Infant auditory perception: Tonal masking

The results of an earlier study (Olsho, 1984) indicated that 5- to 8-month-old infants were relatively better at discriminating among high-frequency pitches than low. In the present study, sensory and nonsensory explanations for that effect were evaluated by examining infants' performance in a task requiring similar sensory processing but differing in the demands placed on processes such as memory. Infants' ability to resolve frequency was tested using a tonal masking paradigm, the psychophysical tuning curve. Twenty-four infants were tested at probe frequencies ranging from 500 to 4000 Hz; a group of young adults served as a comparison. Masked and unmasked thresholds were estimated using the visually reinforced head turn procedure in conjunction with an adaptive psychophysical method. Although infants' tuning curves fell below those of adults (indicating poorer performance), the widths and slopes of the infants' curves were not different from the adults'. Moreover, the difference between age groups remained constant across probe frequencies. These findings imply that by 5 months of age, the infant's ability to resolve sound frequency is similar to the adult's.     

Incidental learning,attention, and curiosity in squirrel monkeys calorie deprived as infants

The long-term effects of infantile malnutrition on information processing were studied in squirrel monkeys. From 2 through 8 weeks of age, four low-calorie infants were fed reduced amounts of a high protein diet, limiting their mean body weight gain to 23% of that of four well-fed controls, with all of this gain occurring during the first 2 weeks on the low-calorie diet. Thereafter, both groups received the standard diet ad libitum. At 68 weeks of age, incidental learning was tested by introducing shape cues that were redundant to the solution of a previously learned, two-choice, color discrimination. Removal of the color cues showed that the low-calorie monkeys had learned significantly less about the shape cues than had the controls. The basis for this incidental learning failure was then examined with an embedded-figures dicrimination, to measure attentional ability, and a novel stimulus substitution task, to measure curiosity. The groups did not differ in detecting embedded figures, but the low-calorie monkeys were significantly less likely than controls to select or handle novel stimuli that had been substituted for previously learned discriminative cues. It was concluded that undernutrition in infancy may induce a long-term strategy of only learning information which leads to an immediate reward, while suppressing the acquisition of information due to intrinsic curiosity.     

Pressures and pretense: Living with gender stereotypes

This study examines how people live with two gender stereotypes: (1) masculine/active and feminine/passive roles; and (2) masculine/emotional inexpressiveness and feminine/emotional expressiveness. Given the contrast between traditional gender stereotypes and the emergent feminist perspective, we expected that both men and women would experience pressures both to conform to and to deviate from the traditional stereotypes, although the pressures would be greater for women. A study of active/passive roles and specific emotions, with a sample of 141 men and women, revealed that both sexes felt such contradictory pressures, and that they actually were greater for women. Moreover, pressures were magnified in cross-sex interaction. Pretense was one way people consciously monitor feelings and manage interactions. A number of paradoxes emerged. The most dramatic is that both men and women experienced each other as demanding stereotypical behavior, yet both claimed self-motivation for change.The author thanks Lucile Duberman for her incisive suggestions, Nancy Leff for her valuable editorial assistance, and Anne Marie Fodera and Laura Mestress for their competent work as research assistants.     

The effect of training on visual alignment discrimination and grating resolution.

The effect of training on an observer's ability to detect the misalignment of three points, a hyperacuity, and to resolve a six-line grating was studied in a transfer-of-training design with observers (4 in each of two experiments) who were experienced in making psychophysical judgments of other visual stimuli. The transfer-of-training design enabled us to look for any training-based improvement. Long periods of training produced no statistically significant improvement in performance under any condition. There were small practice-based improvements, but the primary patterns indicated threshold fluctuation rather than improvement. We interpret the results to indicate that the neural mechanisms underlying three-point alignment and grating discrimination, like those for gap bisection (Klein & Levi, 1985), are not malleable to any significant extent.     

Human Aggressive and Escape Responding: Effects of Provocation Frequency

The Psychological Record - The effect of point loss frequency on aggressive and escape responding was investigated in two experiments. Subjects could respond on levers marked “A,”...     

Friendship: Communication and interactional patterns in same-sex dyads

Based on the classic work of Georg Simmel on dyadic intimacy and dependency and more recent work on self-disclosure, this study uses subjective accounts to compare same-sex dyadic friendships. Past research has neglected the important dimension of content. Thus, a major purpose was to specify three content levels of communication — topical, relational, and personal — and to determine sex differences in the range and primacy of these levels. In addition, seven interactional factors were identified: spontaneous communication, trust, nonverbal communication, dependency, shared value systems, conflict, and competition for power. The data reveal that women relate on all three levels, while men relate primarily on the topical level. Overall findings on the seven interactional factors reveal high congruence with traditional gender stereotypes. A serendipitous finding for both male and female dyads is that a particular individual is of less importance than a particular type of friendship. This suggests that friendship in modern society may be more tenuous than Simmel contended.This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 74th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 1979.Kidder, Peabody, & Co.     

TRAINING FAMILY THERAPISTS: AN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS

This study implemented and evaluated a training program (a written manual, videotaped models, rehearsal, role plays, and performance feedback) designed to teach five subjects the skills to become effective family therapists. The study examined the therapists' use of three target behaviors: instructing, informing, and praising. The therapists, each paired with a parent and a preschool-aged child (2 1/2–4 1/2 yr old), were trained in the clinic to use, and to teach to the parents, several behavioral skills (e.g., praising, planned ignoring, and time-out) relevant to teaching children compliance to parental instructions. A multiple-baseline design across triads (therapist/parent/child) demonstrated that after the training program was instituted, the therapists increased their rates of instructing, praising, and informing the parents; all parents increased attention to compliance, decreased attention to noncompliance, and increased rates of praise to their children; and all children increased their compliance and decreased their noncompliance.     

The role of elaborations in memory for prose

In two experiments, subjects read stories and were asked to make plausibility judgments about statements with respect to the stories. The inherent plausibility of the queried statements, the amount of attention subjects focused on information necessary for making a judgment, and the interval between presentation of the relevant story information and the test probe were varied orthogonally. The pattern of latencies obtained to make these judgments cast strong doubt on the notion that question answering is typically accomplished by searching for a single fact in memory. Rather, people seem to retrieve any relevant, available information and then use this to compute whether a statement seems true. The independent variables in these experiments can be interpreted according to whether they affect the retrieval or the judgment phase.