Satiation for social reinforcers: The effects of contingency,vicarious experience,and ambiguous situations

The relative satiation effect, an inverse relationship between the frequency of prior social reinforcement (the word “good”) and the later effectiveness of the social reinforcer in controlling behavior, was studied. In Experiment 1, a discrimination task in which social reinforcement was given for correct responses was administered to first- to fourth-grade children (6 to 10 years of age), who had during a preexposure phase performed a preliminary task or observed another child performing. During the preexposure phase, the experimenter delivered frequent or infrequent social reinforcement that was either contingent or noncontingent. Only performers and observers who had experienced frequent noncontingent reinforcement showed the satiation effect during the discrimination task phase. The results were interpreted as inconsistent with J. L. Gewirtz' (Developmental Psychology, 1969, 1, 2–13) social drive formulation but supportive of an informational analysis in which the children are seen as responding appropriately to unambiguous evidence concerning the reliability of contingency information. In Experiment 2, seating arrangements were varied so that information concerning the direction of reinforcement was made ambiguous. Performers were less responsive during the discrimination phase after experiencing frequent noncontingent reinforcement when seated alone or opposite an observer than when seated next to an observer. The results are interpreted as indicating trust of the reliability of the contingency under ambiguous conditions.     

Iconic memory and visible persistence

There are three senses in which a visual stimulus may be said to persist psychologically for some time after its physical offset. First, neural activity in the visual system evoked by the stimulus may continue after stimulus offset (“neural persistence”). Second, the stimulus may continue to be visible for some time after its offset (“visible persistence”). Finally, information about visual properties of the stimulus may continue to be available to an observer for some time after stimulus offset (“informational persistence”). These three forms of visual persistence are widely assumed to reflect a single underlying process: a decaying visual trace that (1) consists of afteractivity in the visual system, (2) is visible, and (3) is the source of visual information in experiments on decaying visual memory. It is argued here that this assumption is incorrect. Studies of visible persistence are reviewed; seven different techniques that have been used for investigating visible persistence are identified, and it is pointed out that numerous studies using a variety of techniques have demonstrated two fundamental properties of visible persistence: theinverse duration effect (the longer a stimulus lasts, the shorter is its persistence after stimulus offset) and theinverse intensity effect (the more intense the stimulus, the briefer its persistence). Only when stimuli are so intense as to produce afterimages do these two effects fail to occur. Work on neural persistences is briefly reviewed; such persistences exist at the photoreceptor level and at various stages in the visual pathways. It is proposed that visible persistence depends upon both of these types of neural persistence; furthermore, there must be an additional neural locus, since a purely stereoscopic (and hence cortical) form of visible persistence exists. It is argued that informational persistence is defined by the use of the partial report methods introduced by Averbach and Coriell (1961) and Sperling (1960), and the term “iconic memory” is used to describe this form of persistence. Several studies of the effects of stimulus duration and stimulus intensity upon the duration of iconic memory have been carried out. Their results demonstrate that the duration of iconic memory is not inversely related to stimulus duration or stimulus intensity. It follows that informational persistence or iconic memory cannot be identified with visible persistence, since they have fundamentally different properties. One implication of this claim that one cannot investigate iconic memory by tasks that require the subject to make phenomenological judgments about the duration of a visual display. In other words, the so-called “direct methods” for studying iconic memory do not provide information about iconic memory. Another implication is that iconic memory is not intimately tied to processes going on in the visual system (as visible persistence is); provided a stimulus is adequately legible, its physical parameters have little influence upon its iconic memory. The paper concludes by pointing out that there exists an alternative to the usual view of iconic memory as a precategorical sensory buffer. According to this alternative, iconic memory is post-categorical, occurring subsequent to stimulus identification. Here, stimulus identification is considered to be a rapid automatic process which does not require buffer storage, but which provides no information about episodic properties of a visual stimulus. Information about these physical stimulus properties must, in some way, be temporarily attached to a representation of the stimulus in semantic memory; and it is this temporarily attached physical information which constitutes iconic memory.     

Children’s use of phonological encoding when reading for meaning

The role of phonological recoding in children’s reading was investigated by means of a task requiring comprehension of sentence meaning: The child’s task was to decide whether a sequence of printed letter strings was a meaningful sentence or not. Meaningless sentences that are meaningful when phonologically recoded (e.g., “He ran threw the street”) produced more incorrect responses than did meaningless sentences that remain meaningless when phonologically recoded (e.g., “He ran sew the street”). The difference in error rates between the two sentence types diminished as a function of age. Control experiments showed that these results were not due to visual similarity effects, nor to imperfect ability to spell homophones. It was concluded that very young readers rely extensively on phonological recoding when reading for meaning; as they grow older, reliance on visual encoding becomes progressively more important.     

Reality therapy: Icing on the cake of behavior modification

The paper presents a conceptual model for therapeutic intervention based on a behavioral orientation. Behavioral therapy is viewed on a continuum ranging from basic operant techniques to cognitive strategies applied to human interaction. It is hypothesized that the elements of reality therapy, with its emphasis on human interaction, are needed to provide closure to the therapeutic intervention and to help maintain new coping behaviors. Utilizing the context of an institutionalized client, suggestions for how this process might occur are discussed.     

Forest lights: Notes on the conceptualization of the unconscious

Using the metaphor of lights appearing unexplained in the night, the author argues for a conceptualization of the unconscious based on a posture of trust and acceptance rather than one of fear and explanation.His last book,Idea and Experience, dealt with Husserl's project of phenomenology inIdeas I. He has recently completed another book,The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature.