INCREASING EXTENDED CARE FACILITY RESIDENTS' ATTENDANCE AT RECREATIONAL ACTIVITIES WITH CONVENIENT LOCATIONS AND PERSONAL INVITATIONS1

Residents of extended care facilities generally exhibit a low level of attendance at recreational and therapeutic activities. Spatial arrangement of rooms, prompting, snacks, and small prizes have been suggested as factors that affect attendance. The present study examined the effects of an extensive system of prompts and the location of activity areas on the attendance of residents at a variety of activities. Twenty-six subjects were randomly selected from the ambulatory population of the facility. The first time each subject entered the activity room during the first 6 min of an activity session their name was recorded. Reliability measures were taken at 10 sessions, with a 95% mean agreement between observers. The variables examined were the amount of individualization of subjects (experimental group I: names announced versus experimental group 2: names not announced), room location (central or peripheral), use of names in announcements (activity only versus activity and group I names), and mode of announcement (PA system only versus PA system and in-person). A counter-balanced group design with repeated measures was used, with a randomly determined order of application of experimental treatments. An analysis of variance split plot 2.222 (Kirk, R. E. Experimental Design: Procedures for the Behavioral Science. Belmont, Ca.: Brooks-Cole, 1968.) of the level of subject attendance yielded significant main effects for room location, F(1, 24) = 5.47, p < 0.05, and type of announcement, F(1, 24) = 9.10, p < 0.01, and significant interactions for Individualization × Use of Names in Announcements, F(1, 24) = 5.57, p < 0.05, and Room Location × Mode of Announcement, F(1, 24) = 7.90, p < 0.01. The results indicate that using a centrally located room and announcement of resident names increases attendance at a variety of activities. The increased social and environmental interaction generated by activity attendance has potential therapeutic benefits for the residents involved. Furthermore, the kind of information reported here and by others should be taken into consideration by planners of a variety of group living facilities, ranging from nursing homes to residential treatment cottages.     

Future-time gradients for performance in test anxious individuals.

It was assumed that highly anxious individuals should have a negative goal gradient for future performance and that this negative goal gradient should be reduced as the test-anxiety dispositions of the individuals decreased. The results for 392 grade school (6th) students showed, as expected, that (a) the highly anxious individuals (n = 55) tended to decrease the number of problems solved correctly as a future goal (task) approached in time and that (b) the slopes of the negative goal gradients decreased as the test-anxiety dispositions decreased. When number of problems attempted was the measure of performance (c) ther was a tendency for Ss of low anxiety (n = 101) to increase their performance as the goal approached.     

Detection of a deficit in visual discrimination of pattern following lesions of anterior cortex: role of type of motivation.

6 albino rats were trained under appetitive motivation to perform diametrically opposed visual discriminations of pattern via opposite eyes. Small lesions were subsequently placed unilaterally in anterior neocortex. Following a period of post-surgical recovery, subjects were re-trained on the diammetrically opposed discriminations in alternating 10-trial blocks. Every subject made more post-surgical errors on the discrimination mediated by the eye contralateral to the lesion. Since albino rats have virtually complete decussation of the visual system, this indicates selective impairment in mediation of performance of pattern discrimination in the part of the lesioned hemispheres. Thus, findings previously obtained in studies involving aversive motivation are general to appetitively motivated tasks.     

Effects of postresponse visual stimuli on visual discrimination learning in the rhesus monkey

To learn more about the mechanism (or mechanisms) involved with postresponse stimulus processing during discrimination learning, a series of studies was conducted with monkeys to determine why the combined relevant and irrelevant stimuli impair learning more than irrelevant stimuli appearing alone. It was found that: (a) the greater size and complexity of the combination of stimuli were not responsible for the greater deficit, while the presence of the relevant stimuli (S^D and S^Δ) within the stimulus combination apparently was; (b) the more similar the postresponse irrelevant stimuli were to the relevant stimuli the greater the deficit that resulted; and (c) monkeys that had earlier learned to discriminate the relevant and irrelevant features of a combination showed no learning impairment when this same stimulus combination was later presented after the response during a new learning problem. These results were interpreted as evidence that: (1) processes associated with learning a discrimination problem do not end with the execution of a choice response; (2) postresponse stimuli produce greater impairment in discrimination learning when they are distorted versions of the relevant stimuli; and (3) the impairment resulting from postresponse irrelevant stimuli occurs primarily when this misinformation is processed and misperceived as being relevant to learning the discrimination problem.     

Configural conditioning in the CER: Loss of element strength after repeated reinforced compound CS trials

Different groups of rats received different numbers of compound CS (light/noise) conditioning trials in the CER procedure. The amount of suppression evident to the single elements of the compound decreased as a function of the number of previous compound trials. This loss of CR strength was interpreted as a configuring effect. Further experimental comparisons indicated that the configuring effect could not be readily explained in terms of a generalization decrement or a stimulus novelty hypothesis.     

Effects of schedule and magnitude of reinforcement under conditions of thirst motivation

In contrast to a recent finding (Macdonald, G. E., & De Toledo, L. Learning and Motivation, 1974, 5, 288–298.) the results of three experiments investigating various partial reinforcement (PRF) manipulations under conditions of thirst motivation demonstrated strong similarity to analogous manipulations involving food reward. Specifically, for animals receiving water reinforcement, PRF was shown to generate greater resistance to extinction than continuous reinforcement (Expt 1 & 3), the schedule of reinforcement was shown to interact with level of acquisition (Expt 1 and 2), and the magnitude of the partial reinforcement extinction effect was shown to be a function of reward magnitude (Expt 3). These results provide strong evidence that mechanisms which operate in partial reinforcement situations are highly similar, regardless of the type of appetitive reinforcement.     

Processing strategies in sentence comprehension

Response latencies in sentence-picture verification tasks were compared as a function of whether a mismatch was located in the logical subject (LS), verb (V), or logical object (LO) of the sentence. Sentences were presented auditorily and varied in voice and reversibility. The comparison process for nonreversibles was clearly serial self-terminating: latencies for both actives and passives were ordered LS < V < LO, or, after practice with a small number of mismatch types, LS < LO < V. Latencies for reversibles were ordered V < LS = LO, suggesting either a verb-first comparison process or an LS-V-LO comparison process which did not terminate with a subject-mismatch because of the confusability of the subject and object. The results attest to the importance of considering the "naturalness" of stimuli in sentence processing tasks, and the flexibility of subjects' encoding and comparison strategies both within and across task contexts.     

Control-system theory and performance objectives

Behaviorism, the source of the concept of performance objectives, models behavior as an output emitted by an organism. Control theory suggests a different model, in which the stable patterns called behavior are perceptual variables stabilized against disturbances by variations in motor activities. Control theory provides a clear distinction between a learning model and a performance model. Learning is centered around the control of internal variables by means of changes in the organization of performance. Performance is centered around control of perceptual variables, which the experimenter or teacher must learn to share with the subject or student in order to understand what is being performed.     

The effects of stress on state and trait anxiety in emotionally disturbed,normal, and delinquent children

The effects of stress on trait and state anxiety of emotionally disturbed, normal, and delinquent children were assessed using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC). This scale measures both transitory feelings of apprehension and tension that vary over time as a function of situational stress (A-State) and individual differences in the disposition to experience such anxiety states (A-Trait). Results indicated that A-State increased as a function of stress, whereas A-Trait was relatively stable and impervious to the temporary effects of stress. Use of the STAIC with normal and deviant populations was supported.