Handedness and lateral positioning in heterosexual couples: Are men still strong-arming women?

This study examined the way in which heterosexual couples arrange themselves while walking together. In same-handed couples, significantly more females were on the males' preferred (dominant) side than expected by chance — especially when the partners were touching. Apparently, handedness and lateral positioning combine to reflect a male-dominance tendency in this type of situation. In opposite-handed couples, males and females put their dominant sides together, especially when touching. Social implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are also discussed.     

Conditioned fear and startle magnitude: effects of different footshock or backshock intensities used in training

In Experiment 1 four groups of rats received 30 light-shock pairings using footshock intensities of either .2, .4, .8, or 1.6 mA. One day later all rats were tested for startle by presenting tones in the presence or absence of the light CS. Potentiated startle (the difference between startle on light-tone vs tone-alone trials) was nonmonotonically related to the shock intensity used in training, with the greatest potentiation at intermediate shock levels. Experiment 3 demonstrated a similar relationship when backshocks instead of footshocks were used. In Experiment 2 rats were trained with either a moderate or high shock and then given an extended extinction-test session 1 day later. The moderate-shock group showed a gradual decline in potentiated startle over extinction. The high-shock group showed a nonmonotonic extinction curve where potentiation progressively increased toward the middle of extinction and dissipated thereafter. The results suggest that acoustic startle bears an inverted U-shaped relationship to fear and are discussed in relation to other studies concerned with this issue.     

Linguistic negation in autistic and normal children

Young, severely maladaptive autistic children with some speech competence were compared to normally developing 3-year-old children of lower and middle class and 5-year-olds of lower class on negation tasks. All subjects were shown 12 sets of cards depicting negative contrasts designed to elicit semantic categories of nonexistence, denial, and rejection and were tested for production, imitation, and comprehension. Syntactic and semantic analysis revealed that autistic children were superior imitators and poor producers but showed skills in comprehension comparable to a 4-year-old's level of functioning. While retarded in some functions, the experimental group produced syntactic structures that were more rigid, suggesting the significantly greater use of imitation as a major strategy in linguistic coding.This work was done at the NYU-Bellevue Medical Center with partial support by NIMH Grant No. MH 07331 to R. K.     

An introduction to microcomputer networking concepts

This paper presents a brief history of the use of internal computer networks, an introduction to networking concepts and topology, and suggestions regarding a possible system for use in a psychology laboratory. Considerations about the design and use of a microcomputer network are discussed.     

Ethanol’s influence on the stimulus level required to evoke an orienting response in goldfish

In goldfish the heart rate orienting response to periodic photic stimuli was measured by a specially designed computer that also regulated the intensity of the stimuli to maintain the response. When ethanol was administered, the fish then exhibited orienting responses to less intense stimuli; this increased excitability was maintained for the duration of all tests(i.e., a maximum of 26 hours). There also seemed to be a residual increase of excitability lasting as long as 7 days after the ethanol was administered.     

YEPS: Running real-time experiments on a timesharing system

The Yale experimental programming system is described. This system consists of user-callable subroutines and a set of modifications to the UNIX operating system which support the development and execution of real-time psychology experiments. The interactions between a timesharing operating system and the provision of real-time facilities for experiments are discussed.     

Contour specificity of the McCollough effect

Subjective estimates of McCollough aftereffect strength are significantly reduced when certain spatial features of the line grating patterns are manipulated. Results are dependent upon whether the spatial parameters of the test or inspection patterns are altered. Changing the angular slant, contour sharpness, or contour completeness of the inspection gratings does not affect aftereffect strength, but changing the spatial frequency, contour sharpness, or contour completeness of the test gratings does. The implications of these results are discussed with regard to theories offered to explain the McCollough effect.     

Influencesicture context on object recognition

The effect of sorrounding context on the recognition of objects from briefly presented pictures was investigated. Forty-eight undergraduates saw 100 msec displays of either line drawings containing several objects embedded in context or drawings of object arrays without background context. Following each exposure they were required to select from among four objects the one that had been contained in the picture. Presentation of objects in context aided recognition only when incorrect response alternatives were inconsistent with the picture context. The results suggest that context contributes to the construction of a general characterization of the pictures which provides expectancies regarding the identity of specific objects.     

Maintenance and generalization of a semantic rehearsal strategy in educable mentally retarded children

Two groups of 11- to 12-year-old educable mentally retarded children, equated on the basis of a free recall pretest, were given a series of lists for free recall. Approximately half the subjects were trained in the use of a strategy designed to induce deeper level semantic encoding and the discovery of categorical relationships and half constituted a “no-training” control group with standard free recall instructions. The subjects received either related or unrelated lists during the training phase and related or unrelated lists during two post-tests, immediately following and 1 week after training. There was evidence not only that the semantic strategy was maintained over the 1-week delay, but that it also generalized to word lists unlike those used during training. The degree of generalization was greater for those subjects receiving related lists during training.