The influence of positive and negative reinforcement on selective attention in the rat

In Experiments 1 and 2 rats were trained under two multiple schedules of reinforcement. In one, bar pressing during a tone-light compound stimulus was reinforced under a variable-interval food reinforcement schedule. In the other multiple schedule, bar pressing avoided grid shock on a free-operant schedule. In both multiple schedules, a discrimination was maintained by an extinction schedule that was operative during the absence of the tone-light compound. In Experiments 1 and 2 the intensity of the tone-light compound was manipulated over three levels. Subsequent extinction tests revealed that light was attended to, almost exclusively of the tone, when food reinforcement had maintained bar pressing. On the other hand, the tone gained considerable attentional control under the shock avoidance schedule. This stimulus-reinforcer interaction was maintained for all three levels of the compound intensity. In Experiment 3 it was investigated whether this interaction was associative by presenting shock during the absence of the tone-light compound when food reinforcement maintained responding, and food during the absence of the compound when shock avoidance maintained responding. Since both food and shock were presented during a single session for both schedules, nonassociative effects of the reinforcing stimuli were equivalent across the schedules. Nevertheless, the stimulus-reinforcer interaction was maintained, indicating that the interaction was an associative effect.     

The shifting salience of valence and instrumentality in the prediction of perceived effort,satisfaction and turnover

The role of valence and instrumentality was examined in predicting three work-related criteria in a military setting: satisfaction, perceived effort, and turnover. A total of 323 enlisted men responded to desirability and instrumentality scales for each of four categories of performance outcomes: extrinsic rewards, personal fulfillment, recognition, and autonomy. Multiple regression analyses indicated that the different outcome types varied substantially in their relationship to the criteria, ranging from strongly positive to no relationship to strongly negative. Furthermore, the salience of valences and instrumentalities changed as a function of the criterion being predicted in a manner not deducible from current expectancy-valence models. Several implications of the results were discussed in terms of assumptions underlying general expectancy-valence approaches to motivation.This research was supported in part by Grant DAHC19-77-G0017 to New York University (Samuel Shiflett, principal investigator) from the Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences. This work was conducted while the authors were members of the Army Research Institute. The interpretations and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of the Department of the Army or the Department of Defense. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance of John Turney at various stages of the project.     

Self-image formation in adopted children: The environment within

Adoption of a child is an event in which a number of crises have converged. Both the biologic and adoptive families have contributed their failures and crises, and the subsequent interpretations of these by the adopted child can lead to polarized themes of goodness and badness. The absence of the biologic parents and of a coherent history reinforces the tendency to splitting. This paper explores these operations and raises questions about prevailing adoption practices.Paper presented at Spence-Chapin Symposium on Identity Problems of Children in Non-Nuclear Families, April 11, 1981.     

The relationship between sighting dominance and the fading of a stabilized retinal image

The fading of a stabilized retinal image in the sighting and the nonsighting dominant eye was studied using the Haidinger’s brush target. Reaction time to the complete disappearance of the stabilized image was significantly longer when the target was input to the sighting eye. The greater persistence of stabilized targets in the sighting eye suggests possible differences in the neural channels from the two eyes or processing differences in the two monocular channels that are related behaviorally to eye dominance.     

A truth-conditional formulation of Karttunen's account of presupposition

Karttunen's seminal 1973 article Presuppositions of compound sentences, lays the groundwork for the elegant and fruitful theory of this subject which he subsequently presented in (1974). In (1973, pp. 185–8), however, he fallaciously argued that the regularities he discovered concerning the behavior of and, or, and if ... then in English cannot be embodied in any three-valued logic giving a truth-functional interpretation to these connectives. The present paper refutes Karttunen's argument by exhibiting an interpretation with the desired properties, and shows further how the full articulation of his 1974 system can be developed naturally within a truth-conditional semantics for English if bivalence is abandoned — contrary to what Karttunen expected.     

Some effects of positive life events on community mental health

Measures of positive and negative events were derived from a life-event inventory to test the predictions of an equilibrium model and a positive mental health model of psychological well-being. These measures were related to indicators of individual and community well-being with data obtained through a household survey of 454 residents. Residents who reported more negative events also reported more psychological distress and less positive adjustment. Positive events were associated with reports of positive adjustment. An analysis of census tract scores on life events revealed that the relative absence of positive events in census tracts was associated with higher service utilization rates to the community mental health center serving those tracts. The number of negative events was unrelated to service rates for census tracts but was related to several demographic indicators of well-being.     

The role of dissimulation and social desirability in the measurement of moral reasoning

A series of studies investigating the psychometric and conceptual properties of the Survey of Ethical Attitudes (SEA), a paper-and-pencil measure of moral reasoning, is reported. The results of these studies indicate that the scale is clearly susceptible to the influence of response dissimulation in the form of both role-playing and impression management, and is also confounded with sources of stylistic variance in the form of social desirability. Previous proposals concerning the relationships among moral development, moral reasoning, and personality structure are reviewed in light of these findings, and an alternative conceptualization of the measure in terms of political and social attitudes is offered.     

Monocular asymmetries in recognition after an eye movement: Sighting dominance and dextrality

Although monocular recognition scores for targets presented immediately after an eye movement do not differ, the two eyes show marked recognition asymmetries when both eyes are receiving inputs but a specific target is only presented to one. In general, the right eye performs better than the left, although there are interactions with sighting dominance and the direction of eye movement.     

Avoidance extinction in goldfish

Independent groups of goldfish trained to avoid shock in a shuttlebox situation were presented with several extinction procedures in which the relationships between the conditioned stimulus and shock were altered and/or response contingencies removed. Random shock presentations, equivalent to the number of shocks received during avoidance acquisition, resulted in response decrements similar to those obtained when the conditioned stimulus was presented alone. Pairing the conditioned stimulus with shock on every trial, however, served to maintain response levels. When response-contingent punishment was superimposed upon these Pavlovian pairings, performance was facilitated slightly although punishment alone resulted in somewhat faster response reduction than that produced by exposure only to the conditioned stimulus. Extinction of avoidance responding produced by exposure to the conditioned stimulus alone was dependent on the total duration of exposure and independent of both number of stimulus onsets and response prevention. These experiments demonstrated that, in general, the procedures used to reduce avoidance responding in rats were equally effective for goldfish, with one exception: the introduction of a Pavlovian contingency following avoidance acquisition, making the previously avoidable shock unavoidable, maintained response probabilities near previously established levels.