Comparability, reliability, and practice effects on alternate forms of the Digit Symbol Substitution and Symbol Digit Modalities tests

The present study examined the comparability of 4 alternate forms of the Digit Symbol Substitution test and the Symbol Digit Modalities (written) test, including the original versions. Male contact-sport athletes (N = 112) were assessed on 1 of the 4 forms of each test. Reasonable alternate form comparability was demonstrated through establishing normality of form distributions and conducting pairwise form comparisons of means, variability, and intraclass correlations. Nonetheless, alternate forms are likely an insufficient means of controlling practice in speeded measures at brief (1-2 weeks) retest intervals. Reliable change indices demonstrated that practice must be accounted for in individual retesting.     

Stimulus control in fixed ratio matching-to-sample

Pigeons were maintained on a fixed ratio (FR 9) schedule of reinforcement for correct matching-to-sample responses. Included in the test situation was a vertical array of lights, illuminated in relation to the successive steps of the fixed ratio. All five subjects showed regular decrements in matching errors across the sequence of unreinforced responses within the ratio cycle. In the form of a randomly introduced probe, the stimulus situation (array of lights) appropriate to having seven of the FR 9 steps already completed was occasionally introduced at the beginning of an FR cycle. Reinforcement followed the illumination of the two remaining lights by two correct matches. The number of errors in this probe condition was sharply lower than the errors characteristic of the first two steps of the basic FR 9.     

Improving Treatment Plan Implementation in Schools: A Meta-analysis of Single Subject Design Studies

Twenty-nine peer-reviewed journal articles that analyzed intervention implementation in schools using single-case experimental designs were meta-analyzed. These studies reported 171 separate data paths and provided 3,991 data points. The meta-analysis was accomplished by fitting data extracted from graphs in mixed linear growth models. This analytic approach was adopted to provide a model whose assumptions were met and could model both level and trend. The extent to which interventions were implemented as planned in baseline was low with a downward trend. Performance feedback, performance feedback augmented with additional procedures, and self-monitoring with environmental supports were found to be highly effective for improving intervention implementation. Follow-up meetings without review of implementation data were ineffective. Maintenance data were positive across studies. Implications of the results for future research and practice are discussed.     

Political Psychology: Submissions,Acceptances, Downloads,and Citations

Political Psychology has experienced a marked increase in the number of submissions, downloads, citations, and global exposure over the past few years. It is also a more influential journal than it was at the beginning of the decade. Specifically, the journal is now available in more than 4,200 libraries worldwide, compared with 2,200 five years ago; the number of downloads has recently increased to more than 620,000(!), compared with about 100,000 five years ago; the number of new submissions has increased drastically over the past five years to more than 300 per year; and the impact factor has risen to 1.771—the highest in the history of the journal. In 2014 alone, more than 40 articles published in the journal have been downloaded more than 500 times each. In this article, we analyze submissions to Political Psychology, acceptances, downloads, and citations by area of study and methodology.     

How Working With a Helpful Versus Less Helpful Confederate Influences Joint-Action in a Pegboard Task

Actors change their movement strategies to complement a coactor's movements when performing cooperative tasks. To further investigate this topic, the authors designed a pegboard task whereby a participant-confederate pair worked together to move a peg from one side of the board to the other. The authors examined how the experience of working with a helpful confederate versus less helpful confederate influenced the participant's movement behavior. Results provide evidence that participants change their movement behaviors in response to the actions of the confederate. Here the human capacity to act in such a manner exemplifies an individual's ability to utilize his or her own action system to understand others and interact to complete joint action tasks. Individuals appear to adapt their behavior to their experiences, and thus may be helpful in some contexts and less helpful in others.     

The distributional structure of grammatical categories in speech to young children

We present a series of three analyses of young children's linguistic input to determine the distributional information it could plausibly offer to the process of grammatical category learning. Each analysis was conducted on four separate corpora from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000) of speech directed to children under 2;5. We showthat, in accord with other findings, a distributional analysis which categorizeswords based on their co‐occurrence patterns with surroundingwords successfully categorizes the majority of nouns and verbs. In Analyses 2 and 3, we attempt to make our analyses more closely relevant to natural language acquisition by adopting more realistic assumptions about howyoung children represent their input. In Analysis 2, we limit the distributional context by imposing phrase structure boundaries, and find that categorization improves even beyond that obtained from less limited contexts. In Analysis 3, we reduce the representation of input elements which young children might not fully process and we find that categorization is not adversely affected: Although noun categorization is worse than in Analyses 1 and 2, it is still good; and verb categorization actually improves. Overall, successful categorization of nouns and verbs is maintained across all analyses. These results provide promising support for theories of grammatical category formation involving distributional analysis, as long as these analyses are combined with appropriate assumptions about the child learner's computational biases and capabilities.