On the origin and preservation of cumulative record in its struggle for life as a favored term

This paper offers a case study of the origins, emergence, and evolution of the term cumulative record as the name for the means by which B. F. Skinner brought his behavior under the control of his subject matter. Our methods included on-line searches, reviews of Skinner's publications, and journal codings and counts. The results reveal that the term is not originally attributable to Skinner, but emerged earlier in ordinary language and in another discipline--education. It was not even original to Skinner in print in his own science. Still, the term was once original to him, which we address with additional analyses of his having originated and advanced it. We conclude with a discussion the constraints of our methods, suggestions for future research, and the variable appreciation of technology and terminology in science studies.     

Factors contributing to the utilization of mental health services in a rural setting

The purpose of this study was to examine if age, attitudes toward help-seeking, education, and sex were related to previous or intended future mental health utilization in a rural population. Data were collected via a mail survey from 438 adults. Regression analyses suggested that positive attitudes toward help-seeking, being female, and being younger were significantly related to both previous and intended future mental health service utilization. In addition, prior mental health use was significantly related to whether one would seek out mental health services in the future, Implications for mental health practitioners in rural settings are addressed, and limitations of the study discussed.     

Understanding trust and confidence: two paradigms and their significance for health and social care

Trusting agents characteristically anticipate beneficial outcomes, under conditions of uncertainty, in their engagement with others. However, debates about trust incorporate different interpretations of risk, uncertainty, calculation, affect, morality and motivation in explaining when trust is appropriate and how it operates. This article argues that discussions about trust have produced a concept without coherent boundaries and with little operational value. Two paradigms are identified, which distinguish the characteristics of trust and confidence. It is argued that a reliance on confidence in human affairs makes trust redundant and that this has undesirable moral consequences. Discussion is illustrated by the UK Government's 'modernisation' policy in health and social care, which privileges confidence in systems over trust in moral agents.     

Specific-token effects in screening tasks: possible implications for aviation security

Screeners at airport security checkpoints perform an important categorization task in which they search for threat items in complex x-ray images. But little is known about how the processes of categorization stand up to visual complexity. The authors filled this research gap with screening tasks in which participants searched for members of target categories in visual displays. The authors found that when targets were sampled with replacement and repetition, participant screeners relied on recognizing familiar targets and had great difficulty using category-general knowledge. The authors observed a "heartbeat" in detection performance--it improved while test images repeated but dropped sharply when unfamiliar targets from the same categories appeared. This reliance on familiarity illuminates the processes of categorization under conditions of visual complexity and suggests limits on those processes. This reliance also has implications for the training and evaluation of screeners in the field.     

An implicit test of the associations between children and sex in pedophiles

Pedophiles are motivated to disguise their thoughts and feelings about their sexual beliefs and attraction toward children. New developments using implicit measures of associations have been successful in accessing socially stigmatic beliefs, even in cases in which the participant is resistant to this disclosure. Using an implicit measure, the authors show that pedophiles have an association between children and sex, whereas nonpedophilic offenders have an association between adults and sex. The task can therefore identify a core cognitive abnormality that may underpin some pedophilic deviant sexual behavior.     

Adult age differences in distinctive processing: the modality effect on false recall

Age differences in distinctive processing were investigated by examining the effects of study presentation modality on false recall in younger and older adults using the Deese/Roediger and McDermott paradigm. Participants were presented with study words either visually or auditorily. Older adults did not show the typical reduction in false recall after visual, compared to auditory, study presentation (R.E. Smith & R.R. Hunt, 1998). The authors interpret these results as evidence of reduced distinctive processing on the part of older adults.     

From the lexicon to expectations about kinds: a role for associative learning

In the novel noun generalization task, 2 1/2-year-old children display generalized expectations about how solid and nonsolid things are named, extending names for never-before-encountered solids by shape and for never-before-encountered nonsolids by material. This distinction between solids and nonsolids has been interpreted in terms of an ontological distinction between objects and substances. Nine simulations and behavioral experiments tested the hypothesis that these expectations arise from the correlations characterizing early learned noun categories. In the simulation studies, connectionist networks were trained on noun vocabularies modeled after those of children. These networks formed generalized expectations about solids and nonsolids that match children's performances in the novel noun generalization task in the very different languages of English and Japanese. The simulations also generate new predictions supported by new experiments with children. Implications are discussed in terms of children's development of distinctions between kinds of categories and in terms of the nature of this knowledge.     

Superior performance of blind compared with sighted individuals on bimanual estimations of object size

Five preliminary experiments on sighted individuals revealed marked overestimation on an object size-estimation task using a bimanual response. These experiments ruled out the possibility that overestimation was due to the mode of visual presentation (whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional), the input modality (visual or kinesthetic), or the influence of other visual cues. The main experiment then investigated whether these distortions are due to visual experience by using a variant of the same task to test 24 blind and 24 sighted control participants. Remarkably, the sighted control participants overestimated object size, on average, but the blind participants did not. A follow-up experiment demonstrated that visual memory was the primary influence causing the size over-estimations. We conclude that blind individuals are more accurate than sighted individuals in representing the size of familiar objects because they rely on manual representations, which are less influenced by visual experience than are visual memory representations.     

On the complexity of quantifying construct validity

To validate a measure of a construct is to validate a theory: The process includes theory specification, theory elaboration, choice of methods, choice of research design, reliance on necessary auxiliary theories, and empirical observation. Evaluating the success of the process is likely to be enhanced through quantification. To date, scientists have quantified the final step of empirical observation, but earlier steps in the validation process appear more difficult to measure. In this issue, D. Westen and R. Rosenthal (2005) emphasize that threats to validity are often methodological ones that precede empirical observation. Yet, their earlier attempt to quantify construct validity focused only on the final, empirical observation step of the process. For that reason, it can produce positive results despite real theoretical and methodological threats to validity. Nonetheless, the laudable attempt by these distinguished authors to quantify construct validity reminds us of the complexity of the construct validation process.     

Fragment memories mark the end of childhood amnesia

Adults described and dated two kinds of first remembrances: a personal event memory (the recollection of a personal episode that had occurred at some time in some place) and a memory fragment (an isolated memory moment having no event context and remembered, perhaps, as an image, a behavior, or an emotion). First fragment memories were judged to have originated substantially earlier in life than first event memories--approximately 3 1/3 years of age for first fragment memories versus roughly 4 years of age for first event memories. We conclude that the end of childhood amnesia is marked not by our earliest episodic memories, but by the earliest remembered fragments of childhood experiences.