Investigations of the reinstatement of extinguished fear

In two experiments, fear was conditioned to the situational cues in one compartment of a hurdle-jumping apparatus and was then extinguished. Subsequently, either one shock (Experiment 1) or three or nine shocks (Experiment 2) were given in a situation distinctively different from that in which conditioning and extinction had taken place. Although some associative strength between the situational cues and fear was shown to have remained after extinction, in neither experiment did the postextinction-shock treatment increase the fear elicited by these cues: Escape-from-fear performance was no better in the shocked groups than in control groups given no additional shock. Thus, the nonassociative hypothesis which postulates that inflating the value of the representation of the UCS with shock-alone presentations can reinstate the extinguished fear of a stimulus was not supported. Rather, the results showed that, after extinction, an increase in fear of a simulus depended on further conditioning to that stimulus. The data also indicated that the nonvisual components of the situational cues predominated over the visual component.     

QUESTIONING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF BEHAVIOR MODELING TRAINING IN AN INDUSTRIAL SETTING1

The intention of this study was to improve behavioral modeling's effectiveness by substituting managers for professional trainers and to evaluate the effect on 44 male supervisors using Kirkpatrick's four levels of evaluation: reaction, learning, behavior on the job, and performance. Twenty-two supervisors were trained with six behavior modeling modules and the effect was compared to a control group consisting of 22 supervisors. The research also examined the effects of trainees’ self-esteem and the perceived power of the trainers. The results showed that behavior modeling resulted in favorable reactions and an increase in learning, but did not produce behavior change on the job, or improved performance results. Power and self-esteem did not moderate the training effectiveness. The findings are compared with previous behavior modeling research. The discussion concludes with a recommendation for researchers to identify more complete theoretical models which explain behavioral change on the job (e.g., Maltz's theory of psycho-cybernetics) as opposed to relying solely on Bandura's social learning theory.     

Sensory modalities in depth perception by golden hamsters

Golden hamsters are able to detect differences in the height of a platform from which they jump, as measured by their increasing latencies prior to jumping from increased elevations. This ability is very effective when optical information is available, but it is also present when hamsters jump in total darkness. A second experiment shows that, when hamsters are placed on a real physical cliff, they preferentially use tactile information over visual information to guide their choice of the side from which to descend. In a nonvisual setting, tactile stimulation is used in conjunction with other types of cues. Evidence is provided to suggest that these cues are of an acoustical nature.     

Cognitive, perceptual, and personal-social development of prematurely born preschoolers

This study was designed to determine possible differences in the cognitive, perceptual, and personal-social development of prematurely and maturely born 3-yr.-olds which might foreshadow later learning problems. The subjects were 40 prematurely born graduates of a neonatal intensive care unit (birth weight less than 2,500 gm, less than 37 wk. gestation) matched on the pair-level with full-term controls on sex, race, post-conceptual age, and socioeconomic background. All subjects were singletons and parity was matched at the group level. No differences were found between the groups on tests of higher mental processes including the General Cognitive, Verbal, Quantitative, and Memory Scales of the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities, and researcher-devised measures of problem-solving competence. No differences in parental reports of personal-social development were noted. Prematures did not perform as well as controls on perceptual performance tasks, and this difference was interpreted as reflecting relatively impaired visual-motor coordination.     

Manual performance in the cold with gloves and bare hands

Previous research aimed at quantifying and reducing the decrements encountered in performing manual tasks in cold weather has not described the relationships between task characteristics and cold-induced impairments. The amount of decrement and, often times, the optimal means for reducing the decrement, appear to be task-specific. The research reported here is one in a series of studies formulated to explore those relationships. The strategy is to use tasks from the battery developed by Fleishman (1967) to measure the factorially 'pure' abilities needed to perform all manual tasks. 24 U.S. Marines performed this battery of nine tasks across a range of cold temperatures. To determine if the decrement due to wearing gloves might be less than the decrement due to cold hands as the air temperature decreased, performance on the battery of tasks was measured with and without gloves. Only three of the tasks (abilities) were affected by cold temperatures, and the amount of decrement increased as the air temperature decreased. Three tasks deteriorated due to wearing of gloves, two of those affected by cold and one other. Temperature affected performance independently of the glove effect. Half of the subjects did not complete bare-handed testing at -18 degrees C (approximately 20 min.), indicating this is the lower end of the temperature range in which bare-handed performance for more than a few minutes is practical.     

Discrimination of computer-synthesized speech

The effects of learning on the discrimination of computer-synthesized speech was assessed by presenting 100 computer-produced monosyllabic words to 2 groups of 15 adult subjects. One group's errors were corrected while the other group's errors were uncorrected. A comparison of errors on the first 50 vs the second 50 presentations showed significant improvement for corrected group only. It was concluded that the discrimination of computer-synthesized monosyllables can be improved with correction of errors but is still about 14% poorer than the discrimination of human speech.