Increasing Career Center Accessibility for the Blind

To improve career planning services for visually impaired persons, the career center at Florida State University developed a self-directed program. This article describes strategies for making career information materials and resources more accessible to the blind.     

SELF-STIMULATION AND LEARNING IN AUTISTIC CHILDREN: PHYSICAL OR FUNCTIONAL INCOMPATIBILITY?1

This study investigated whether an observed inverse relationship between self-stimulation and learning in autistic children is due to a physical inability of the subject to use the same body part for self-stimulation and task responding, or whether self-stimulation “distracts” the subject from task responding. Four actively self-stimulating autistic children were taught two discrimination tasks; one required a response that physically interferred with their self-stimulation; the other did not. Results were: (a) all subjects responded similarly across both tasks; (b) the three subjects with higher mental age scores learned both tasks without external suppression of self-stimulation; and (c) none of the subjects showed an inverse relationship between self-stimulation and learning. The study demonstrated that elimination of self-stimulation is not a necessary prerequisite for the acquisition of a new behavior in all autistic children.     

The effects of attention-directing training on recognition memory task performance of three-year-old children

Thirty-eight 3-year-old children served as subjects in an investigation of recognition memory in which schematic faces differing only in the orientation of the eyes were employed as stimuli. A pretest was administered to all children, after which the two experimental groups received training in either attention to the distinctive feature of the training stimuli (also schematic faces) by means of a matching task, or in labeling the faces according to how they looked (sleepy, happy, sad, mad) and in using the labels to perform a matching task. After the training session all children were given a posttest on recognition memory of the faces. The verbally trained group obtained significantly higher scores on the posttest than either the feature or control groups. These results indicate that although the children were able to discriminate the faces, evidenced in their ease of performance on the training tasks, they were not able to use this knowledge unless given training in attaching labels to the stimuli, which enabled them to store the information for later use. Results are discussed in light of Gibson's (1969) theory of the developmental interrelations of cognitive processes.     

Parental Visitation of the Institutionalized Retarded

An inverse relationship was found between the number of parental visits an institutionalized retarded child received and the distance of the parental home from the institution. When the natural parents were living together, the retarded child was shown to receive more visits than when the child's parents were separated or one parent was deceased. Single mothers were found to be living significantly closer to the facility than single fathers. Single fathers appeared to put more effort into visiting, since they visited just as often as the mothers, but had to travel further distances than the mothers to do so. Visitation frequency followed a curvilinear pattern, decreasing uniformly from 20–60 miles (from 0–20 miles visitation frequency is uniform), and then leveling off.     

The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes

Evidence from four studies demonstrates that social observers tend to perceive a “false consensus” with respect to the relative commonness of their own responses. A related bias was shown to exist in the observers' social inferences. Thus, raters estimated particular responses to be relatively common and relatively unrevealing concerning the actors' distinguishing personal dispositions when the responses in question were similar to the raters' own responses; responses differing from those of the rater, by contrast, were perceived to be relatively uncommon and revealing of the actor. These results were obtained both in questionnaire studies presenting subjects with hypothetical situations and choices and in authentic conflict situations. The implications of these findings for our understanding of social perception phenomena and for our analysis of the divergent perceptions of actors and observers are discussed. Finally, cognitive and perceptual mechanisms are proposed which might account for distortions in perceived consensus and for corresponding biases in social inference and attributional processes.     

The nature of control by spoken words over visual stimulus selection.

Eight retarded adolescents were trained to select one (a trained S+) of two visual stimuli in response to a spoken word (a trained word). Two different visual stimuli alternated randomly as the S-. To determine if the spoken work was merely a temporal discriminative stimulus for when to respond, or if it also specified which visual stimulus to select, the subjects were given intermittent presentations of untrained (novel) spoken words. All subjects consistently selected the trained S+ in response to the trained spoken word and selected the previous S- in response to the untrained spoken words. It was hypothesized that the subjects were responding away from the trained S+ in response to untrained spoken words, and control by untrained spoken words would not be observed when the trained S+ was not present. The two visual S- stimuli selected on trials of untrained spoken words were presented simultaneously. The untrained spoken words presented on these trials no longer controlled stimulus selections for seven subjects. The results supported the hypothesis that previous control by spoken words was due to responding away from the trained S+ in response to untrained spoken words.     

A digital encoder for field recording of behavioral,temporal, and spatial information in directly computer-accessible form

Digitorg is an inexpensive, portable, field-operable event recorder for recording both behavioral and spatial information in real-time on audiotape. Its capacity is 256 codes. Behavioral information is recorded by pressing buttons on a keyboard and spatial information is recorded by touching a magnetic wand to a paper map overlying a matrix of switches. The audiotape recordings are played through a simple interface into a small computer, producing a permanent record of the time and identity of each event. The record is then available for analysis. Digitorg is discussed in relation to the general value of analyzing spatially differentiated behavior sequences.     

The perception of stop consonant voicing by Spanish-English bilinguals

The performance of Spanish-English bilinguals in two perception tasks, using a synthetic speech continuum varying in voice onset time, was compared with the performance of Spanish and English monolinguals. Voice onset time in speech production was also compared between these groups. Results in perception of bilinguals differed from that of both monolingual groups. Results of bilingual production in their two languages conformed with results obtained from each monolingual group. The perceptual results are interpreted in terms of differences in the use of available acoustic cues by bilingual and monolingual listeners of English and Spanish.