Effort expenditure during proportionally reinforced responding

A bar-pressing experiment was carried out in which laboratory rats were reinforced approximately in direct proportion to the level of time integral of force (“effort”) exerted per response. Over the course of training, the subjects increased in efficiency, as measured by amount of food obtained per unit effort exerted. It was not demonstrated, however, that the animals learned to take advantage of the effort-proportional reinforcement contingency.     

Extended practice with a single-character classification task

Extended practice was given on a single-character classification task with four nested checklists of Sizes 1, 2, 4, and 8 defining positive sets. Reaction time reduces with practice, but is linear with the logarithm of checklist size at all stages of training, and transfers to characters of large size and different case.     

Intimacy in response to direct gaze

Believing that they were participating in a study of encounter groups, male and female subjects were encouraged to deliver a personally revealing monologue to a same-sex listener whose visual behavior had been “programmed” by the experimenter. In the four experimental conditions, designed to explore the role of gaze as a stimulus, as a potential reinforcer, and as a source of feedback, the listener provided (a) continuous direct gaze; (b) direct gaze contingent upon intimate statements; (c) continuous gaze aversion; or (d) gaze aversion contingent upon intimate statements. The intimacy of the speaker's monologue was rated by a “blind” observer, the listener, and the speaker himself. Direct gaze, whether constant or contingent, appeared to promote intimacy between females and reticence between males, while gaze avoidance had the opposite effects. The only raters who disagreed with this assessment were the male speakers, who felt that they had been most intimate in the two direct gaze conditions. Positive feelings including liking for the listener and task satisfaction also were associated both with self-revelation and with direct gaze among females but not among males.     

Aggressive slides can induce a weapons effect

This experiment aims at testing the relationship between the aggressive meaning of slides and the viewers' behavior. Three sets of slides varying in their perceived aggressive content (revolver, whistle and a box of chocolate milk) were shown to three groups of Ss who had to choose the intensity of electric shocks they wanted to administer to a partner. As expected, viewing a highly aggressive slide increased the aggressive behavior of the Ss who had been insulted. These results broaden the generalizability of the Berkowitz and LePage (1967) original finding, and they cannot be explained by Page and Scheidt's (1971) criticisms.     

Homeostasis,discrepancy, dissonance

The argument is presented that motivation is equated to energy mobilization, and that the mechanism involved in all such instances of arousal is a discrepancy-detecting and -reducing mechanism. Motives are specific categories of discrepancy but they operate through a common arousal system. This system, further, may be coopted into (integrated into) processes involving social comparison, relative deprivation, discrepancies with respect to ego-involved persons and objects, and industrial, social, and political motives. While biological homeostasis provides the basic CNS system, other forms of discrepancy-triggered energy arousal must be recognized as important. Hedonism and theories of curiosity, as well as other similar factors, can be subsumed under discrepancy theory.A portion of this paper was prepared with the support of NIMH Fellowship 1-F03-MH-54564-01.     

Time delay in estimation of angles.

The hypotheses were that a 2-min. delay as opposed to a 2-sec. delay between observation and mechanical estimation to an acute angle will increase the likelihood of overestimation of that angle and that minimal-surround cue-conditions would produce greater overestimation than maximal cue-conditions. 40 subjects estimated a 54 degrees acute angle presented behind a 2-way mirror in one of the four treatment combinations in a 2 X 2 factorial design. A 2-min. time delay caused significantly larger estimates of the angle. Overestimation in the maximal cue-condition was significant but the underestimate in the minimal cue-conditions was not. Cue-conditions were not significantly different from one another.     

Feedback and fidelity: Effects of contingent consequences on accuracy of imitation

Accuracy of imitation by sixty kindergarten subjects was examined using a task in which a female adult modeled a series of pegboard patterns and delivered accuracy-contingent feedback. Four methods of feedback and a nofeedback control were compared. All four feedback groups were more accurate than the control group. The feedback conditions were: positive only, negative only, positive and negative, and negative with correction. The last condition resulted in greater accuracy than the others, which did not differ. All groups, including the control, improved significantly over trials. Accuracy of performance on interspersed, nonfeedback trials was maintained by feedback to the other patterns. Finally, imitation of repeating stimulus patterns did not differ from performance with nonrepeating patterns.     

Effect of reference number on magnitude estimation

The psychophysical function obtained by the method of magnitude estimation was influenced by the reference number (modulus) assigned to a “standard” line and the position of this standard in the range of comparison stimuli. Data from two experiments with judgments of apparent length of lines show how both variables systematically affect the slope of the power function. AllowingO to choose his own reference numbers, even though these numbers varied among as, tended to produce less variability in slope than ifE imposed fixed reference numbers forO to use.