Visual behavior of the young human infant: Relationships between chromatic and spatial perception and the activity of underlying brain mechanisms

Two experiments investigated visual attention in human infants. In one experiment, babies looked longer at more than at less saturated colors. In a second experiment, babies looked longer at gratings aligned along the horizontal and vertical orthogonals than along the obliques. Because saturated colors and orthogonal stimulation elicit greater activity in visual system neurons and greater amplitude evoked potentials than desaturated colors or oblique stimulation, these two experiments support the hypothesis that the simple visual stimuli to which infants preferably attend are those that are particularly appropriate in stimulating the geniculostriate or primary visual system. The ethological significance of this taxic mechanism and its utility and function in perception, cognition, and aesthetics are underscored.     

A test of the self-perception explanation of the effects of rewards on intrinsic interest

An experiment was conducted to test the proposition that rewards undermine or enhance intrinsic interest in a task to the extent that individuals interpret their behavior as being motivated by the reward. It was predicted that when subjects were denied the opportunity to develop and confirm this attribution, rewards would not produce an undermining effect, but rather would enhance dispositions and behavior. Subjects were recruited to evaluate a new sugar-free soft drink. Two levels of incentives (reward-no reward), two levels of examination (opportunity-no opportunity), and three levels of outcome (good-neutral-poor) were employed. The results support the prediction that an incentive's effect depends on the examination opportunity. In the examination condition, rewarded subjects attributed their behavior more to external factors than did unrewarded subjects, but gave more negative product evaluations only after tasting it. In the no examination condition, there were no differences in the attributions made by rewarded and unrewarded subjects, and rewarded subjects were more positively disposed toward the product both before and after tasting it. These results are explained as a consequence of two properties of rewards, enhancement through reinforcement and undermining through discounting, and of hypothesis-testing processes.     

Social influence on attitudes and on anchoring of congeneric attitude scales

Criteria for distinguishing between attitude and response scale effects in “after-only” studies of source-recipient discrepancy were developed and applied in two experiments. These criteria refer to congeneric scales (i.e., multiple measures of the the same property, which may differ in origin, unit, and reliability). Persuasive information may function as a scale anchor, in which case it is expected to affect only that response scale to which it directly pertains. Alternatively, it may convice recipients to change attitudinal positions, and produce effects on all congeneric scales. In one experiment, the self-proclaimed leniency-sternness of a presiding judge in a manslaughter case was varied along with the sentence he imposed and his trustworthiness. In the second study, only the sentence was manipulated, while both leniency ratings and sentencing were measured as dependent variables. Both analyses revealed support for the response scale interpretation, in that effects were observed only on those scales that were directly manipulated.     

Attitudinal qualities relating to the strength of the attitude-behavior relationship

A study was conducted to examine the relation between each of several attitudinal qualities and attitude-behavior consistency. Subjects' attitudes toward volunterring to participate in psychological research were assessed. The number of experiments in which each subject volunteered to participate was employed as the measure of behavior. Attitude-behavior consistency was significantly related to (1) the amount of direct experience upon which the subject's attitude was based (specifically, the number of experiments in which the subject had previously participated), (2) the degree of certainty with which the attitude was held, and (3) how well-defined the subject's attitude was, as measured by the width of his latitude of rejection. These three attitudinal qualities were significantly intercorrelated, suggesting that direct experience with an attitude object may produce an attitude that is both better defined and more confidently held than an attitude formed through more indirect means.     

Sexual arousal and interpersonal evaluations

In an attempt to reconcile conflicting results concerning the effects of sexual arousal on interpersonal evaluations, hypotheses based on adaptation level, arousal-need gratification, and labeling of arousal explanations were tested. The variables of sexual arousal, technique of stimulus material presentation, physical attractiveness of the original stimulus female, and physical attractiveness of the final target person being judged were manipulated in a 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 design. A significant three-way interaction (Arousal × Stimulus Attractiveness × Target Attractiveness) obtained on all measures of interpersonal evaluation was interpreted as supporting a labeling of arousal explanation. It is suggested that subjects first interpret their arousal as being caused by their attraction toward the stimulus person. The characteristics of the stimulus person then become a factor used by subjects when they subsequently make judgments of target females. The adaptation-level and arousal-need gratification hypotheses were not supported.     

Involuntary memory and the development of retrieval skills in young children

An incidental memory paradigm was used to study involuntary encoding processes and voluntary retrieval strategies in children's memory. Preschool (mean age: 4 years, 4 months) and kindergarten (mean age: 5 years, 10 months) children sorted pictures according to their color or category membership, and then received either a recall test (Experiment 1) or a recognition test (Experiment 2). Better retention of category- than color-sorted items was observed for kindergarten children in free recall, preschool and kindergarten children in cued recall, and neither group in recognition. These results were interpreted in terms of the retrieval strategies used by children in each of the memory tasks. The importance of distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary memory processes, and between acquisition and retrieval, in studies of depth-of-processing was emphasized. Developmental differences in performance appear to derive primarily from the role of voluntary search strategies in retrieval, rather than from age differences in involuntary encoding processes.     

The effects of observation on emotional arousal and affiliation

This study assessed the influence of anticipated experimenter surveillance during the performance of a painful or potentially embarrassing act on affiliative preferences before engaging in that act. As predicted, there was an overall preference for isolation when the act to be performed was embarrassing, and this tendency increased with anticipated surveillance. There was an overall preference for affiliation under fear arousal, and this preference also increased with anticipated surveillance. Contrary to previous research, whether or not the potential affiliate was a subject in the experiment (i.e., in a similar or dissimilar emotional state) did not affect these tendencies. Possible ways of accounting for these findings are discussed.     

The relative law of effect: effects of shock intensity on response strength in multiple schedules

Key pecking of four birds was reinforced with food according to a two-component multiple variable-interval 1-minute variable-interval 4-minute schedule. In addition, key pecking was punished by a brief shock according to a variable-interval 30-second schedule during both components of the multiple schedule. The intensity of the shock was varied. For all birds, punishment had a stronger suppressive effect on the responding maintained by the leaner food schedule, and the ratio of responding during the two components of the multiple schedule became closer to the ratio of reinforcement as shock intensity was increased, as the relative law of effect predicts. At the higher shock intensity, there was some evidence that the ratio of responses overmatched the ratio of reinforcements.     

Variability of response location on fixed-ratio and fixed-interval schedules of reinforcement

Variability of response location was studied in monkeys performing in a six-lever chamber. Fixed-ratio schedules, ranging from FR 1 to FR 300, generated a high degree of stereotypy of response location. In contrast, fixed-interval schedules of comparable reinforcement frequencies (0.06 to 4 minutes) generated much greater variability. These results failed to confirm any simple relationship between response variability and intermittence of reinforcement. Rather, variability seems to be determined by the particular characteristics of the reinforcement schedule.