Parent group education: What does it do for the children

The Downing Program for Parent Training in Family Relationship and management Skills was introduced to the parents of students attending an alternative education school at the secondary level. With 58 parents completing all phases of the program, the results indicated that students with parents completing the Dowing program were significantly or markedly different from students whose parents did not participate in the Dowing program, using two measures of classroom behavior.     

Perceptual differences between reading handwritten and typed words

Perceptual differences between reading handwritten and typed words were investigated in a series of three experiments. In the first two experiments, a Sternberg memory search paradigm was employed, with either typed or handwritten probes. The reaction time to classify handwritten probes was slower than for typed probes, but memory search took place at the same rate for both kinds of probe. In the third experiment, the latencies for naming the written and typed words differed by the same amount of time as the overall difference between the same stimuli in the memory search task. These findings indicate that only perceptual processes are differentially affected by the differences between typed and written words. Furthermore, in these tasks the independence of encoding and memory search makes it unlikely that processes of perceptual indentification use expectations or analysis-by-synthesis based on the information in immediate memory     

A biphasic 60-Hz synchronizer circuit for the recording of visually evoked responses in high-noise environments

A simple synchronizer clock circuit is described that aids in the rejection of 60-Hz noise from evoked potential measurements.     

Is the discrimination of motion-path length unique?

Discrimination of the extent of a motion path may present a special problem since the discrimination calls on memory for changing position and involves pursuit movements of the eye. To determine how these factors affect judgment, discrimination of extents represented by motion paths, successively appearing endpoints, and simultaneously present endpoints was compared under a variety of eye-movement conditions: fixation, pursuit, and saccadic. Discrimination was assessed by the method of adjustment and also by the method of magnitude estimation. Discrimination of motion path extent was found to be as accurate as discrimination of an interspace demarcated by simultaneously presented points or by successively presented points. This was true for brief single presentations of the extents as well as for repeated exposures to the extents. The findings were applied to the analysis of the perception of velocity and the perception of extent.     

Operant conditioning of the EEG in two patients with epilepsy: Methodologic and clinical considerations

Methodologic and clinical considerations are discussed in sensorimotor rhythm (SMR) biofeedback research on two dissimilar but severe epileptic males. The first case, an akinetic epileptic who prior to feedback training experienced 80–100 clinical seizures every 10 hours, showed considerable seizure reduction after 6 months of SMR and epileptiform training. A number of methodologic and instrumentation advances were pioneered with the akinetic patient: (1) development of and ultra-sharp band-pass filter; (2) use of epileptiform inhibit and feed-back circuitry; (3) use of monetary rewards as additional incentive; (4) use of correlational analysis for evaluation of acquisition in the major dependent variables and; (5) use of noncontingent feedback and rein-forcement as control techniques. The second case, a psychomotor epileptic, also showed therapeutic benefit from SMR training. Clinical information regarding the effect of anticonvulsant medications on the course and therapeutic outcome of SMR training are described. In conjunction with operant conditioning of 12 Hz activity, corresponding changes for other EEG parameters are examined.     

Discrimination of time intervals marked by brief acoustic pulses of various intensities and spectra

Experienced observers were asked to identify, in a four-level 2AFC situation, the longer of two unfilled time intervals, each of which was marked by a pair of 20-msec acoustic pulses. When all the markers were identical, high-level (186-dB SPL) bursts of coherently gated sinusoids or bursts of band-limited Gaussian noise, a change in the spectrum of the markers generally did not affect performance. On the other hand, for 1-kHz tone-burst markers, intensity decreases below 25 dB SL were accompanied by sizable deterioration of the discrimination performance, especially at short (25-msec) base intervals. Similarly large changes in performance were observed also when the two tonal markers of each interval were made very dissimilar from each other, either in frequency (frequency difference larger than 1 octave) or in intensity (level of the first marker at least 45 dB below the level of the second marker). Time-difference thresholds in these two latter cases were found to be nonmonotonically related to the base interval, the minima occurring between 40- and 80-msec onset separations.