The automated psychological evaluation system (APES)

This paper describes the rationale, design, cost, and extensions related to an automated test battery. Increased manpower, speed of service, lower cost, accuracy, and quality of reporting support the use of the system. The liability of failure to maintain and update the system is noted. Design considerations concerning mode of testing, tests included, and method of programming are discussed. The relative cost of automated and conventional testing is examined. Future extensions to the system are reviewed.     

A comparison of the effects of partial reinforcement schedules using a within-subject serial autoshaping procedure

Three experiments, each using a single group of pigeons, are reported. In Experiment 1 subjects were initially trained with two stimuli, one of which was always followed by food, the other being reinforced according to a 50% partial reinforcement schedule. Subsequently a serial procedure was adopted in which an additional stimulus, C, was consistently followed by the partially reinforced CS. A second additional stimulus, A, was followed on half of its occurrences by the continuously reinforced CS, its remaining presentations being followed by nothing. The rate of autoshaped keypecking was substantially greater during A than during C. In the remaining experiments subjects received first-order conditioning with a single stimulus that was either partially (Experiment 2) or continuously (Experiment 3) reinforced. The stimuli A and C were then again introduced for serial autoshaping. Stimulus A was occasionally paired with the CS and occasionally followed by nothing, whereas stimulus C was always followed by the CS. As in Experiment 1, the rate of responding during A was greater than during C. It is proposed that one influence on the rate of autoshaped keypecking during a CS is the accuracy with which the immediate consequences of that CS are predicted.     

Psychology, epistemology, and skepticism in Hume’s argument about induction

Since the mid-1970s, scholars have recognized that the skeptical interpretation of Hume’s central argument about induction is problematic. The science of human nature presupposes that inductive inference is justified and there are endorsements of induction throughout Treatise Book I. The recent suggestion that I.iii.6 is confined to the psychology of inductive inference cannot account for the epistemic flavor of its claims that neither a genuine demonstration nor a non-question-begging inductive argument can establish the uniformity principle. For Hume, that inductive inference is justified is part of the data to be explained. Bad argument is therefore excluded as the cause of inductive inference; and there is no good argument to cause it. Does this reinstate the problem of induction, undermining Hume’s own assumption that induction is justified? It does so only if justification must derive from “reason”, from the availability of a cogent argument. Hume rejects this internalist thesis; induction’s favorable epistemic status derives from features of custom, the mechanism that generates inductive beliefs. Hume is attracted to this externalist posture because it provides a direct explanation of the epistemic achievements of children and non-human animals—creatures that must rely on custom unsupplemented by argument.     

Awakening to Dreams

The author recounts how shamanic dream incubation and lucid dreaming aided both his psychic healing in therapy and his physical healing of cancer through dream journeying in the imaginal. The imaginal is the realm of spirit and soul to the shaman, the unconscious to Freud, the archetypes of the collective unconscious to Jung, and transitional space between the “me” and “not-me” to Winnicott.Louis Hagood, M.A., in Psychoanalytic Studies from The New School, is a member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysts, The Association for the Study of Dreams and the Friends of the Institute for Noetic Sciences and practices psychoanalysis in New York City. Correspondence to Louis Hagood, lhagood@oxbridge.com.