A preliminary comparison of functional analysis results when conducted in contrived versus natural settings

A preliminary evaluation of the correspondence between functional analysis outcomes across settings was conducted with 2 children who had been diagnosed with autism and who engaged in challenging behavior. Differences across settings (a therapy room and a classroom) were demonstrated in ABAB reversal designs. Three potential patterns of results that may occur when comparing functional analyses across environments are described, and one possible explanation for the occurrence of discrepancies between environments (differing learning histories within separate environments) is offered.     

Managing discrimination in selection: the influence of directives from an authority and social dominance orientation

The authors examined one manner in which to decrease the negative impact of social dominance orientation (SDO), an individual difference variable that indicates support for the "domination of 'inferior' groups by 'superior' groups" (J. Sidanius & F. Pratto, 1999, p. 48), on the selection of candidates from low-status groups within society. Consistent with the tenets of social dominance theory, in 2 studies we found that those high in SDO reported that they were less likely to select a potential team member who is a member of a low-status group (i.e., a White female in Study 1 and a Black male in Study 2) than those low in SDO. However, explicit directives from an authority moderated this effect such that those high in SDO were more likely to select both candidates when authority figures clearly communicated that job performance indicators should be used when choosing team members. Thus, our studies suggest that the negative effects of SDO may be attenuated if those high in SDO are instructed by superiors to use legitimate performance criteria to evaluate job candidates.     

Egocentric and allocentric visual cues influence the specification of movement distance and direction

The authors investigated whether visuomotor transformations that support the computation of movement distance (i.e., extent) and movement direction rely differentially on integration of egocentric and allocentric visual information. To accomplish that objective, the authors factorially arranged 17 participants' open-loop reaching movements from 2 movement-start locations with mediolateral (ML) and anteroposterior (AP) variants of the induced Roelofs effect (IRE). The 2 movement-start locations in combination with the 2 IRE configurations enabled the authors to examine the impact of illusory movement pertaining to distance (i.e., AP-IRE) and direction (i.e., ML-IRE) information. AP-IRE and ML-IRE configurations across the 2 movement-start locations reliably influenced reaching endpoints in a direction consistent with the perceptual effects of the illusion. These findings suggest that unitary visual information involving interactive egocentric and allocentric visual cues supports the specification of both movement distance and movement direction.     

Intermanual transfer of prism adaptation

The authors measured intermanual transfer in participants (N = 48) whose exposed or unexposed right or left hand was tested 1st after participants experienced prismatic displacement. Test order did not affect either participants' performance during prismatic exposure or the usual aftereffects, but transfer occurred only when the authors tested the exposed right hand 1st. Transfer did not occur, and proprioceptive shift for the exposed left limb decreased when the authors tested the unexposed right limb 1st. The present results suggest that transfer occurs during testing for aftereffects of prism exposure, but not during prism exposure itself, as researchers have previously assumed. Results are consistent with those of previous research that has shown that limb control is lateralized in opposite hemispheres and that the left hemisphere contains a spatial map only for the right limb.     

Performance-based adaptive schedules enhance motor learning

Although investigators have shown that random scheduling of several tasks enhances learning more than blocked scheduling does, the advantages of random scheduling may be limited because it does not take into account the nominal difficulty of each task, the difference in difficulty between tasks, and the skill level of the learner in that type of schedule. The authors propose 2 new algorithms for adaptively determining the nominal difficulty and the number of trials for each task on the basis of both current and delayed performance of the learner (N = 48). The authors tested the adaptive algorithms in a 2 x 2 factorial design, and they show that the algorithms outperform random scheduling when performance is measured on a delayed retention test.     

Searching for an environmental effect of parental alcoholism on offspring alcohol use disorder: a genetically informed study of children of alcoholics

The children-of-twins design was used to isolate a potentially causal environmental impact of having an alcoholic parent on offspring alcohol use disorder, by an examination of whether the children of alcoholics were at a higher risk for alcohol use disorders than were the children of nonalcoholic parents, even after correlated familial factors were controlled. Participants were 1,224 male and female twins from 836 twin pairs selected from the Australian Twin Registry, 2,334 of the twins' 18-39-year-old offspring, and 983 spouses of the twins. Lifetime histories of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.) alcohol use disorders were obtained by structured, psychiatric, telephone interviews conducted individually with each of the family members. Comparisons of the offspring of twins who were discordant for alcoholism indicated that there was no longer a statistically significant difference between the children of alcoholics and the children of nonalcoholics after genetic and family environmental factors correlated with having an alcoholic parent were controlled. The results of this study suggest that the direct causal effect of being exposed to an alcoholic parent on offspring alcohol use disorder is modest at best.     

Auditory and visual attention-based apparent motion share functional parallels

A perception of coherent motion can be obtained in an otherwise ambiguous or illusory visual display by directing one's attention to a feature and tracking it. We demonstrate an analogous auditory effect in two separate sets of experiments. The temporal dynamics associated with the attention-dependent auditory motion closely matched those previously reported for attention-based visual motion. Since attention-based motion mechanisms appear to exist in both modalities, we also tested for multimodal (audiovisual) attention-based motion, using stimuli composed of interleaved visual and auditory cues. Although subjects were able to track a trajectory using cues from both modalities, no one spontaneously perceived "multimodal motion" across both visual and auditory cues. Rather, they reported motion perception only within each modality, thereby revealing a spatiotemporal limit on putative cross-modal motion integration. Together, results from these experiments demonstrate the existence of attention-based motion in audition, extending current theories of attention-based mechanisms from visual to auditory systems.     

Modeling lexical decision: the form of frequency and diversity effects

What is the root cause of word frequency effects on lexical decision times? W. S. Murray and K. I. Forster (2004) argued that such effects are linear in rank frequency, consistent with a serial search model of lexical access. In this article, the authors (a) describe a method of testing models of such effects that takes into account the possibility of parametric overfitting; (b) illustrate the effect of corpus choice on estimates of rank frequency; (c) give derivations of nine functional forms as predictions of models of lexical decision; (d) detail the assessment of these models and the rank model against existing data regarding the functional form of frequency effects; and (e) report further assessments using contextual diversity, a factor confounded with word frequency. The relationship between the occurrence distribution of words and lexical decision latencies to those words does not appear compatible with the rank hypothesis, undermining the case for serial search models of lexical access. Three transformations of contextual diversity based on extensions of instance models do, however, remain as plausible explanations of the effect.     

Eliciting salient beliefs in research on the theory of planned behaviour: The effect of question wording

The authors of the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and its extension, the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) recommend that researchers who use these theories to investigate the determinants of a given behaviour should first conduct an elicitation study to identify the modal salient beliefs in the target population. In spite of the importance accorded to salient beliefs by the TRA/TPB, the elicitation stage has received little research attention. This paper reports a detailed analysis of beliefs about “being more physically active in the next 12 months.” A general population sample of 213 adults completed a questionnaire while attending a research centre for a series of tests. The findings showed that the beliefs that were elicited by questions designed to prompt affective outcomes (like or enjoy, dislike or hate) differed systematically from those that were elicited by the traditional questions designed to prompt instrumental out-comes (advantages and disadvantages). Whether this resulted in different final sets of modal salient beliefs was found to depend on the particular decision rule that was employed. An alternative decision rule is proposed, based on maximizing the degree of overlap between the modal set and the full set of salient beliefs generated by the sample. The index of overlap can be used to gauge the adequacy of using a modal set of a given size to represent the salient beliefs of the whole sample. In the current dataset, the optimal modal set for “advantages and disadvantages” was associated with only 26 percent overlap with the salient beliefs of the whole sample, which was judged to be insufficient. In such cases, a better strategy may be to ask participants to generate and rate their own beliefs.     

Children's reports of emotionally laden events: adapting the interview to the child

This study examined the influence of expressive vocabulary and temperament on children's verbal reports about emotionally laden events in different interview conditions. In one of three conditions, 58 children aged between 5 and 7 years were interviewed about a time they had felt happy and a time they had felt scared. The interview conditions were: drawing, in which they were asked to draw and tell; re‐enactment, in which they were asked to re‐enact and tell; and verbal, in which they were simply asked to tell. The principal finding was that, whereas for children in the verbal interview condition expressive vocabulary was associated with the amount of information reported and for children in the re‐enactment condition, temperament had a moderate association with the amount reported, for children in the drawing interview condition, neither temperament nor expressive language was associated with the amount of information reported. Children in the drawing condition reported more information than those in the other two interview conditions. The possible mechanisms underlying these findings and their implications for interviewing children in clinical contexts are discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.