Pictorial interference with geometric shapes and achromatic shades

In two experiments, subjects were required to match printed names with subsequently displayed achromatic shades or geoinetric shapes. The presence of incongruent shades or shapes at the time of word display substantially slowed the RT for performing the match. This pictorial interference (interference due to a visual, nonlingalistic attributel was substantially attenuated, however, as the delay between the word display and shapes or shades to be matched was increased beyond 100 msec. These findings illnstrate the occurrence of a transitory automatic pathway activation from an irrelevant pictorial attribute, which may be contrasted with the verbal interference effects typically observed in Stroop-naming tasks. In both our tasks and the Stroop task, selectiwe attention fails when a stimulus must be transformed to another form of encoding in the presence of a competing stimulns which is already close to that form.     

MODIFICATION OF THE EXCESSIVE INAPPROPRIATE CLASSROOM BEHAVIOR OF TWO ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENTS USING HOME-BASED CONSEQUENCES AND DAILY REPORT-CARD PROCEDURES1

Two experiments investigated home-based reinforcement contingencies to control excessive behavior in normal classrooms. Subjects were, respectively, a 12-yr-old fifth-grade boy and a 9-yr-old fourth-grade boy, each in a separate classroom and with a different teacher. Following baseline observations in which observers recorded several categories of student behavior and teacher-student interaction, separate conferences were held including parents of the two children, the principal, teachers, and experimenters. A daily report-card procedure was agreed on, stipulating a one-day suspension from school following three successive “undesirable” daily report cards as well as the supervision of home-based privileges and other reinforcers usually contingent on satisfactory daily reports. Measurements of daily rates of teacher attention indicated no important change in this variable throughout the various experimental conditions. The daily report procedure significantly reduced disruptive classroom behavior. In a second experiment, a teacher-operated timer cued her own time-sample observations. Reliability measures revealed that the teacher could accurately measure the child's behavior while she was teaching the class. The procedure was ultimately successfully expanded to the teacher's total contact hours each day.     

Positive contrast following gradual and abrupt increases in reward magnitude using delay of reinforcement

In Experiment 1, rats were given a 1-pellet reward for 48 preshift trials. During a subsequent 20-trial postshift phase, one group was shifted to a 12-pellet reward on Trial 1, a second was shifted on Trial 11, and a third was given 1 more pellet each trial and then 12 pellets for the last 10 trials. The speeds of all three groups increased to a level above that of a control group given a 12-pellet food reward throughout training (positive contrast). In experiment 2, rats were shifted from 1 to 12 pellets either gradually or abruptly following either abbreviated training (9 trials) or extended training (20 trials). One group of control subjects received 12 pellets throughout training. The results revealed a positive contrast effect for gradually shifted subjects following extended training but not following abbreviated training. The abrupt shift procedure produced positive contrast following abbreviated training but only a marginal effect following extended training. These results indicate that, contingent upon the amount of preshift training, either gradual or abrupt reward increases may produce positive contrast.     

Wilhelm Dilthey: Forerunner of humanist social thought

Humanist social thought is as a meadow in the forest of positivist science. Much of this space was cleared by Wilhelm Dilthey, not only through his attack on the fundamental assumptions of positivism, but also through his formulation of a critical method by which the works of free human consciousness could be understood. The first tenet of positivism is that the world is made up of ‘out there’ objectively knowable ‘facts’. Dilthey undercut this notion by asserting that the subject matter of the human studies was not mere facts of nature, but rather objectified expressions of the human mind. The second central assumption of positivism is that these facts are explainable or determined by general causal laws. In contrast, Dilthey asserted that, while we can explain the natural world, human action must be understood through an interpretive rather than a causal logic. In demonstrating and specifically describing such an interpretive procedure, Dilthey provided an epistemological and methodological grounding fur a humanistic science of the person and of the social world. His ideas illuminate the works even of his critics and his influence, though largely unacknowledged, continues to be widespread in all the human studies.     

Auditory contralateral induction: An early stage in binaural processing

Binaural interaction was studied using headphones presenting signals (tones or filtered speech) to one ear and noises of various spectral compositions to the other. Every half-second, the sides receiving the signal and noise were reversed. The noise was always perceived to alternate from side to side, but the signal appeared to be stationary and diffusely localized about the midsaggital plane when the noise contained the spectral components of the signal at appropriate intensity levels. This delateralization of a monaural signal results from a process called “contralateral induction” (CI). Additional observations indicate that CI corresponds to an early stage in binaural interaction which generally escapes notice because of further perceptual processing.