Autonomic learning

Academic achievement was resolved into its intellectual and motivational components. IQ, personality variables, and parameters of operant and classical conditioning of autonomic nervous system controlled variables were examined in 99 black inner-city high school seniors. Six physiological variables(respiration, heart rate, finger plethysmogram, frontalis muscle potential, palmar skin conductance, and palmar skin potential) were analyzed by computer using analog-to-digital conversion and a Points of Interest (PI) program. Psychological measures were full WAIS IQ, Edwards Personality Inventory(EPI), Cattell Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire(16PF), McClelland need Achievement test(n Ach), Object Sorting test, Minnesota Counseling Inventory(MCI), Level of Aspiration Board, and Rotter—Miller Locus of Control. Achievement(Ach) was defined as the residuals of total grade point average(GPA) regressed on IQ. Each of 19 variables which discriminated significantly between high and low achievers was employed in step-wise regression analyses for GPA and Ach separately. In a regression analysis of variance of GPA, IQ=20.44%, EPI=9.08%, and physiological measures =21.37%(operant conditioning =18.70%; classical conditioning =2.67%). Combined measures of motivation(psychological and physiological) =30.45% of the variance in GPA. The entire psychological and physiological test battery, including IQ, contributed a total of 50.89% of the variance in GPA. In a regression analysis of variance in achievement, psychological measures, other than IQ(six EPI and one 16PF), =11.0% and physiological measures =30.3%. As a replication, this study demonstrated significant correlation between autonomic conditioning and school achievement.     

Attribution of behavioral intentions to obese and normal-weight stimulus persons

This study examines the relationship between the attribution of traits and the attribution of short-term, situation-specific intentions and probable behaviors, with particular reference to the perception of obese persons. College students performed one of four tasks: (1) Rating photographs of obese and normal-weight female faces for likeability and attractiveness; (2) attributing short-term intentions and probable behaviors to these stimulus persons within the context of briefly described social interactions; (3) judging the situationally determined demand characteristics of the intentions and probable behaviors; or (4) judging the ‘meaning’ of the intentions or behaviors in terms of trait scales. The results demonstrate that although the obese faces were consistently rated significantly less likeable and less attractive than the normal-weight faces, these judgments were paralleled by only a few differences in the situation-specific intentions or behaviors attributed to the two groups of stimulus faces. It is suggested that impression-formation measured in terms of global, dispositional characteristics such as traits cannot be assumed to directly predict many differences in behavioral expectations in specific interpersonal settings. On the basis of the few attributions of intention which did discriminate, an ‘obese personality’ stereotype emerged, consisting either of socially undesirable traits or traits of ambiguous social desirability. The implications of the relationships among traits, intentions and situational demand characteristics for an interactive model of situational vs. personality determinants of expected behavior are discussed.     

Failure of selective attention to phonetic segments in consonant-vowel syllables

Subjects performed a two-choice speeded classification task that required selective attention to either the consonant or the vowel in synthetic consonant-vowel (CV) syllables. When required to attend selectively to the consonant, subjects could not ignore irrelevant variation in the vowel. Similarly, when required to attend selectively to the vowel, they could not ignore irrelevant variation in the consonant. These results suggest that information about an initial stop consonant and the following vowel is processed as an integral unit.     

Improving visual acuity in a myopic child: Assessing compliance and effectiveness

Improvements in visual acuity following vision training were evaluated for an 11$\text{1}\text{2}$-yr-old myopic male. Initial increases in the distance at which the S could discriminate letters were found. However, performance began to deteriorate as training progressed. A negative-reinforcement procedure was employed in order to rule out motivational factors potentially related to this decreased performance. Using a changing criterion within an ABCBC reversal design, the distance at which the S correctly discriminated letters increased by more than $\text{4}\text{1}\text{2}$ times and was clearly related to the reinforcement procedure.     

Philosophical conceptions of rationality and psychiatric notions of competency

Psychiatrists are frequently called upon to make assessments of the rationality or irrationality of persons for a variety of medical-legal purposes. A key category is that of evaluations of a patient's capacity to grant informed consent for a medical procedure. A diagnosis of mental illness is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a finding of incompetence. The notion of competency to grant consent, which is a mixed psychiatric-legal concept, shares some features with philosophical conceptions of rationality, but differs from them in a number of important respects. This article describes the actual practice of psychiatrists when making such judgments, along with the standards of competency they employ. A comparison is made between those notions of competency and predominant philosophical conceptions of rationality.     

Writing nonwords to dictation

Two experiments show that the spelling of a nonword that is heard (i.e., /prein/) is influenced by the spelling of a word that is heard earlier (i.e., “brain” > prain and “crane” > prane). This is a robust effect and inspection of the pattern of results suggests that, under these conditions, both words and nonwords are lexically analyzed. A patient with an aquired reading disorder characterized as surface dyslexia was unaffected by such lexical influences in his spelling of nonwords. Moreover, his spelling suggested a defective ability to generate phonemically acceptable spellings of nonwords. Taken together with other reports of neurologically caused spelling impairments these results suggest that skill at assigning letters to sounds never becomes independent of lexical skill in adult readers. An analogical, lexically based parsing system for the reading and spelling of new (nonwords, as suggested by Marcel (1980) appears to be the best fit to these data.     

Learning deficits and activity changes: A partial laboratory model in postencephalitic rats for studies of brain damage

Rats ranging from 8–21 days of age were inoculated in the right cerebral hemisphere with St Louis encephalitis virus, Japanese B encephalitis virus, Murray Valley encephalitis virus. Mumps virus however, was injected at age one day. When very young rats were injected with these viral preparations, fatal encephalitis usually developed. Rats injected at ages of more than two weeks showed little or no clinical signs of infection. When inoculated at ages between these extremes, clinical disease developed in most rats but many survived. Physically most of these surviving animals appeared to be normal, but when tested at maturity in a rather complex maze, they showed a marked reduction in learning ability. Tilting-cage-type activity measurements taken overnight with the Murray Valley encephalitis group also indicated that most of the postinfectious rats were hyperactive. These data imply that such a laboratory model might be related to similar hyperactivity and learning disabilities seen in certain types of minimally brain damaged children. A viral-sex interaction often seen in earlier studies is also noted in our animals injected at younger ages.     

The frequency principle for comparative judgments)

This experiment supplements a recetlf study of the effects of an interpolated weight upon memory for a standard (Parducci, Marshall, & Degner, 1966). The earlier data suggested that the stimulus-averaging approach as represented by the theory of adaptation level should be modified to incorporate the principle that Ss use alternative categories with equal frequency. The present data support this modification by demonstrating that even when the stimulus mean is held constant, judgments are affected by the relative frequencies of the comparison stimuli.