A survey of the use of facilitated communication in community agencies serving persons with developmental disabilities

Service providers to individuals with developmental disabilities at seven North Dakota agencies were surveyed on their current and past use of facilitated communication (FC). Perceived validity and effectiveness of FC were also assessed. Seventeen percent of the 177 direct care and supervisory staff surveyed reported that they had never heard of FC, 36% were aware of but had never used FC, 28% had previously used FC, and 18% currently used the technique despite overwhelming experimental evidence that FC is not a valid means of communication for people with disabilities. The results indicated that respondents who had previously used FC, but did not do so currently, gave it the lowest ratings of validity, usefulness, and likability, while current users gave FC the highest ratings. Current users had the fewest years of experience in the field of developmental disabilities. The majority of current users said guardian approval should not be required prior to the use of FC, whereas the majority of past users and non-users said that guardian approval should be required. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of video feedback on running form

Correct running form is important for injury prevention; as such, correct form promotes continued engagement in running as a long-term form of exercise. Researchers have shown video feedback to be an effective strategy to improve athletic form for a variety of sports, but it has not been evaluated in any behavior analytic research as a method for improving running form. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of video feedback to improve running form for regular runners. During baseline, each participant was video recorded while running without any feedback (verbal or video). During intervention, the researcher recorded the participant, then showed them the video and provided feedback on correct or incorrect form, according to a 9-step task analysis. Results show that all three participants achieved 100% correct steps on the task analysis when video feedback was used to maintain their form during follow-up.     

The Relation of Candidate Personality With Selection-Interview Outcomes

Two studies examined the relation of personality on the interview process. Study 1 was designed to examine these behaviors and characteristics in a lab sctting. while Study 2 examined similar variables in a field setting. Study 1 demonstrated that Type A achievemetit strivings, extraversion, work locus of control. neuroticism. and trait anxiety were related to interview outcomes in simulated employment interviews. Study 2 examined the relation of personality characteristics to outcomes of actual interviews conducted by college recruiters. Type A achievement striving, work locus of control. and trait anxiety were found to be related to interviewer decision outcomes.     

Early extinction effects following intermittent reinforcement: Little evidence of extinction bursts

The occurrence of extinction bursts—transient increases in response rate in excess of those observed in baseline during the period immediately following discontinuation of reinforcement of a response—was examined. In Experiment 1, key pecking of pigeons was reinforced according to a multiple schedule in which a variable-ratio schedule alternated with an interval schedule in which the reinforcers were yoked to the preceding variable-ratio component. In Experiments 2 and 3, rats were screened such that the lever-press response rates of different rats maintained by variable-interval schedules were either relatively high or relatively low. Following these baseline conditions, in Experiments 1 and 2 responding was extinguished by eliminating the food reinforcer and in Experiment 3 by removing the response–reinforcer dependency. Responses immediately following extinction implementation were examined. Response increases relative to baseline during the first 20 min of a 324.75-min extinction session (Experiment 1) or during the first 30-min extinction session (Experiments 2 and 3) were rare and unsystematic. The results (a) reinforce earlier meta-analyses concluding that extinction bursts may be a less ubiquitous early effect of extinction than has been suggested and (b) invite further experimentation to establish their generality as a function of preceding reinforcement conditions.     

An Intensional Theory of Truth: An Informal Report

Saul Kripke’s theory of truth suffers from expressive limitations – in particular, there are no extensional operators within that framework that allow one to characterize those sentences that fail to receive a truth value within the framework. Especially worrisome is the fact that there is no operator that outputs true on exactly the paradoxical sentences. In this paper I extend Kripke’s approach via the addition of extensional operators, which allows us to characterize many (but not all) such sentences, including the paradoxical ones.     

Impaired discourse gist and working memory in children after brain injury

Emerging evidence suggests that a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in childhood may disrupt the ability to abstract the central meaning or gist-based memory from connected language (discourse). The current study adopts a novel approach to elucidate the role of immediate and working memory processes in producing a cohesive and coherent gist-based text in the form of a summary in children with mild and severe TBI as compared to typically developing children, ages 8-14 years at test. Both TBI groups showed decreased performance on a summary production task as well as retrieval of specific content from a long narrative. Working memory on n-back tasks was also impaired in children with severe TBI, whereas immediate memory performance for recall of a simple word list in both TBI groups was comparable to controls. Interestingly, working memory, but not simple immediate memory for a word list, was significantly correlated with summarization ability and ability to recall discourse content.     

Emotional Responses to Changing Feedback: Is It Better to Have Won and Lost Than Never to Have Won At All?

Two experiments investigated how self-esteem guides people's emotional responses to changing evaluative feedback. In both experiments, participants received an initial evaluation (either positive or negative) followed by a second evaluation (either positive or negative). Emotional reactions to the second evaluation were then assessed. High self-esteem participants found feedback that was consistently negative to be most distressing, whereas low self-esteem participants were most disturbed by feedback that changed from positive to negative. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Effects of visual-field inversions on the reverse-perspective illusion

The 'reverse-perspective' illusion entails the apparent motion of a stationary scene painted in relief and containing misleading depth cues. We have found that, using prism goggles to induce horizontal or vertical visual-field reversals, the illusory motion is greatly reduced or eliminated in the direction for which the goggles reverse the visual field. We argue that the illusion is a consequence of the observer's inability to reconcile changes in visual information due to body movement with implicit knowledge concerning anticipated changes. As such, the reverse-perspective illusion may prove to be useful in the study of the integration of linear perspective and motion parallax information.     

The structure of pigeon multiple-class same-different learning

Three experiments examined the structure of the decision framework used by pigeons in learning a multiple-class same-different task. Using a same-different choice task requiring the discrimination of odd-item different displays (one or more of the display's component elements differed) from same displays (all display components identical), pigeons were concurrently trained with sets of four discriminable display types. In each experiment, the consistent group was tested such that the same and different displays of four display types were consistently mapped onto their choice alternatives. The inconsistent group received a conflicting mapping of the same and different displays and the choice alternatives that differed across the four display types but were consistent within a display type. Experiment 1 tested experienced pigeons, and Experiment 2 tested naive pigeons. In both experiments, the consistent group learned their discrimination faster and to a higher level of choice accuracy than did the inconsistent group, which performed poorly in general. Only in the consistent group was the discrimination transferred to novel stimuli, indicative of concept formation in that group. A third experiment documented that the different display classes were discriminable from one another. These results suggest that pigeons attempt to generate a single discriminative rule when learning this type of task, and that this general rule can cover a large variety of stimulus elements and organizations, consistent with previous evidence suggesting that pigeons may be capable of learning relatively unbounded relational same-different concepts.