Attitudes toward sex, arousal, and the retention of contraceptive information

Previous research has suggested that women with a negative emotional orientation toward sexuality (i.e., erotophobia) have difficulty learning and retaining sexually relevant material such as contraceptive information. It has been hypothesized that these women become aroused by this material and that this arousal interferes with their ability to learn it. The importance of this issue led us to conduct the current study. Erotophobic and erotophilic women viewed presentations about contraception while their physiological responses were being monitored. In addition, they were tested on the information contained in the presentation before, immediately after, and again 4-6 weeks after the presentation. The results indicated that the erotophobic women knew less contraceptive information before the presentation and were more aroused by the presentation. This arousal, however, did not interfere with retention of the material. These results are discussed in terms of individual differences in reactions to sexual material and the ability to learn, retain, and use contraceptive information.     

IES Arrow Dot performance and success in a cocaine detoxification program

The IES Arrow-Dot was administered to 41 cocaine detoxification patients. This group's scores indicated lower ego functioning and higher impulsivity and superego functioning than other clinical samples. No significant differences were noted between the Arrow-Dot scores of patients who successfully completed the program and those who did not.     

A representation theorem for languages with generalized quantifiers through back-and-forth methods

We obtain in this paper a representation of the formulae of extensions ofL by generalized quantifiers through functors between categories of first-order structures and partial isomorphisms. The main tool in the proofs is the back-and-forth technique. As a corollary we obtain the Caicedo's version of Fraïssés theorem characterizing elementary equivalence for such languages. We also discuss informally some geometrical interpretations of our results.     

Multiunit changes in hippocampus and medial geniculate body in free-behaving rats during acquisition and retention of a conditioned response to a tone

Multiunit activity (MUA) was recorded chronically in the hippocampus (CA3) and the medial geniculate body (mMG) during habituation to a tone followed by conditioning (tone paired with footshock) or pseudoconditioning (tone/footshock unpaired) in rats previously trained in a lever-pressing for food task (VI 60). In the conditioned group pairing tones with footshocks rapidly induced an increase in the initial CS-evoked response in the mMG, followed by the emergence of a hippocampal response and a marked conditioned suppression of lever-pressing to the tone. In contrast, in the pseudoconditioned group, the stimulus induced only transient cellular changes in the hippocampus and in the mMG, while no behavioral suppression to the tone could be seen. Moreover, presentations of the CS 45 days later induced multiunit and behavioral responses in both structures, only in the conditioned group. These results are used for discussion of the role of learning-induced changes in the sensory structure (mMG) as compared with changes in an associative structure (hippocampus), during acquisition and retention of a conditioned response.     

Additivity, subadditivity, and the use of visual information: a reply to Massaro (1988)

Previously we (Bruno & Cutting, 1988) explored the perception of spatial relations among objects laid out in a computer-generated environment. In his commentary on our article, Massaro (1988) raised several issues. The most important is from his reanalysis, which indicated that--because of a subadditive trend in the results--additive and multiplicative strategies fit our data in Experiment 1 about equally well. In reply, we performed a different analysis. Results corroborate subadditivity--and hence multiplicative information combination--in Experiment 1 but provide no evidence for it in Experiments 2 and 3. On the whole, then, the results still support additivity more strongly than any other combination rule and thus support our notion of minimodularity.     

Problem structure and the use of base-rate information from experience

This article is concerned with the use of base-rate information that is derived from experience in classifying examples of a category. The basic task involved simulated medical decision making in which participants learned to diagnose hypothetical diseases on the basis of symptom information. Alternative diseases differed in their relative frequency or base rates of occurrence. In five experiments initial learning was followed by a series of transfer tests designed to index the use of base-rate information. On these tests, patterns of symptoms were presented that suggested more than one disease and were therefore ambiguous. The alternative or candidate diseases on such tests could differ in their relative frequency of occurrence during learning. For example, a symptom might be presented that had appeared with both a relatively common and a relatively rare disease. If participants are using base-rate information appropriately (according to Bayes' theorem), then they should be more likely to predict that the common disease is present than that the rare disease is present on such ambiguous tests. Current classification models differ in their predictions concerning the use of base-rate information. For example, most prototype models imply an insensitivity to base-rate information, whereas many exemplar-based classification models predict appropriate use of base-rate information. The results reveal a consistent but complex pattern. Depending on the category structure and the nature of the ambiguous tests, participants use base-rate information appropriately, ignore base-rate information, or use base-rate information inappropriately (predict that the rare disease is more likely to be present). To our knowledge, no current categorization model predicts this pattern of results. To account for these results, a new model is described incorporating the ideas of property or symptom competition and context-sensitive retrieval.