Three intensive community-based programs for children and youth with serious emotional disturbance and their families

Systems of care for children with serious emotional disturbance and their families have generally lacked intensive community-based programs. We describe three types of newly established community-based programs in New York State and present a general evaluation plan for determining which programs work for various children and their families. The three community-based programs are Intensive Case Management, Family-Based Treatment, and Family-Centered Intensive Case Management. Process and outcome evaluations are being conducted for each of these programs. These evaluations make use of common intake and termination instruments, based on a minimum data set, standardized assessment instruments, and a common logic model, thus facilitating the comparison of findings across evaluations.     

Brief report: An extension of the sequential alternating treatment design using reversals with subjects not available concurrently

This brief report proposes an extension of the traditional Alternating Treatments Design that would be acceptable to use in hospital and residential settings where subjects are often not concurrently available. Concerns about the inability of traditional designs to work in these special situations and the emergence of a “scientist–practitioner split” are discussed. An example of how the Extended Alternating Treatments Design might be used is provided.     

Multilevel models in developmental psychological research: Rationales and applications

The armoury of statistical techniques has recently been enhanced with the multilevel model for longitudinal data. The present article explains the multilevel model for longitudinal data to the statistically non-sophisticated reader. It shows how the model relates to the five rationales of longitudinal research, as they were put forward by Baltes and Nesselroade (1979). In addition, it shows how the model matches Wohlwill's methodology of developmental functions. To elucidate the model further, three applications are given. The applications pertain to the development of children's sleeping duration during the first 18 months of life, the effects of early hospitalization on the daily frequency of crying, and the developmental relationship between social and solitary play.     

Technologies to reliably transduce the topographical details of pigeons’ pecks

Pigeons’ pecking has long been a subject of interest in behavioral research, with the response typically being viewed as unitary. Recent experiments done with computer-controlled devices have revealed that this response is at least bipartite in character, with beak opening and response location (head transport) as its components. In addition, experimental work has demonstrated that these response components may be separately influenced and controlled by respondent and operant conditioning procedures. The detailed topographic analysis and technology that have emerged may provide a background for similar work with other behavioral systems.     

Data generation and analysis using spreadsheets

Modern spreadsheets are powerful and useful tools that can often replace special-purpose programs for generating data and for student analysis of simple statistical problems. The inherent flexibility of spreadsheets makes them especially convenient and extensible. Several templates for generating and analyzing data fort tests and analysis of variance are discussed. Users can specify then, \(\bar X\) , andSD of two or more groups and then execute macros that generate appropriate data. Overwriting the generated data with “real” values turns the spreadsheet into a data analysis program. Spreadsheets hold promise as valuable instructional supplements for simple designs, but they are less suitable for more complex designs, where special-purpose programs may be more appropriate.     

Shaw’s stored information as a quantitative measure of sequential structure

In this paper, we describe a method to study the sequential structure in interevent times. The technique uses the stored information of an iterative map developed by-Shaw (1984). The stored information is a quantitative measure of the sequential organization or predictability in data. This paper discusses the concept of stored information and provides a FORTRAN routineto compute the stored information of interevent time data. Several synthetic data sets with known sequential structures are examined. Finally, we present some initial results from computing the stored information of experimental interresponse time data.     

Oculomotor readiness and covert orienting: Differences between central and peripheral precues

The costs produced by invalid precues can depend on the spatial relationship between the cued location and the target location. If oculomotor programs mediate attention shifts, then the effect of varying the spatial relation between the cue and target should be the same for covert orienting (indexed by manual responses) and saccadic responses. We found this to be true only for central precues. With central precues, both manual and saccadic costs were greater when cue and target occurred on opposite sides of the vertical meridian than when they occurred on the same side. With peripheral precues, there were no meridian effects in either response condition, but there was a significant dissociation in the pattern of saccadic and manual costs. For manual responses costs were greater when the target was eccentric relative to the cue, whereas for saccades costs were greater when the cue was eccentric to the target. These results provide additional support for the idea that different orienting mechanisms are engaged by central and peripheral precues. They further suggest that the relationship between oculomotor and attentional orienting may depend on the nature of the precue, with the potential for interdependence being greater with central precues.     

The linkage between stimulus frequency and covert peak areas as it relates to monaural localization

Head-related transfer functions for differently centered narrow noise bands were obtained on 6 subjects. Derived from these measurements were covert peak areas (CPAs), defined as the spatial constellation of loudspeakers that generates maximal sound pressure at the entrance of the ear canal for specific bands of frequency. On the basis of previous data, we proposed that different frequency bands served as important spectral cues for monaural localization of sounds from different loci and that location judgments were directed toward the CPAs associated with the different bands. In the first study, the stimuli were bandpass filtered so that they contained only those frequencies whose associated CPAs occupied either the monaural listener’s “upper” or “lower” spatial regions. Loudspeakers, separated by 15°, were stationed in the left hemifield, ranging from 0° to 180° azimuth and ?45° to 60° elevation. Subjects reported the loudspeaker from which the sound appeared to originate. Judgments of the sound’s elevation were in general accord with the CPAs associated with the different frequency segments. In the second study, monaural localization tests were administered in which different 2.0-kHz-wide frequency bands linked with specific CPAs were notch filtered from a 3.5-kHz highpass noise band. For the control condition, the highpass noise was unfiltered. The data demonstrated that filtering a frequency segment linked with specific CPAs resulted in significantly fewer location responses directed toward that particular spatial region. These results demonstrate in greater detail the relation between the directional filtering properties of the pinna and monaural localization of sound.     

Primacy of dimensions in vibrotactile perception: An evaluation of early holistic models

Early holistic models of perception presume that stimuli composed of interacting dimensions can be experienced initially as undifferentiated. This view, formalized through recourse to a Euclidean geometry of perceptual space, predicts that the orientation of axes used to create stimulus sets is unimportant to performance in speeded classification. We tested this idea by using the interacting vibrotactile dimensions of pitch and loudness. Despite perceivers’ relatively poor experience with these dimensions, we showed that the orientation corresponding to pitch and loudness was unique in vibrotactile perceptual space; subjects classified stimuli more efficiently at this orientation than at other orientations. Certain holistic models also claim that when stimulus differences are small, perceivers can recognize change without distinguishing the kind of change. We tested this idea by using a signal detection analysis of unspeededsame—different decisions. We found that subjects’ ability to notice the kind of change equaled their ability to notice the change alone. In view of these results, which indicate that pitch and loudness are primary in vibrotactile perception, we detail a new conception of dimensional interaction.     

Three-space inference from two-space stimulation

Oblique contours sloping at 30° with respect to the horizontal were presented alone, in combination to form chevrons, or with a vertical line to form arrowhead or Y patterns; they were projected onto a screen in the frontal parallel plane and viewed from positions that gave viewing angles of 90° (normal to the screen’s surface), 53°, or 34°. The perceived orientation of the contours, as assessed by a movable arm that the subjects set to be parallel to the obliques, changed monotonically as a function of viewing angle. The change was as great for single obliques as for combinations of obliques within the chevron, arrowhead, and Y patterns. The results of Experiment 1 were extended in Experiment 2, in which obliques at 30° and 50° with respect to the horizontal were presented singly or in combination as chevron patterns. It is argued that the results of both experiments indicate that single two-space oblique lines are immediately interpreted as lying in three-space and that the changes in perceived orientation are a consequence of this perceptual inference.