Magnitudes of score differences produced within sessions in a cooperative exchange procedure

Interest centered on maximal score differences produced within sessions during two-party exchange. Subjects chose between earning money independently or through potentially higher-paying exchange. In the exchange option, only one person could produce points for the other on a trial. Because each exchange response (“give”) required the giver to forego earning points independently, the larger the score difference produced (i.e., the further ahead in earnings the other person was put), the greater the reduction in the giver's earnings if the other person did not reciprocate. Results showed that scores were usually equal at the end of each session, and that subjects maintained close equality of scores throughout each session. When a response-cost contingency that punished the alternation of giving was introduced, however, large within-session score differences developed. These large differences continued to be produced after the response-cost contingency was removed. Finally, when subjects were told that the session could end at any moment, score differences were sharply reduced, indicating that production of score differences remained under the control of discriminative stimuli associated with the likelihood of reciprocation. The study suggests that with appropriate procedures, an experimental analysis of behavioral phenomena associated with the concept of “trust” may be possible.     

Uninstructed human responding: sensitivity to ratio and interval contingencies

College students' presses on a telegraph key were occasionally reinforced by light onsets in the presence of which button presses (consummatory responses) produced points later exchangeable for money. One student's key presses were reinforced according to a variable-ratio schedule; key presses of another student in a separate room were reinforced according to a variable-interval schedule yoked to the interreinforcement intervals produced by the first student. Instructions described the operation of the reinforcement button, but did not mention the telegraph key; instead, key pressing was established by shaping. Performances were comparable to those of infrahuman organisms: variable-ratio key-pressing rates were higher than yoked variable-interval rates. With some yoked pairs, schedule effects occurred so rapidly that rate reversals produced by schedule reversals were demonstrable within one session. But sensitivity to these contingencies was not reliably obtained with other pairs for whom an experimenter demonstrated key pressing or for whom the reinforcer included automatic point deliveries instead of points produced by button presses. A second experiment with uninstructed responding demonstrated sensitivity to fixed-interval contingencies. These findings clarify prior failures to demonstrate human sensitivity to schedule contingencies: human responding is maximally sensitive to these contingencies when instructions are minimized and the reinforcer requires a consummatory response.     

Further investigation of Coleman's Level Hypothesis

Volunteers (16 male and 17 female) from introductory psychology courses were used to investigate Coleman's rationale in support of the Levels Hypothesis. Projective stimuli from parts of the Rorschach, TAT, and Sentence Completion techniques were presented, and subjects asked to rate how much the stimuli and their responses said something about themselves, their fathers, or mothers, to determine their awareness of the personal relevance of the stimuli and responses. Results indicated that both the stimulus and response ratings varied as expected at the .01 level of significance, thus supporting Coleman's rationale.     

Coding processes in the free recall of associated word lists

An experiment is reported on the free recall of lists of 18 words. The lists consisted of words that were strongly or weakly associated to the eliciting stimulus, were members of either a single category or more than one category and were arranged into sets of three associated words or six associated words. Each list was presented once only and free recall required after a filled interval of 18 s. One half of the subjects were provided with cues at recall: the remainder were given no assistance. Recall efficiency increased with association level and with restricted category membership of the words in a set. Clustering at recall (when adjusted for opportunity) was greater in the 6×3 lists than in the 3×6 lists. The provision of cues only led to a significant facilitation in recall with lists consisting of 6 sets of 3 words. A detailed analysis of the recall data suggested the importance of the category membership variable in the production of the later recall.     

Helping the reluctant client to engage in counselling

The reluctant or resistant counselling client is a common though frustrating client for many school counsellors. A number of techniques designed to aid reluctant clients to engage in the process of counselling are described.     

Sex-role perception,portrayal, and preference in the fantasy play of young children

The naturalistic observation of role-taking behavior in 90 spontaneously occurring (i.e., unelicited) fantasy play episodes of 16 4-year-old children in same-sex paired interaction revealed (1) a differential perception of male, female, parental, and conjugal roles, particularly in terms of competence; (2) the accuracy, depth, and breadth of their sex-role portrayals; and (3) a preference for same-sex role-play. The assimilative and accommodative functions of roleplay in the early acquisition of sex role are discussed, as well as the degree of decentration required for the roleplay activities to occur.The research reported here was carried out at Cornell University. It was part of a doctoral dissertation on the nature of fantasy in the spontaneous play of young children, which was in turn part of a larger study of peer interaction conducted by Lee C. Lee. It was supported by a research grant from the College of Human Ecology, State University of New York. This article was originally presented as a paper at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, New Orleans, March 1977.     

Facilitation of letter recognition by an annulus in a metacontrast paradigm

The recognition of a single letter is found to improve when it is surrounded by an annulus in close proximity. This facilitatory effect is obtained only when annulus and target durations are equal and onsets are simultaneous. When the annulus is increased in size, the facilitatory effect is found first to increase in magnitude and then to decline; no interaction between target letter and annulus is observed for large diameter annuli (72'+). The results are interpreted with reference to a lateral inhibitory model of spatio-temporal interactions.     

Selective sensitivity of schedule-induced activity to an operant suppression contingency.

The sensitivity of pigeons' schedule-induced activity to operant consequences was studied in two experiments. During a 30-s interval between food presentations, a keylight stimulus brightened incrementally. Stable terminal key pecking and interim locomotor activity developed. An operant "setback" contingency was applied to activity. The contingency arranged for locomotor movements (detected by a nine-panel floorboard) to be followed by a resetting of the keylight brightness to a dimmer value and a 1-s delay of reinforcement (for individual responses). Experiment 1 showed that activity patterns were highly sensitive to their operant consequences. Accompanying key-peck rates were only transiently affected. In Experiment 2, the setback contingency was imposed during restricted portions of the trial, and differential operant control of activity was demonstrated. However, birds in this study produced higher rates of key pecking as activity rates were reduced. These results suggest that although schedule-induced activity arises in response to the temporal arrangement of stimulus events, this behavior may retain considerable sensitivity to response-consequence relations.     

Repetition of Lexicalization Across Languages: A Further Test of the Locus of Priming

Wheeldon and Monsell (this issue) found that production of a word in response to a definition had a large and long-lasting facilitatory effect on latency for later production of the same word to name a pictured object, and that this priming effect was not due to repeated production of the phonological word-form per se. This paper reports a further test of the locus of the effect. Welsh-English bilinguals named pictured objects in Welsh. Half the words were primed either by their earlier production in Welsh in response to Welsh definitions or by production of their equivalents in English in response to English definitions. Substantial facilitation resulted from prior production in the same language, none from prior production in the other language—provided that the equivalents differed in phonological form. Given that priming results neither from repeated activation of a meaning when different phonological forms are produced, nor from repetition of the same phonological form in response to different meanings, the priming effect must be localized in the connection between a word's meaning and its phonological form. We also put forward an account of bilingual lexicalization that accommodates this result together with some evidence indicating that production of words in one language is not wholly insulated from the “availability” of words in the other.