Performance of humans in concurrent avoidance/positive-reinforcement schedules

Performance maintained under concurrent schedules consisting of a variable-interval avoidance component and a variable-interval positive-reinforcement component was studied in three human subjects using points exchangeable for money as the reinforcer. The rate of responding in the avoidance component increased, and the rate of responding in the positive-reinforcement component declined, as a function of the frequency of point-losses avoided in the avoidance component. The performance of all three subjects conformed to equations proposed by Herrnstein to describe behavior in concurrent schedules. The logarithms of the ratios of the response rates in the two components, and the logarithms of the ratios of the times spent in the two components, were linearly related to the logarithms of the ratios of the frequency of loss avoidance in the avoidance component to the frequency of reinforcement in the positive-reinforcement component. When a changeover delay of 5.0 sec was imposed, the slopes of the linear functions were close to 1.0 in the case of two subjects, whereas the third subject exhibited significant undermatching. For two subjects the changeover delay was then reduced to 2.0 sec; in both cases the slopes of the linear functions were lower than under the 5.0-sec condition. One subject participated in a third phase, in which no changeover delay was imposed; there was a further reduction in the slopes of the linear functions.     

Instructional planning: information collected by school psychologists vs. information considered useful by teachers

A limited national sample of 49 school psychologists and 30 regular education teachers provided information on assessment for the purpose of instructional planning. School psychologists listed the types of information they most often collected for this purpose and teachers listed the types of information considered most useful for this purpose. While some indications of agreement were found between school psychologists and teachers, there were also several inconsistencies in the views of the two groups regarding assessment procedures for instructional planning. The findings are discussed in light of empirical evidence on the contribution of various types of assessment data to instructional planning.     

Perceived effort in sniffing: The effects

Previous research has shown that perceived odor strength does not vary with flow rate of an odorant vapor entering the naris when that variation is produced by subject-controlled changes in sniff pressure, but that it does vary with flow rate when the variation is produced by experimenter-controlled changes in the resistance of the olfactometric system. We have suggested an odor-constancy model in which invariance of perceived odor strength is linked to perceived effort of sniffing, and have hypothesized that changed resistance will have its effect because there is no corresponding change in perceived effort when sniff pressure is held constant. In two studies, subjects made magnitude estimations of the perceived effort of sniffing; sniff pressure was controlled by having the subject match his sniff, displayed on a storage oscilloscope face, to a pattern specifying its required shape, duration, and level. In Experiment 1, resistance was fixed while sniff pressure varied; perceived effort grew as the .8 power of the required sniff pressure. In Experiment 2, sniff pressure and resistance were varied in a factorial design; perceived effort grew as the .8 power of pressure at fixed resistance, but remained unchanged when resistance varied at fixed pressure. This outcome provides indirect support for the odor-constancy model, since it shows that perceived effort covaries with flow rate under the condition in which constancy is found but does not change under the condition in which constancy fails.     

MULTIVARIATE ASSESSMENT OF CONFLICT IN DISTRESSED AND NONDISTRESSED MOTHER-ADOLESCENT DYADS

A battery of measures was used to assess conflict between mothers and young adolescents (females and males, 11 to 15 years of age). Two groups of families, one composed of a distressed clinical sample (N = 38), the other a nondistressed normative sample (N = 40), participated. The assessment battery included retrospective judgments, frequency estimates, self-monitored home recording, and tape-recorded discussion of a home problem. Content of assessment measures tapped aspects of parental control, decisionmaking, self-reported interaction behavior, arguments, interaction behavior rated by independent “blind” observers, frequency and anger-intensity of specific problematic issues, and perceptions of positive and negative behaviors of the other family member. Based on univariate analyses, 21 of the 26 defined variables discriminated significantly in the predicted direction. Maternal and adolescent reports of behavior and independent ratings of tape-recorded interaction emerged as strong and consistent discriminators. Stepwise multivariate discriminant analysis provided successful classification of 100% of the families based on the inclusion of nine variables. In a cross-validation sample, 84% of the families were correctly classified. Implications for systematic outcome research as well as clinical application are discussed.     

Teacher Beliefs,Classroom Interaction and Personal Causation1

The study reports relationships between teachers' belief systems (Harvey), a teacher-pupil interaction measure of classroom influence, pupils' perception of the dimate of the dassroom, and pupils' academic achievement. Results demonstrate that more complex teachers encourage more pupil influence, and are perceived as having a more origin climate. In classrooms of high pupil influence and perceived origin climate, the pupils have higher academic achievement. These results are discussed in terms of the theory of personal causation and are cited as evidence for the value of the study of action sequences as related to verbal-utterances of the actors.     

Phonemic behavior of aphasic patients with posterior cerebral lesions

The investigation analyzed the phonemic paraphasic errors of 10 asphasic patients with posterior cerebral lesions. The results indicated that paraphasic speech is characterized by complex confusions, often occurring at the ends of words and often involving phonemic transpositions. Many of the unusual and unexpected phonemic errors appeared to be due to simultaneous semantic and phonologic confusions.     

Naming of object-drawings by dyslexic and other learning disabled children

On the Oldfield-Wingfield Picture-Naming Test, sensitive to subtle chronic dysphasia in adults, dyslexic children name fewer pictures correctly. Even when correct on words with less than 30 per million frequency of occurrence, they perform more slowly than do nondyslexic subjects suffering from minimal brain dysfunction (MBD) or normal controls. However, there is no evidence for “perceptual impairment” underlying dyslexic subjects' low scores and prolonged latencies, as the distribution of their errors is similar to that of normal children. Rather it is the nondyslexic MBD group which produces a high percentage of wrong names, suggestive of mistaking the pictured stimuli for other, visually similar, objects.