Assessing the acceptability of staff management procedures to direct care and supervisory staff

Direct care and supervisory staff in five residential training programs for persons with mental retardation in North Dakota rated the acceptability of six staff management procedures. Overall, staff rated “Instructions”, “Instructions and Modeling”, “Feedback and Praise”, and “Instructions, Feedback, and Praise”, as significantly more acceptable than “Self-Management” and “Self-Management, Feedback and Praise”. There was a significant group by treatment interaction in which supervisors and direct care staff had significantly different acceptability rating for four of the six procedures. The results were further analyzed by group and implications and future research are discuessed.     

Family interaction and child psychopathology: A comparison of two observation strategies

We examined two systems of assessing family interactions that are in common usage: a home based observation of free parent-child interaction and a clinic based observation of a structured mother-child problem solving discussion. Participants were 18 depressed, 27 conduct disordered and 16 comparison children and their mothers. Results indicated that: 1) these observations may yield very different data about child, and to a lesser extent, parent behavior, 2) parental affect in the clinic was related to their level of aversive behaviour in the home, 3) levels of both aversive and positive behavior for children and their mothers were correlated within each setting, 4) accuracy of diagnostic classifications made on the basis of the observational data were highest for comparison and conduct disordered children, but lowest for depressed children observed in the clinic, and 5) the inclusion of data on mothers' behavior increased classification accuracy for conduct disordered children only.     

Shaw’s stored information as a quantitative measure of sequential structure

In this paper, we describe a method to study the sequential structure in interevent times. The technique uses the stored information of an iterative map developed by-Shaw (1984). The stored information is a quantitative measure of the sequential organization or predictability in data. This paper discusses the concept of stored information and provides a FORTRAN routineto compute the stored information of interevent time data. Several synthetic data sets with known sequential structures are examined. Finally, we present some initial results from computing the stored information of experimental interresponse time data.     

Application of chaos theory to biology and medicine

The application of “chaos theory” to the physical and chemical sciences has resolved some long-standing problems, such as how to calculate a turbulent event in fluid dynamics or how to quantify the pathway of a molecule during Brownian motion. Biology and medicine also have unresolved problems, such as how to predict the occurrence of lethal arrhythmias or epileptic seizures. The quantification of a chaotic system, such as the nervous system, can occur by calculating the correlation dimension (D2) of a sample of the data that the system generates. For biological systems, the point correlation dimension (PD2) has an advantage in that it does not presume stationarity of the data, as the D2 algorithm must, and thus can track the transient non-stationarities that occur when the systems changes state. Such non-stationarities arise during normal functioning (e.g., during an event-related potential) or in pathology (e.g., in epilepsy or cardiac arrhythmogenesis). When stochastic analyses, such as the standard deviation or power spectrum, are performed on the same data they often have a reduced sensitivity and specifity compared to the dimensional measures. For example, a reduced standard deviation of heartbeat intervals can predict increased mortality in a group of cardiac subjects, each of which has a reduced standard deviation, but it cannot specify which individuals will or will not manifest lethal arrhythmogenesis; in contrast, the PD2 of the very same data can specify which patients will manifest sudden death. The explanation for the greater sensitivity and specificity of the dimensional measures is that they aredeterministic, and thus are moreaccurate in quantifying the time-series. This accuracy appears to be significant in detecting pathology in biological systems, and thus the use of deterministic measures may lead to breakthroughs in the diagnosis and treatment of some medical disorders.     

Increasing the intelligibility of speech through multiple phonemic restorations

Outside of the laboratory, listening conditions are often less than ideal, and when attending to sounds from a particular source, portions are often obliterated by extraneous noises. However, listeners possess rather elegant reconstructive mechanisms. Restoration can be complete, so that missing segments are indistinguishable from those actually present and the listener is unaware that the signal is fragmented. This phenomenon, called temporal induction (TI), has been studied extensively with nonverbal signals and to a lesser extent with speech. Earlier studies have demonstrated that TI can produce illusory continuity spanning gaps of a few hundred milliseconds when portions of a signal are replaced by a louder sound capable of masking the signal were it actually present. The present study employed various types of speech signals with periodic gaps and measured the effects upon intelligibility produced by filling these gaps with noises. Enhancement of intelligibility through multiple phonemic restoration occurred when the acoustic requirements for TI were met and when sufficient contextual information was available in the remaining speech fragments. It appears that phonemic restoration is a specialized form of TI that uses linguistic skills for the reconstruction of obliterated speech.     

Counterfactuals for free

I would like to thank D. Føllesdal, R. Jeffrey, J. Maienschein, B. van Fraassen, and M. White for comments on earlier versions of this paper and for discussion of the ideas involved. Funds to support research leaves during which this was written came from several sources; the NEH (#FB-24865-87), the NSF (#SES 19308), and Arizona State University. All these are gratefully acknowledged.     

Attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity and methylphenidate: The effects of dose and mastery level on children's learning performance

This investigation examined the relationship between methylphenidate (MPH) and the learning and recall of paired associations by children with attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity (ADDH). Forty-five children with ADDH were randomly assigned to one of three groups (novel, partial mastery, and mastery learning) that varied in the amount of previous learning of paired associations and participated in a double-blind, placebo-control, repeated-measures-across-dose (crossover) design. Each child received four doses of MPH (5 mg, 10 mg, 15 mg, and 20 mg) and a placebo in a random, counterbalanced sequence. The results indicated that both the rate of acquisition and accuracy in learning paired associations were significantly, but differentially, affected by MPH dose and the degree of learning mastery. The implications of these results for psychopharmacological research and the monitoring of psychostimulant effects on children's learning performance in academic settings are discussed.The authors wish to acknowledge and express their sincere appreciation to the graduate and undergraduate student members of the Children's Learning Clinic.