Model discrimination through adaptive experimentation

An ideal experiment is one in which data collection is efficient and the results are maximally informative. This standard can be difficult to achieve because of uncertainties about the consequences of design decisions. We demonstrate the success of a Bayesian adaptive method (adaptive design optimization, ADO) in optimizing design decisions when comparing models of the time course of forgetting. Across a series of testing stages, ADO intelligently adapts the retention interval in order to maximally discriminate power and exponential models. Compared with two different control (non-adaptive) methods, ADO distinguishes the models decisively, with the results unambiguously favoring the power model. Analyses suggest that ADO's success is due in part to its flexibility in adjusting to individual differences. This implementation of ADO serves as an important first step in assessing its applicability and usefulness to psychology.     

Hannah Arendt & Jean Baudrillard: Pedagogy in the Consumer Society

This paper considers the place of education within our “consumers’ society”, beginning with Hannah Arendt’s account of the rise of consumerism to a position of political dominance and the resulting eclipse of public life. Connections are then made between Arendt’s account of this rise and Jean Baudrillard’s account of the postmodern proliferation of signs and the transformation of the sign into a commodity. This radical “semiurgy” accelerates into a self-referential series of signs which entails the loss of reality – it contributes to the disappearance of the human subjectivity behind the creation of images. I argue that Baudrillard does not respond adequately to the dynamic that he describes so well. By contrast, Arendt’s concept of natality, I suggest, prepares the ground for a response to the forces of commodification that colonize the educational environment and threaten its critical possibilities. As youth and schools receive more and more attention from advertisers, students are sold by educational institutions to commercial interests who seek unfettered access to this “captive audience”. Yet education is profoundly compromised when youths are viewed as consumers and not as a social investment, when education is viewed merely as an opportunity to secure a new market.     

Evaluating small‐scale simulation for training firearm safety skills

There is limited research using small‐scale simulation in applied behavior analysis. We used small‐scale simulation to train firearm safety skills to 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children and assessed whether the skills generalized to the natural environment through in situ assessment. Three participants completed the training, and all participants learned the safety skills from simulation training. Two of the participants acquired the safety skills after the first simulation training, and the third participant required one booster training before demonstrating the safety skills in the natural environment.     

Spatializing Emotion: No Evidence for a Domain‐General Magnitude System

People implicitly associate different emotions with different locations in left‐right space. Which aspects of emotion do they spatialize, and why? Across many studies people spatialize emotional valence, mapping positive emotions onto their dominant side of space and negative emotions onto their non‐dominant side, consistent with theories of metaphorical mental representation. Yet other results suggest a conflicting mapping of emotional intensity (a.k.a., emotional magnitude), according to which people associate more intense emotions with the right and less intense emotions with the left — regardless of their valence; this pattern has been interpreted as support for a domain‐general system for representing magnitudes. To resolve the apparent contradiction between these mappings, we first tested whether people implicitly map either valence or intensity onto left‐right space, depending on which dimension of emotion they attend to (Experiments 1a, b). When asked to judge emotional valence, participants showed the predicted valence mapping. However, when asked to judge emotional intensity, participants showed no systematic intensity mapping. We then tested an alternative explanation of findings previously interpreted as evidence for an intensity mapping (Experiments 2a, b). These results suggest that previous findings may reflect a left‐right mapping of spatial magnitude (i.e., the size of a salient feature of the stimuli) rather than emotion. People implicitly spatialize emotional valence, but, at present, there is no clear evidence for an implicit lateral mapping of emotional intensity. These findings support metaphor theory and challenge the proposal that mental magnitudes are represented by a domain‐general metric that extends to the domain of emotion.     

The role of binaural and fundamental frequency difference cues in the identification of concurrently presented vowels

The relative importance of voice pitch and interaural difference cues in facilitating the recognition of both of two concurrently presented synthetic vowels was measured. The interaural difference cues used were an interaural time difference (400 μsec ITD), two magnitudes of interaural level difference (15 dB and infinite ILD), and a combination of ITD and ILD (400 μsec plus 15 dB). The results are analysed separately for those cases where both vowels are identical and those where they are different. When the two vowels are different, a voice pitch difference of one semitone is found to improve the percentage of correct reports of both vowels by 35.8% on average. However, the use of interaural difference cues results in an improvement of 11.5% on average when there is a voice pitch difference of one semitone, but only a non-significant 0.1% when there is no voice pitch difference. When the two vowels are identical, imposition of either a voice pitch difference or binaural difference reduces performance, in a subtractive manner. It is argued that the smaller size of the interaural difference effect is not due to a “ceiling effect” but is characteristic of the relative importance of the two kinds of cues in this type of experiment. The possibility that the improvement due to interaural difference cues may in fact be due to monaural processing is discussed. A control experiment is reported for the ITD condition, which suggests binaural processing does occur for this condition. However, it is not certain whether the improvement in the ILD condition is due to binaural processing or use of the improvement in signal-to-noise ratio for a single vowel at each ear.     

Cognitive-Behavioral Erectile Dysfunction Treatment for Gay Men

The purpose of the present paper is to assist cognitive-behavioral therapists who are treating erectile dysfunction among gay men. Little information is available to cognitive-behavioral therapists about the psychological and social effects of erectile dysfunction in this population, or how to incorporate the concerns of gay men with erectile dysfunction into a case conceptualization and treatment plan. The present paper provides an overview of the extant research on erectile dysfunction and of its treatment among gay men. The application of clinical research on erectile dysfunction to treatment for gay men will be illustrated using two case examples.