The temporal course of the frustration effect

General activity subsequent to reward (R) and nonreward (N) was monitored at 5-sec intervals with a stabilimeter in the runway goal box. Activity of never-rewarded control Ss was also measured. In Expt 1 it was found that the frustration effect (difference between N- and R-trial activities) disappeared after about 40 sec of goal box confinement. This disappearance of the frustration effect was due to activity increase on R trials rather than activity decrease on N trials as a function of time. Comparison of N-trial activity with control group activity indicated that frustration does not dissipate within 60 sec. Expt 2 investigated activity following reward and nonreward as a function of reward magnitude. Evidence from these experiments suggests that the late R-trial activity increase results from frustration, possibly conditioned to apparatus cues on N trials.     

Aftereffect of inspection of a perspectival stimulus for slant depth: A new normalization effect

The Ss made judgments of the frontoparallel plane monocularly and binocularly by adjusting the position of a rotatable thin luminous line viewed in darkness. The judgments were made before and after a 10-min period of monocular inspection of a luminous outline frontoparallel trapezoid which was the projection of a rectangle rotated in depth. Verbal reports indicated normalization of perspectival slant depth, i.e., the inspection figure appeared less rotated, and the line settings exhibited an aftereffect bf normalization. These findings may contribute toward an account of certain previously unexplained observations reported in an earlier study by Epstein and Morgan-Paap (1974) dealing with adaptation to uniocular image magnification.     

Perceptuomotor adaptation to a speech feature

Selective adaptation experiments were conducted to test for the presence of a mechanism that mediates an aspect of both speech perception and speech production. Ss were instructed to utter /i/ or /bi/ after listening to repetitions of either of these syllables or to repetitions of the vowel /i/. Analysis of the utterances showed that a timing relation which distinguishes /pi/from /bi/, namely the latency in onset of voicing relative to the release burst of the consonant, varied systematically for the /pi/ utterances but not for the /bi/ utterances as a function of the speech input. The effect for the /pi/ utterances was shown not to be attributable to factors such as compensation for distorted perception of the /pi/ adapting stimulus or voluntary mimicry of this stimulus.     

The relation between information and variance analyses

Analysis of variance and uncertainty analysis are analogous techniques for partitioning variability. In both analyses negative interaction terms due to negative covariance terms that appear when non-orthogonal predictor variables are allowed may occur. Uncertainties can be estimated directly from variances if the form of distribution is assumed. The decision as to which of the techniques to use depends partly on the properties of the criterion variable. Only uncertainty analysis may be used with a non-metric criterion. Since uncertainties are dimensionless (using no metric), however, uncertainty analysis has a generality which may make it useful even when variances can be computed.The work of the senior author was supported by Contract N5ori-166, Task Order 1, between the U.S. Office of Naval Research and The Johns Hopkins University. This is Report No. 166-I-192, Project Designation No. NR 145-089, under that contract.     

A note on the estimation of nonspurious correlations

A method is provided for estimating the nonspurious correlation of a part of a test with the total test. Two cases are considered: one in which the actual subtest is parallel to the total test, the other in which the actual subtest is not parallel to the total test.     

Organization of the affective life a critical survey

Il est depuis longtemps reconnu que la vie affective de l'homme normal subit, surtout pendant l'enfance, une sorte d'organisation résultant d'une suite de transformations. On n'a cependant pas pris la peine de formulaer exactement les observations faites, ni d'en interprêter les conséquences avant Kant et Herbart. Ceux-ci ont aussi attiré l'attention sur la question de la différence entre émotions et passions.     

Stimulus control of avoidance behavior

The introduction of a warning signal preceding shocks greatly increased the effectiveness of avoidance responding. Periods of “warm-up” at the beginning of the session were eliminated, and the number of shocks received by the subjects was greatly reduced. With response-shock interval constant, response rate increased as the interval between the response and the onset of the warning signal was shortened. The response tended to occur shortly after the onset of the warning signal regardless of the duration of these “safe” periods. A greatly elevated response rate was maintained even when the duration of the safe period was reduced to 0.3 sec. Thus, the pre-shock signal obtained nearly exclusive control of the responding and overrode the usual “temporal discrimination” of the response-shock interval.