Children's recall and source monitoring of a repeated event using a timeline as an interview aid

Investigators sometimes use timelines (visual depictions of time) to help children identify temporal information from experienced events or details from a particular instance of a repeated event. However, little is actually known about the efficacy of this visual aid on children's memories. Six‐ to 9‐year‐olds participated in four occurrences of a repeated event and were later interviewed with or without the use of a timeline. Children in the timeline condition were less accurate and made more source‐monitoring errors than those in the control condition. For items that appeared consistently throughout the events, a suggestibility effect was more evident for older children who used the timeline than those who did not. Overall, there was no clear evidence in support of the visual aid. Despite its popularity, our findings suggest that timelines should be further examined to establish whether, and under what circumstances, they might be used in investigative contexts.     

语音回路和视空间模板对音位流畅性和语义流畅性的影响

采用双任务范式,通过四种次任务考察了工作记忆两个子系统－语音回路和视空间模板对音位流畅性和语义流畅性的影响。实验1表明,主动产生系列发音和被动聆听声音判断对音位流畅性影响更大,表明音位流畅性更依赖于语音回路。实验2表明,字形匹配和字形旋转判断对语义流畅性影响更大,表明语义流畅性更依赖于视空间模板。研究还表明,被试完成音位流畅性任务的策略更易受语言的特点影响,完成语义流畅性任务的策略更易受概念系统的特性影响     

Age trends in stimulus overselectivity

Stimulus overselectivity refers to the phenomenon whereby stimulus control over behavior is exerted only by a limited subset of the total number of stimuli present during discrimination learning. It often is displayed by individuals with autistic spectrum disorders or learning disabilities, but is not exclusive to those groups. The present studies investigated the impact of aging on stimulus control and overselectivity. Three age groups--18-22, 47-55, and 70-80 year olds-were studied in two experiments. All participants were trained on a simple discrimination task, randomly assigned to one of two conditions (either with or without a distractor task), and then tested for the emergence of overselectivity (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2 responding controlled by the overselected stimulus elements was reduced by introducing a verbal punisher. In subsequent tests, control of behavior by the previously underselected elements from Experiment 1 was enhanced across the two younger age groups but not the oldest group of participants. The results are discussed in relation to the attention-deficit and overshadowing accounts of overselectivity.     

Perception and its objects

Early modern empiricists thought that the nature of perceptual experience is given by citing the object presented to the mind in that experience. Hallucination and illusion suggest that this requires untenable mind-dependent objects. Current orthodoxy replaces the appeal to direct objects with the claim that perceptual experience is characterized instead by its representational content. This paper argues that the move to content is problematic, and reclaims the early modern empiricist insight as perfectly consistent, even in cases of illusion, with the realist contention that these direct objects of perception are the persisting mind-independent physical objects we all know and love.

A preliminary evaluation of the emergence of novel mand forms

Strategies that produce generalized responding are valuable, especially with regard to language acquisition, because relatively little training may result in large behavior changes. Conditions that result in generalized manding were analyzed in the current study. We demonstrated in reversal designs that undesirable or single-word responses were the predominant mand forms of 3 preschool children. Multiple baseline designs with 2 participants and a reversal design with 1 participant were then used to demonstrate the extent to which differential reinforcement of single-word mands (e.g., "cars") or framed mands (e.g., "I want the cars, please") would result in the emergence of other single-word and framed mands for different items (e.g., mands for music, puppets, or puzzles). Results showed that prompting and differential reinforcement of one or two mand frames resulted in the emergence of other framed mands for all participants.     

Further evaluation of emerging speech in children with developmental disabilities: training verbal behavior

The conceptual basis for many effective language-training programs are based on Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior. Skinner described several elementary verbal operants including mands, tacts, intraverbals, and echoics. According to Skinner, responses that are the same topography may actually be functionally independent. Previous research has supported Skinner's assertion of functional independence (e.g., Hall & Sundberg, 1987; Lamarre & Holland, 1985), and some research has suggested that specific programming must be incorporated to achieve generalization across verbal operants (e.g., Sigafoos, Reichle, & Doss, 1990). The present study provides further analysis of the independence of verbal operants when teaching language to children with autism and other developmental disabilities. In the current study, 3 participants' vocal responses were first assessed as mands or tacts. Generalization for each verbal operant across alternate conditions was then assessed and subsequent training provided as needed. Results indicated that generalization across verbal operants occurred across some, but not all, vocal responses. These results are discussed relative to the functional independence of verbal operants as described by Skinner.     

Assessment of the functions of vocal behavior in children with developmental disabilities: a replication

Although experimental analysis methodologies have been useful for identifying the function of a wide variety of target behaviors (e.g., Iwata, Dorsey, Slifer, Bauman, & Richman, 1982/1994), only recently have such procedures been applied to verbal operants (Lerman et al., 2005). In the current study, we conducted a systematic replication of the methodology developed by Lerman et al. Participants were 4 children who had been diagnosed with developmental disabilities and who engaged in limited vocal behavior. The function of vocal behavior was assessed by exposing target vocal responses to experimental analyses. Results showed that experimental analyses were generally useful for identifying the functions of vocal behavior across all participants.     

A day of great illumination: B. F. Skinner's discovery of shaping

Despite the seminal studies of response differentiation by the method of successive approximation detailed in chapter 8 of The Behavior of Organisms (1938), B. F. Skinner never actually shaped an operant response by hand until a memorable incident of startling serendipity on the top floor of a flour mill in Minneapolis in 1943. That occasion appears to have been a genuine eureka experience for Skinner, causing him to appreciate as never before the significance of reinforcement mediated by biological connections with the animate social environment, as opposed to purely mechanical connections with the inanimate physical environment. This insight stimulated him to coin a new term (shaping), and also led directly to a shift in his perspective on verbal behavior from an emphasis on antecedents and molecular topographical details to an emphasis on consequences and more molar, functional properties in which the social dyad inherent to the shaping process became the definitive property of verbal behavior. Moreover, the insight seems to have emboldened Skinner to explore the greater implications of his behaviorism for human behavior writ large, an enterprise that characterized the bulk of his post-World War II scholarship.     

Relations between enabling skills and reading comprehension: a follow-up study of Latvian students from first to second grade

In order to examine the relationships among various phonological skills and reading comprehension, Latvian children were followed from grade 1 to grade 2 and were tested with a battery of phonological, word reading, and reading comprehension tasks. A principal component analysis of the phonological tasks revealed three salient factors: a phonemic awareness factor, a rapid naming factor, and a short-term memory factor. In order to analyze the relationship between various phonological skills and reading comprehension, a structural modeling analysis was performed. Phonemic awareness and rapid naming explained approximately the same amount of unique variance in reading comprehension, but phonemic awareness had most predictive power indirectly via word decoding. Only rapid naming had a significant direct impact on reading comprehension.     

Eye contact does not facilitate detection in children with autism

Eye contact is crucial in achieving social communication. Deviant patterns of eye contact behavior are found in individuals with autism, who suffer from severe social and communicative deficits. This study used a visual oddball paradigm to investigate whether children with high functioning autism have difficulty in detecting mutual gaze under experimental conditions. The results revealed that children with autism were no better at detecting direct gaze than at detecting averted gaze, which is unlike normal children. This suggests that whereas typically developing children have the ability to detect direct gaze, children with autism do not. This might result in altered eye-contact behavior, which hampers subsequent development of social and communicative skills.