Abstraction of contingency in concept learning

It is generally agreed that concept learning involves the abstraction of some general representation or schema. Just what is abstracted, however, and how it is used in the classification of sets of stimuli in the natural world or in the laboratory, remain outstanding questions. In this paper a hypothesis involving contingency abstraction is described as a possible solution to these questions. An experiment which manipulated measured contingency in a concept-learning task, and which offered empirical support for the hypothesis, is reported. The advantages of a contingency-abstraction theory of concept learning are briefly discussed.     

The Radio Shack color computer in the experimental psychology laboratory: An evaluation

The Radio Shack color computer is examined from the viewpoint of capabilities needed to program, time, control, and acquire data from typical cognitive psychology experiments. Its capabilities are compared with those of the alternative inexpensive microcomputers discussed in an earlier article (Reed, 1980). The paper also includes a 6809 assembly language routine that permits the measurement of reaction times in video horizontal scan (HS = 4/63 msec) units without hardware modifications and an RSCC BASIC program for unbiased conversion of HS units to milliseconds.     

Behavior analysis of cigarette smoking

Patterns of cigarette smoking, treated as series of discrete events in time, were investigated with a variety of quantitative techniques designed to characterize individual subject smoking series and to illuminate the relationship between cigarette smoking and environmental events. Data were collected from a total of 35 subjects who were either participants in residential laboratory studies or in a smoking cessation program. Cigarette smoking events were found to be fairly irregularly distributed with respect to time within individual subject series. However, strong dependencies were found between the occurrence in time of individual acts of cigarette smoking and coffee drinking. In addition, the distribution and frequency of smoking events throughout one-hour activity sequences were found to be dependent upon the nature of the activity, and the temporal scheduling of activities was found to affect several quantitative indices of smoking patterns.     

Cognitive styles in the development of medical careers

Recent research has shown that academic choice and achievement may be partly a function of the student's standing on the field-dependence-independence cognitive-style dimension. The results of two longitudinal studies suggest that information about field dependence-independence may be of value for student guidance in the medical setting. The first, a study of college undergraduates who early expressed an interest in medicine, showed that these cognitive styles play a discernible role in determining who will eventually enter medical school. The second, a study of medical students, showed that field-dependent and field-independent students subsequently tend to choose different medical specialties. These results are consistent with cognitive-style theory, which proposes that field-independent people will choose vocations that require cognitive restructuring skills, whereas field-dependent people will choose vocations that require greater social-interpersonal involvement.     

Negative recency and measurement of primary memory.

The technique of Waugh & Norman (1965) is widely used in measuring the capacity of primary memory. Watkins (1974) has proposed a modification of the technique which takes into account registration failure. A further modification is proposed which takes into account findings of negative recency in delayed recall.     

MULTIVARIATE ASSESSMENT OF CONFLICT IN DISTRESSED AND NONDISTRESSED MOTHER-ADOLESCENT DYADS

A battery of measures was used to assess conflict between mothers and young adolescents (females and males, 11 to 15 years of age). Two groups of families, one composed of a distressed clinical sample (N = 38), the other a nondistressed normative sample (N = 40), participated. The assessment battery included retrospective judgments, frequency estimates, self-monitored home recording, and tape-recorded discussion of a home problem. Content of assessment measures tapped aspects of parental control, decisionmaking, self-reported interaction behavior, arguments, interaction behavior rated by independent “blind” observers, frequency and anger-intensity of specific problematic issues, and perceptions of positive and negative behaviors of the other family member. Based on univariate analyses, 21 of the 26 defined variables discriminated significantly in the predicted direction. Maternal and adolescent reports of behavior and independent ratings of tape-recorded interaction emerged as strong and consistent discriminators. Stepwise multivariate discriminant analysis provided successful classification of 100% of the families based on the inclusion of nine variables. In a cross-validation sample, 84% of the families were correctly classified. Implications for systematic outcome research as well as clinical application are discussed.