TEACHING THE HANDICAPPED TO EAT IN PUBLIC PLACES: ACQUISITION,GENERALIZATION AND MAINTENANCE OF RESTAURANT SKILLS

This study examined classroom-based instruction in restauranting skills for handicapped persons. Three male students were taught each of four skill components in sequential order: locating, ordering, paying, and eating and exiting. Training was implemented in a multiple baseline design across subjects and consisted of modeling and role playing in conjunction with photo slide sequences and a simulated ordering counter. The use of a menu containing general item classes and a finger matching procedure for identifying errors in the delivery of change greatly reduced the reading and math skills necessary to enter and complete the program. Periodic probes were conducted in a McDonald's restaurant prior to, during, and up to one-year following the termination of training. In addition, two probes (overt and covert observation) were conducted in a Burger King restaurant to assess further generalization to a location different from the one depicted throughout training. Results showed that students' performance on restaurant probes improved as a result of training, generalized to novel settings, maintained over an extended period of time, and was comparable to that of a normative sample of nonretarded persons.     

AN ECOBEHAVIORAL EXAMINATION OF A SIMPLE STRATEGY FOR INCREASING MEALTIME LANGUAGE IN RESIDENTIAL FACILITIES

Typically in large residential facilities for retarded persons, meals are served in an institutional style that does not appear to encourage appropriate peer interactions. An ecological program alternative is serving meals in a family style. The present study was designed to examine both the feasibility of serving family style meals and the effects of family style meal service on mealtime language. Five retarded young adult male residents, who had some conversational skills and appropriate table manners, participated in this study. The experimental design involved a multiple baseline analysis across meals (dinner, lunch, and breakfast). Observers coded the youths' mealtime verbalizations according to the type, content, and direction of the verbalizations and they recorded the length of the meals. The analysis of the verbalization data indicated that during family style meals the participants spoke substantially more often than during institutional style meals. Increases in peer-directed conversation about the meals primarily accounted for the verbalization changes. Family style serving also resulted in the youths spending more time with their meals. In addition, social validation measures suggested that the family style procedures were preferred by the consumers (participants, staff, and concerned community members).     

The effect of modification of expressive displays on vicarious emotional arousal

Several recent experiments have demonstrated that modulation of the facial expressive response is accompanied by changes in autonomic arousal and subjective response to painful stimuli. The present study asked whether facial self-regulation may also bring about changes in covert vicarious emotional experience. Three groups of subjects were exposed to a videotaped model displaying intermittent pain to shock in a differential vicarious autonomic conditioning paradigm. Subjects in the inhibit and amplify groups were asked, respectively, (a) to inhibit their facial muscles or (b) to pose a facial response of pain when the model was shocked. It was predicted that the inhibit group would show less autonomic arousal to the model's expressive display (empathy) and less conditioning (as measured by skin conductance and heart rate change), and the amplify group more empathy and conditioning, than a third group who was given no facial instruction. In fact, the amplify group showed more skin conductance arousal, heart rate acceleration, and activity in response to the model's expressive display of pain than did the other two groups (which were not different from each other), but no more autonomic or facial conditioning. The overall pattern of physiological data is interpreted as generally supportive of a facial feedback theory of emotion: where significant between-groups' differences were obtained in facial activity, as in vicarious instigation, autonomic arousal differences also emerged; where no expressive differences were obtained, as in vicarious conditioning, no differences in autonomic arousal were found.     

Children's detection and awareness of textual anomaly

Children of 8 and 11 years were assessed in two experiments for their sensitivity to textual anomaly. In Experiment 1, subjects read stories containing two target lines, one appropriate and the other anomalous in relation to previously given information. Both age groups read the anomalous line more slowly than the appropriate line, but in a subsequent test of comprehension monitoring, the older group was more likely than the younger group to pick out the anomalous line as not fitting in with the rest of the story. Experiment 2 produced similar results: both 8- and 11-year-old children read an anomalous line more slowly, but 11-year-olds were more likely than 8-year-olds to cite the anomalous line or part of it when questioned about the possible presence of a line that did not fit in with the rest of the story. The results indicate that an age change in comprehension monitoring as indexed by citation or selection of a textual anomaly need not be contingent upon a parallel age change in constructive processing as indexed by modulation of reading rate.     

A simple encoding and recording system for small group observation

A simple and inexpensive system for coding and recording interaction patterns in small groups is described. It consists of a keyboard and a standard tape recorder, and it is capable of storing sequential data using up to 36 codes. Its main application is in the study of speaker-target patterns, but it can also be used in encoding up to 12 behavioral codes, or six speakers and 6 codes. The keyboard costs less than $200 and is used with conventional tape recorders and minicomputers available at most research sites.     

An information processing system for the psychiatric emergency room

An information processing system for a psychiatric emergency room is described. Several studies are presented that show the utility of the system. In the first study, variables involved in diagnosis are explicated. The second study attempts to determine the characteristics that distinguish recidivists from nonrecidivists at an emergency room. The third study attempts to find patient variables related to success in short-term treatment programs. The final study is aimed at discovering whether there are psychopathological effects related to the use of inhalants. Together, these studies show the potential of a mental health information system for learning more about the nature of mental disorders and their treatment.     

Evidence against independent processing of black and white pattern features

Following adaptation to a rectangular grating, subjects observed a shift in the perceived duty cycle of a test grating (Burton, Nagshineh, & Ruddock, 1977; DeValois, 1977). This suggests that size information about black and white pattern components may be analyzed independently. We have tested this hypothesis by combining adaptation to a 2-cpd rectangular wave grating (narrow white bars and wide black bars or vice versa) with adaptation to a 4-cpd sine wave (narrow white and black bars. The data do not support the independent analysis of white and black components, but they may be accounted for by mechanisms sensitive to the relative phase relations among the spatial frequency components of the input.     

Salient features of color space

Recent research has demonstrated that focal regions of color space are cognitively more salient than nonfocal regions. Employing a linguistic hedge task, the experiment here sought mainly to verify the cognitive primacy of loci representing Berlin and Kay’s first four chromatic categories over foci representing the remainder. The experimental results failed to support the primacy hypothesis, an outcome that gives rise to a number of theoretical implications. Additional questions in the analysis concerned the relationship between the salience of a color and its lightness (Munsell value) and saturation (Munsell chroma). While the results permit no simple interpretation for lightness, a definite trend emerged in the case of saturation.     

Cross-modal bias and perceptual fusion with auditory-visual spatial discordance

Investigations of situations involving spatial discordance between auditory and visual data which can otherwise be attributed to a common origin have revealed two main phenomena:cross-modal bias andperceptual fusion (or ventriloquism). The focus of the present study is the relationship between these two. The question asked was whether bias occurred only with fusion, as is predicted by some accounts of reactions to discordance, among them those based on cuesubstitution. The approach consisted of having subjects, on each trial, both point to signals in one modality in the presence of conflicting signals in the other modality and produce same-different origin judgments. To avoid the confounding of immediate effects with cumulative adaptation, which was allowed in most previous studies, the direction and amplitude of discordance was varied randomly from trial to trial. Experiment 1, which was a pilot study, showed that both visual bias of auditory localization and auditory bias of visual localization can be observed under such conditions. Experiment 2, which addressed the main question, used a method which controls for the selection involved in separating fusion from no-fusion trials and showed that the attraction of auditory localization by conflicting visual inputs occurs even when fusion is not reported. This result is inconsistent with purely postperceptual views of cross-modal interactions. The question could not be answered for auditory bias of visual localization, which, although significant, was very small in Experiment 1 and fell below significance under the conditions of Experiment 2.