Overt “mediating” behavior during temporally spaced responding

A rat was trained on a schedule that programmed reinforcements only when a minimum waiting time between successive responses was exceeded (DRL schedule). It was observed to fill much of the pause between lever presses with a stereotyped behavioral chain: it would take its tail in its mouth and nibble it. This behavior was shown to be functionally related to the efficiency with which the subject spaced its responses. It is thought to have served as mediating behavior, providing discriminating stimuli for appropriate lever presses.     

Beyond Consent: Building Trusting Relationships With Diverse Populations in Precision Medicine Research

With the growth of precision medicine research on health data and biospecimens, research institutions will need to build and maintain long-term, trusting relationships with patient-participants. While trust is important for all research relationships, the longitudinal nature of precision medicine research raises particular challenges for facilitating trust when the specifics of future studies are unknown. Based on focus groups with racially and ethnically diverse patients, we describe several factors that influence patient trust and potential institutional approaches to building trustworthiness. Drawing on these findings, we suggest several considerations for research institutions seeking to cultivate long-term, trusting relationships with patients: (1) Address the role of history and experience on trust, (2) engage concerns about potential group harm, (3) address cultural values and communication barriers, and (4) integrate patient values and expectations into oversight and governance structures.     

Memory and metamemory for inverted words: illusions of competency and desirable difficulties

Research regarding how people monitor their learning has shown that ease of processing strongly guides people’s judgments of learning (JOLs). However, the desirable difficulties concept (Bjork, 1994) suggests that studying information that is less fluent can result in greater learning. Currently, it is unclear whether people are aware of the potential benefits of desirable difficulties during learning. To address this, in Experiment 1, participants studied inverted and upright words and also made JOLs. While participants’ JOLs did not differ for inverted and upright words, recall was greater for inverted words. Experiment 2 used several study–test cycles in which participants could potentially learn about the beneficial effects of processing inverted words with task experience, and similar results were obtained. Thus, reading inverted words requires processing that enhances recall, but memory predictions do not differentiate between upright and inverted words. We interpret these results in terms of processing fluency, desirable difficulties, and theories of metacognitive monitoring.