An illusion of auditory saltation similar to the cutaneous "rabbit"

Trains of brief clicks produced successively at 3 points in a horizontal array were not localized accurately. Observers reported clicks occurring in succession across the spaces between sources as well as at the sources themselves. The illusion is functionally related to interstimulus interval, number of clicks per speaker, and regularity of pulsing. It appears similar to Geldard and Sherrick's cutaneous "rabbit" illusion.     

The community mental health center management game: Teaching administrative skills by means of computer simulation

Clinical training in psychology rarely includes the opportunity for students to exercise managerial responsibility for a functioning human service organization. Nevertheless, many clinicians are called upon to assume such decision-making duties, despite their lack of administrative training. This study examines the feasibility of using a computer model of a typical Community Mental Health Center (CMHC) as a training device, permitting clinical students to “manage” a complex social agency over a course of many months of simulated time. The system provides a valuable and interesting supplement to the usual training materials in psychology programs.     

A device for presenting attack opportunity as a reinforcer for operant behavior

A device is described which automatically measures barpresses reinforced by short opportunities to attack male mice. Data on barpress rates indicate rapid and reliable acquisition of preferences for reinforcer bars and rapid abolition of this preference when the reinforcement contingency is subsequently eliminated. The data are less reliable for reversal learning.     

Auditory contralateral induction: An early stage in binaural processing

Binaural interaction was studied using headphones presenting signals (tones or filtered speech) to one ear and noises of various spectral compositions to the other. Every half-second, the sides receiving the signal and noise were reversed. The noise was always perceived to alternate from side to side, but the signal appeared to be stationary and diffusely localized about the midsaggital plane when the noise contained the spectral components of the signal at appropriate intensity levels. This delateralization of a monaural signal results from a process called “contralateral induction” (CI). Additional observations indicate that CI corresponds to an early stage in binaural interaction which generally escapes notice because of further perceptual processing.     

The role of surface order and surface deletion in sentence perception

The perceptual complexity of intransitive adverbials, truncated passives and full passives was investigated in two experiments using rapid visual processing tasks. Both forms of passive were found to be more complex than the intransitive adverbials, presumably because of the lack of correspondence of surface and base orders. However, deletion of the logical subject in truncated passives did not increase their complexity relative to full passives.     

Profiles of stutterers' and nonstutterers' affective, cognitive, and behavioral communication attitudes

The purposes of this investigation were 1) to profile the affective, cognitive, and behavioral attitudinal dimensions of stutterers' and nonstutterers' communication attitudes and 2) to describe membership characteristics of each profile. To this end, 76 stutterers and 81 nonstutterers completed the Inventory of Communication Attitudes. This self-report inventory obtained ratings of different types of speaking situations, using five response scales reflecting behavioral, affective, and cognitive aspects of attitudes. Exploratory cluster analysis identified six attitudinal clusters or profiles. Some profiles were more typical either of stuttering respondents or of nonstuttering respondents, whereas one profile reflected attitudes of proportionately equal numbers of stutterers and nonstutterers. Examination of profile membership characteristics revealed two significant discriminators, classification as a stutterer or nonstutterer and an overall speech rating. Nondiscriminatory characteristics included sex, age, education, therapy experiences, stuttering severity self-rating, onset of stuttering, total therapy time, current therapeutic status, and familial history.