Leaving patches: Effects of travel requirements

Five pigeons were trained in an analogue foraging procedure in which, by completing a travel requirement, they entered a “patch” in which a reinforcer might be available after an unpredictable time. They also had the opportunity, by emitting a defined response, to exit the patch and travel to another patch. Prey availability in a patch was not signaled. Data were collected on the length of time that subjects stayed in patches before exiting (residence times) as a function of various travel requirements: travel for a fixed time in blackout, fixed-interval schedule traveling, fixed-time traveling with an added response required to terminate traveling, and fixed-ratio traveling. For each of these conditions, the required amount of travel (time or responses) was varied over a wide range. As previously reported, residence times increased with increases in fixed-time traveling, as they did with increasing fixed-interval or fixed-ratio traveling. There was no evidence that adding response or work requirements systematically affected residence time except via increased travel time, although 3 of the 5 birds stayed longer in a patch under higher fixed-ratio values. A “threshold-maximization” model described the data well with a single parameter that was consistent across subjects, procedures, and experiments.     

The Relations of Regulation and Emotionality to Children's Situational Empathy-Related Responding

The relations of dispositional regulation (attentional control, ego control), ego resiliency, and emotionality (general emotional intensity and negative emotionality) to situational measures of sympathy and personal distress were examined. Situational sympathy and personal distress were assessed with facial, self-reported, and heart rate reactions to an empathy-inducing film. Teachers and parents completed measures of children's dispositional regulation and emotionality. In general, children who evidenced sympathy (e.g., facial sadness, mean heart rate decline, and self-reported sympathy) were rated higher in regulation and resiliency, although findings sometimes were obtained for only one sex. Children who evidenced personal distress (e.g., facial distress), as well as facial sadness, were rated relatively high in emotionality. Gaze aversion from the film was correlated with regulation and boys' resiliency, and was negatively related to negative emotionality.     

Cover, Copy, and Compare: A Self-Managed Academic Intervention Effective Across Skills, Students, and Settings

Cover, Copy, and Compare (CCC) is a simple, efficient, self-managed academic intervention that can be used to improve accuracy, fluency, and maintenance across students, curricula objectives, academic skill domains, and settings. In it's simplest form CCC requires students to look at an academic stimulus (e.g., for spelling the stimulus would be a written a word) cover the stimulus, respond by copying the stimulus (e.g., writing the word), and evaluate the responses by comparing it to the original stimulus. The CCC procedure and research that supports the generalizability and ecological validity of this procedure is described and analyzed. Following this analysis, recommendations for implementing Cover, Copy, and Compare in educational settings are provided.     

Structural Model of Coping,Appraisals, and Emotions After Relationship Breakup

The relationship of coping resources and cognitive appraisals to emotions produced by the end of a romantic relationship at 2 separate times was investigated. Participants were 231 graduate students who completed inventories measuring their coping resources, cognitive appraisals, and emotional reactions. The results of the structural model suggested that preventive coping resources affected the appraised desirability of the event as well as initial emotional reactions and that combative coping resources affected subsequent emotional response. The implications of these findings for stress models of emotions and clinical interventions are discussed.     

Delayed signal detection, differential reinforcement, and short-term memory in the pigeon.

In two discrete-trial delayed-detection experiments, six pigeons were trained on dependent concurrent variable-interval schedules. Pecking a red side key was reinforced when the brighter of two white lights (S1) had been presented on the center key, and pecking a green side key was reinforced when the duller of two white lights (S2) had been presented on the center key. Incorrect responses were red side-key pecks following S2 presentations and green side-key pecks following S1 presentations; these resulted in three-second blackouts. In Experiment 1, the time between presentation of S1 or S2 on the center key and the onset of the red and green side keys was varied nonsystematically from 0.06 seconds to 19.69 seconds across experimental conditions. Stimulus discriminability decreased as the stimulus-choice delay increased. A rectangular-hyperbolic function better described this decrease in discriminability over time than did a negative-exponential function. In Experiment 2, at each of three stimulus-choice delays (0.06, 3.85, and 10.36 seconds), relative reinforcer frequency for correct responses to the red and green side keys was varied by changing the values of the dependent concurrent variable-interval schedules. The sensitivity of choice to relative reinforcer frequency was independent of the decrease in stimulus discriminability with increasing stimulus-choice delay.     

Discrepancy and nondiscrepancy methods of assessing visual-auditory interaction

Much of our information about interaction among the sensory modalities has come from studies in which discrepancy between the modalities has been imposed experimentally. The question arises whether the conclusions generated from discrepancy research are affected by the use of the nonnatural experimental situation: Would the same conclusions be reached if discrepancy were not used? In addition to using the index of interaction derived from discrepancy, as in prior research, the present study assessed two nonexperimentally imposed indices to explore the interaction between vision and audition in a spatial localization task. The additional indices, or “tags,” were standard deviations (SDs) and confidence ratings (CRs) of localization responses. The SD tag showed a pattern of interaction between vision and audition that was identical to that found with spatial discrepancy. The CR tag produced a similar pattern but did not show the same regular variation with the independent variable. Both SD and CR tags showed identical patterns of results when an experimentally imposed discrepancy was and was not used, suggesting that the use of moderate degrees of experimental discrepancy does not produce misleading conclusions about intersensory interaction.     

The role of visual-auditory “compellingness” in the ventriloquism effect: Implications for transitivity among the spatial senses

A magnitude estimation response procedure was used to evaluate the strength of visualauditory intersensory bias effects under conditions of spatial discrepancy. Maj or variables were the cognitive compellingness of the stimulus situation and instructions as to the unity or duality of the perceptual event. With a highly compelling stimulus situation and single-event instructions, subjects showed a very high visual bias of audition, a significant auditory bias of vision, and a sum of bias effects that indicated that their perception was fully consonant with the assumption of a single perceptual event. This finding reopens the possibility that the spatial modalities function as a transitive system, an outcome that Pick, Warren, and Hay (1969) had expected but did not obtain. Furthermore, the results support the model for intersensory interaction proposed by Welch and Warren (1980) with respect to the susceptibility of intersensory bias effects to several independent variables. Finally, a new means of assessing intersensory bias effects by the use of spatial separation threshold was demonstrated.