from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Life Sciences Directorate. We thank Chris Thurber for his extensive and competent assistance in testing subjects and making acoustic measurements, and Jay Rueckl for comments on an earlier version of this paper     

Attitude change following persuasive communication: Integrating Social Judgment Theory and the Elaboration Likelihood Model

An experiment was conducted to examine the influence of the perceived extremity of a message and motivation to elaborate upon the process of persuasion. The first goal was to test a model of attitude change relating Social Judgment Theory to the Elaboration Likelihood Model. The second objective was to develop an instrument to measure attitude structure (latitudes of acceptance, non-commitment, and rejection) that allowed for a more refined assessment of the discrepancy between the position advocated in a message and the recipient's initial attitude. The main dependent variable was the attitude towards the use of automobiles in relation to environmental issues. Subjects were confronted with a message located in their own latitude of acceptance, rejection or non-commitment. Shortly after, a second measurement of attitude took place. The results showed that messages within the latitudes of non-commitment gave rise to the greatest attitude change. The data support the susceptibility hypothesis that subjects elaborate messages mainly in the latitude of non-commitment.     

Parts and wholes in face recognition

Are faces recognized using more holistic representations than other types of stimuli? Taking holistic representation to mean representation without an internal part structure, we interpret the available evidence on this issue and then design new empirical tests. Based on previous research, we reasoned that if a portion of an object corresponds to an explicitly represented part in a hierarchical visual representation, then when that portion is presented in isolation it will be identified relatively more easily than if it did not have the status of an explicitly represented part. The hypothesis that face recognition is holistic therefore predicts that a part of a face will be disproportionately more easily recognized in the whole face than as an isolated part, relative to recognition of the parts and wholes of other kinds of stimuli. This prediction was borne out in three experiments: subjects were more accurate at identifying the parts of faces, presented in the whole object, than they were at identifying the same part presented in isolation, even though both parts and wholes were tested in a forced-choice format and the whole faces differed only by one part. In contrast, three other types of stimuli--scrambled faces, inverted faces, and houses--did not show this advantage for part identification in whole object recognition.     

Women in advertisements in medical journals

To determine the images of women in picture advertisements, a stratified random sample of 32 medical journals, representing approximately 12% of medical journals published in the United States that are directed toward physicians in clinical practice, was subjected to content analysis. The sample consists of 209 different ads. The subjects of the ads included men, women, and children representing a variety of ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups. Notable, however, was the preponderance of Caucasian males pictured as physicians and the absence of women and people of color in this role. Women are pictured as 68.1% of consumers and men as 31.9%, a significant difference. Statistically significant differences also occur in the images of men and women as consumers. Most of the workers are men (68.2%), another significant difference. When women depicted are workers, they are secretaries and waitresses. Portrayals of women in medical advertisements continue to be stereotyped and outdated.