Negative recency and measurement of primary memory.

The technique of Waugh & Norman (1965) is widely used in measuring the capacity of primary memory. Watkins (1974) has proposed a modification of the technique which takes into account registration failure. A further modification is proposed which takes into account findings of negative recency in delayed recall.     

Taste aversions to mother's milk: the age-related role of nursing in acquisition and expression of a learned association.

The development of taste aversion learning to novel cues contained in mother's milk was examined in rat pups. Pups receiving distinctive mild by experimenter-delivered oral infusions followed by toxicosis formed an aversion to the dam's diet. Robust aversions were learned as early as Day 10 and were retained for at least 11 days. When the same distinctive milk was obtained directly from a foster mother through nursing, however, only weanling-age pups (over 20 days) formed an aversion. X-ray analysis of nipple location in the mouths of suckling pups suggested that pups between the ages of 10 and 21 days receive milk at a similar tongue locus. Flavored milk was then delivered at specific time intervals in controlled quantities through tongue cannulas implanted at loci corresponding to the nipple position shown by the X-rays. Cannulated preweanling pups that were attached to a nipple during milk delivery failed to associate the taste cue with illness, whereas both preweanlings off the nipple and weanlings on the nipple acquired aversions to the taste cue in the milk. The evidence obtained in these experiments suggests that pups of all ages are incapable of expressing a taste aversion in a nursing situation and that preweanling pups in particular are also dificient in acquiring aversions within a suckling context. The inability of preweanling pups to acquire taste aversions in a nursing situation appears to result from a failure to associate taste cues with illness rather than a failure to detect taste cues obtained from a nipple.     

Evaluation of infant vocal conditioning.

The use of the operant conditioning paradigm, as it has been applied to infant social, vocal behavior, reflects a failure to take into account the social nature of human infants over and above the rigid theoretical rationale of the paradigm. It is argued that: (1) the baseline procedure used in operant conditioning studies is methodologically and conceptually invalid; (2) the reinforcing stimulus used in social conditioning studies elicits the very response that it is assigned to reinforce; and (3) the effect of the response-reinforcer relationship is not the reinforcement (strengthening) of vocal response rate.     

Generalized and specific expectancies: Sequential mediators of interpersonal behavior1

Two experiments confirmed sequential mediation of social interaction by investigating the effects of generalized expectancies on specific expectancies and the effects of specific expectancies on performance. Both experiments used a simulated tutoring task in which the subject took the role of tutor while a confederate took the role of student. In Experiment 1 subjects combined generalized expectancies about the effectiveness of certain tutoring responses with specific situational information to produce specific expectancies about the results of the tutoring responses under the experimental circumstances. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and showed that specific expectancies of the relative effectiveness of different responses influenced which response was performed more. Results were discussed in terms of cognitive motivation theory and social learning theory.     

An adolescent symptom checklist for juvenile deliquents

A rating instrument was developed to assess the personality functioning of problem adolescents who have a brief history of official delinquency. Subjects were 186 residents at a short-term diagnostic detention facility. The instrument that emerged from a factor analysis was tested for reliability, validity, and cross-situational generality. Two major orthogonal factors emerged, Apathy-Withdrawal (I) and Anger-Defiance (II). Each factor was found to be congruent with the corresponding dimension on behavior rating instruments that had previously yielded two orthogonal factors and that had been shown to be relevant to a large number of psychological and educational issues. Significant correlations between the factors and a series of global ratings measuring behavior and measures indicative of the frequency and seriousness of official delinquency provided further evidence of construct and discriminant validity as well as evidence of cross-setting consistency of personality functioning.     

Stability of performances of individual stutterers on oral reading adaptation tasks

This study aimed to determine whether individual oral reading adaptation task performances are sufficiently reliable to be used as predictive indicators of improvement in stuttering behavior by testing the stability of individual stutterers' adaptation scores. Results demonstrated that all stutterers are not stable in their individual adaptation scores and therefore individual adaptation scores may be insufficiently reliable for predicting and classifying. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.     

The generality of learned helplessness in the rat

Two experiments were simultaneously conducted in which two different groups of 40 rats each were exposed to one of two different stressors. In both experiments half the subjects were pretreated with shock, half with underwater exposure. For each pretreatment stressor, half the subjects were allowed to escape, the other half were not. The experiments differed in the test task used. Approximately 24 hr after pretreatment, one-half the subjects from each pretreatment group received 20 water-escape trials in an underwater maze, the other half received 20 shock-escape trials in a two-way shuttle box. The subjects in each of the inescapable pretreatment conditions were slower to escape in the subsequent shock-escape and water-escape tasks when compared with subjects in the corresponding escapable pretreatment condition. The “learned helplessness” effect appeared to be no smaller when aversive stimuli were changed between pretreatment and test than when they remained the same.     

Adult-child discourse: Developmental interaction between information processing and linguistic knowledge

In the present study, the discourse interaction between adult and child was examined in terms of the content of their utterances, and the linguistic and contextual relations between their messages, in order to investigate how children use the information from adults' input sentences to form contingent responses. The analyses described were based on longitudinal data from four children from approximately 21 to 36 months of age. Categories of child discourse, their development and their interactions with aspects of prior adult utterances form the major results of the study. Child utterances were identified as adjacent (immediately preceded by an adult utterance), or as nonadjacent (not immediately preceded by an adult utterance). Adjacent utterances were either contingent (shared the same topic and added new information relative to the topic of the prior utterance), imitative (shared the same topic but did not add new information), or noncontingent (did not share the same topic). From the beginning, the adjacent speech was greater than nonadjacent speech. Contingent speech increased over time; in particular, linguistically contingent speech (speech that expanded the verb relation of the prior adult utterance with added or replaced constituents within a clause) showed the greatest developmental increase. Linguistically contingent speech occurred more often after questions than nonquestions. The results are discussed in terms of how the differential requirements for processing information in antecedent messages is related to language learning.     

The Cost-Reward Model of Helping Behavior: A Nonconfirmation1

A field experiment was designed to test several predictions derived from the Piliavin and Piliavin cost-reward model of helping behavior. Female and male subjects' reported intent to help a hemophiliac in a nearby hospital was unrelated to the costs for helping, the costs for not helping, and the order in which the subjects received the costs' manipulations. The obtained rates of helping were also unrelated to whether or not subjects reported having donated previously. Failure to obtain the predicted results is discussed.