Risk it? Direct and collateral impacts of peers' verbal expressions about hazard likelihoods*

When people encounter potential hazards, their expectations and behaviours can be shaped by a variety of factors including other people's expressions of verbal likelihood (e.g., unlikely to harm). What is the impact of such expressions when a person also has numeric likelihood estimates from the same source(s)? Two studies used a new task involving an abstract virtual environment in which people learned about and reacted to novel hazards. Verbal expressions attributed to peers influenced participants’ behaviour toward hazards even when numeric estimates were also available. Namely, verbal expressions suggesting that the likelihood of harm from a hazard is low (vs. higher) yielded more risk taking with respect to said hazard. There were also inverse collateral effects, whereby participants’ behaviour and estimates regarding another hazard in the same context were affected in the opposite direction. These effects may be based on directionality and relativity cues inferred from verbal likelihood expressions.     

学前儿童抑制控制的发展趋势及其对言语理解和数学认知的预测作用

以长春市某幼儿园的122名3~6岁幼儿为被试,采用2(测试任务:无嵌套规则白天黑夜任务,有嵌套规则的白天黑夜任务)×2(测试时间:间隔9个月的第一次测试和第二次测试)×4(年龄分组:3.00~3.75岁组,3.76~4.50岁组,4.51~5.25岁组,5.26~6.00岁组)的三因素混合设计,来分析不同复杂程度的抑制控制在学前阶段的发展趋势,并在控制幼儿年龄和工作记忆水平后,分析不同复杂程度抑制控制对言语理解和数学认知的独立预测作用。结果发现:(1)对3~6岁儿童来说,有嵌套规则的白天黑夜任务的难度水平要显著高于无嵌套规则的白天黑夜任务;(2)较简单的抑制控制(无嵌套规则的白天黑夜任务)在学前阶段的发展速度先快后慢,但较复杂的抑制控制(有嵌套规则的白天黑夜任务)在3~6岁期间持续快速发展;(3)独立于年龄和工作记忆,较复杂的抑制控制能够显著预测幼儿的数学认知和言语理解,但较简单的抑制控制对言语理解和数学认知的预测作用不显著。根据上述结果,在描述学前儿童抑制控制发展趋势时要注意任务难度的设定,而且难度适当的抑制控制任务成绩更能预测幼儿的言语理解和数学认知。     

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.     

Inconsistency as an interactional problem: a lesson from political rhetoric

The classical theory of cognitive dissonance suggests that when two related cognitions are mutually inconsistent, one of them will change to restore consistency. However, Billig suggests that inconsistency is primarily an interactional problem between subjects and not a cognitive problem within a subject. In the current paper, we adopt Billig's rhetorical approach to inconsistency and study inconsistency as an interactional problem in the context of political rhetoric. More specifically, we use Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis to identify the discursive strategies the former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, used to cope with the inconsistency between his national ideology and his contradictory behavior during his short term in office.     

Asymmetric influences of temporally vs. nasally presented masked visual information: evidence for collicular contributions to nonconscious priming effects

It was tested whether the retino-collicular projection allows for the processing of nonconsciously registered visual information in healthy individuals. Masked primes were presented to different visual hemifields. Because the retino-collicular projection is stronger for temporal than for nasal hemifields, priming should be stronger by temporal than by nasal primes. This pattern was tested in two experiments (Experiments 1 and 3). Further, with less peripheral primes, only available to weaker parts of the retino-collicular projection, hemifield asymmetries of priming vanished (Experiment 2). In conclusion, the study offers first evidence for collicular contributions to nonconscious priming effects by visual information in healthy individuals.     

Using task clarification, graphic feedback, and verbal feedback to increase closing-task completion in a privately owned restaurant

An informant functional assessment was used to evaluate closing-task completion by servers and dishwashers at a restaurant. Based on the functional assessment results, an intervention consisting of task clarification, posted graphic feedback, and verbal feedback was implemented and evaluated with a multiple baseline design across two groups of employees. Results showed an increase of 15% and 38% in task completion for the two groups.     

The effects of differential and lag reinforcement schedules on varied verbal responding by individuals with autism

Variability has been shown to be a reinforceable dimension of behavior. One procedure that has been demonstrated to increase variability in basic research is the lag reinforcement schedule. On this type of schedule, a response is reinforced if it differs from a specified number of previous responses. Lag schedules are rarely used, however, for increasing response variability in applied settings. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of a lag schedule of differential reinforcement on varied and appropriate verbal responding to social questions by 3 males with autism. A reversal design with a multiple baseline across subjects was used to evaluate the effects of the lag schedule. During baseline, differential reinforcement of appropriate responding (DRA) resulted in little or no varied responding. During the intervention, a Lag 1 requirement was added to the DRA (Lag 1/DRA) resulting in an increase in the percentage of trials with varied and appropriate verbal responding for 2 of the 3 participants. In addition, an increase in the cumulative number of novel verbal responses was also observed for the same 2 participants. These results are discussed in terms of reinforcement schedules that support variability, generalization, and potential stimulus control over varied responding.     

Does the nature of the experience influence suggestibility? A study of children's event memory

Two experiments examined the effects of event modality on children's memory and suggestibility. In Experiment 1, 3- and 5-year-old children directly participated in, observed, or listened to a narrative about an event. In an interview immediately after the event, free recall was followed by misleading or leading questions and, in turn, test recall questions. One week later children were reinterviewed. In Experiment 2, 4-year-old children either participated in or listened to a story about an event, either a single time or to a criterion level of learning. Misleading questions were presented either immediately or 1 week after learning, followed by test recall questions. Five-year-old children were more accurate than 3-year-olds and those participating were more accurate than those either observing or listening to a narrative. However, method of assessment, level of event learning, delay to testing, and variables relating to the misled items also influenced the magnitude of misinformation effects.