Rethinking reinforcement: allocation, induction, and contingency

The concept of reinforcement is at least incomplete and almost certainly incorrect. An alternative way of organizing our understanding of behavior may be built around three concepts: allocation, induction, and correlation. Allocation is the measure of behavior and captures the centrality of choice: All behavior entails choice and consists of choice. Allocation changes as a result of induction and correlation. The term induction covers phenomena such as adjunctive, interim, and terminal behavior-behavior induced in a situation by occurrence of food or another Phylogenetically Important Event (PIE) in that situation. Induction resembles stimulus control in that no one-to-one relation exists between induced behavior and the inducing event. If one allowed that some stimulus control were the result of phylogeny, then induction and stimulus control would be identical, and a PIE would resemble a discriminative stimulus. Much evidence supports the idea that a PIE induces all PIE-related activities. Research also supports the idea that stimuli correlated with PIEs become PIE-related conditional inducers. Contingencies create correlations between "operant" activity (e.g., lever pressing) and PIEs (e.g., food). Once an activity has become PIE-related, the PIE induces it along with other PIE-related activities. Contingencies also constrain possible performances. These constraints specify feedback functions, which explain phenomena such as the higher response rates on ratio schedules in comparison with interval schedules. Allocations that include a lot of operant activity are "selected" only in the sense that they generate more frequent occurrence of the PIE within the constraints of the situation; contingency and induction do the "selecting."     

Psychometric qualities of the White Bear Suppression Inventory in a Dutch sample of children and adolescents

The White Bear Suppression Inventory [WBSI; Wegner and Zanakos (1994)] was developed to assess the tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts. Most psychometric studies of the WBSI have included healthy students and adults with obsessive-compulsive disorder. There has been increasing interest in thought suppression in children and adolescents, especially after a traumatic event, but little is known about the psychometric properties of the WBSI for children. The aim of this research was to examine the psychometric qualities of the WBSI in a Dutch sample of children and adolescents. Two studies were conducted. First, the WBSI’s factor structure, internal consistency and test-retest stability were examined in a sample of 203 primary school children (9-13 years). Second, the factor structure and content validity were assessed in 89 children and adolescents (8-18 years) who attended the emergency room after a road traffic accident. Results demonstrated that the WBSI items contribute to a single factor measuring the suppression of unwanted thoughts and that the reliability is satisfactory. Associations between the WBSI and PTSD-symptoms demonstrated sufficient content validity. The findings suggest that the WBSI can appropriately be used in child and adolescent samples.     

No evidence for a General Factor of Personality in the HEXACO Personality Inventory

There have been an increasing number of articles that have speculated on the existence of a General Factor of Personality (GFP) similar to ‘g’ in intelligence research. In this study, I provide evidence that this general factor may be an artifact of the personality instrument used. Specifically, in two samples I show that depending on the type of analysis used there is either no evidence for a GFP in the HEXACO Personality Inventory or the GFP is found to be uncorrelated to GFPs based on Big Five or FFM instruments.     

Aging and the segmentation of narrative film

The perception of event structure in continuous activity is important for everyday comprehension. Although the segmentation of experience into events is a normal concomitant of perceptual processing, previous research has shown age differences in the ability to perceive structure in naturalistic activity, such as a movie of someone washing a car. However, past research has also shown that older adults have a preserved ability to comprehend events in narrative text, which suggests that narrative may improve the event processing of older adults. This study tested whether there are age differences in event segmentation at the intersection of continuous activity and narrative: narrative film. Younger and older adults watched and segmented a narrative film, The Red Balloon, into coarse and fine events. Changes in situational features, such as changes in characters, goals, and objects predicted segmentation. Analyses revealed little age-difference in segmentation behavior. This suggests the possibility that narrative structure supports event understanding for older adults.     

Cognitive technology to capture deep computational concepts with combinators

Computational activity is now recognized as a natural science, and computational and information processes have been discovered in the deep structures of many areas. Computations in the natural world were present long before the invention of computers, but a remarkable shift in understanding its fundamental nature occurs, in fact, before our eyes. The present moment, in fact, is a transition from the concept of computer science as an artificial science to the understanding that information processes are abundant in nature. Computing is recognized as a natural science that studies natural and artificial information processes.In everyday computing, operations are performed on the individual generators, with little attention paid to their internal structure. However, many common operations consist of more primitive constructions connected by a combination mode. The interaction of information processes and corresponding structures is carried out in an environment of “applicative interaction”, their applications to each other, and the study of the properties of this environment allows us to understand the nature of the computations.In the present work, the main attention is paid to elucidating the technological features of computations with individual generators, or objects. Their interaction is considered in an applicative environment, which allows us to elucidate the internal structure of ordinary operations, the knowledge of which allows us to understand their properties. The choice of initial constant generators, considered as generic ones and expressed by combinators, is discussed. These initial generators are used as the main “building blocks” that occur within the larger blocks of the applicative environment in interaction with each other. As a result of the interaction, constructions arise that give representative sets of ordinary operators and embedded computing systems.     

Patterns of Religious Education Policy in Switzerland: The Long Arm of Distanced Christians?

In spite of its different cantonal jurisdictions and traditions, the development of religious education in Switzerland over the past decade has taken a common direction: the state has assumed a more active role in the field of religious education in public (state‐run) schools. In this article, we ask the question: How do key social actors interpret these reforms and how do these interpretations relate to the social structure of religion in Switzerland, in particular with respect to the majority category of the so‐called distanced Christians? Drawing on qualitative interviews with members of the schools’ teaching staff, school administrators, and church representatives, the article highlights a dominant interpretative pattern that frames the socially accepted representation of religion in public schools. Thus, rather than addressing the pedagogical dimension of religious education, we discuss the significance of this pattern for the debate on the public presence of religion in Switzerland and Europe.     

Revisiting Chinese‐speaking children's understanding of argument structure

A causative verb is likely to appear in a sentence with two noun arguments, whereas a noncausative verb tends to appear in a sentence with a single argument. The present research investigates from what point children learning Chinese begin to show this knowledge of argument structure. Two‐, 3‐, 4‐, and 5‐year‐old children were tested using a forced‐choice pointing task. The results showed that Chinese‐speaking children aged 2 years could associate a transitive construction with a causative event, whereas they were not able to map an intransitive construction to a noncausative event even after reaching 5 years of age. The reason why Chinese children have such difficulty in learning knowledge of intransitive construction is discussed, focusing on (a) the semantic properties of certain intransitive verbs, which have been found not only in Chinese but also in other languages, and (b) the ellipsis of arguments, which is characteristic of Chinese.     

Neurophysiological marker of inhibition distinguishes language groups on a non-linguistic executive function test

Successful interaction with the environment depends on flexible behaviors which require shifting attention, inhibiting primed responses, ignoring distracting information, and withholding motor responses. These abilities, termed executive function (EF), are believed to be mediated by inhibitory processes in the frontal lobes. Superior performance on EF tests (i.e., faster reaction times (RT), and fewer errors) has been shown in bilinguals compared to monolingual speakers. However, findings are inconsistent, and no study has directly linked this bilingual advantage to frontal lobe inhibitory processes. To clarify this uncertainty, we concomitantly tested neural inhibitory processes and behavioral responses on an EF test in bilinguals and monolinguals. Specifically, we compared English monolinguals (N = 15) to Spanish/English bilinguals (N = 13) on event-related brain potentials (ERP) during a non-linguistic, auditory Go/NoGo task, a task linked to non-motor, cognitive inhibition in monolinguals. Participants responded with a button press on trials in which target tone-pairs (Go trials) were presented and withheld their responses on non-target trials (NoGo trials). Results revealed significantly greater inhibition (i.e., greater mean N2 amplitude) in bilinguals compared to monolinguals during NoGo trials even though both groups performed the task equally well (i.e., withheld a motor response). On Go trials where participants pressed a response button, neither ERPs nor RT distinguished the groups. Additionally, scores on a second language proficiency test (i.e., English in our bilingual group) were positively correlated with N2 amplitude. These findings are the first to directly link this bilingual advantage to a neural correlate of inhibition and to reveal that inhibition in bilinguals is moderated by second language proficiency. Results are discussed in the context of plasticity, and we propose that evaluating bilinguals at varying levels of second-language proficiency may serve as a model of human neuroplasticity.     

Children Use Temporal Cues to Learn Causal Directionality

The ability to learn the direction of causal relations is critical for understanding and acting in the world. We investigated how children learn causal directionality in situations in which the states of variables are temporally dependent (i.e., autocorrelated). In Experiment 1, children learned about causal direction by comparing the states of one variable before versus after an intervention on another variable. In Experiment 2, children reliably inferred causal directionality merely from observing how two variables change over time; they interpreted Y changing without a change in X as evidence that Y does not influence X. Both of these strategies make sense if one believes the variables to be temporally dependent. We discuss the implications of these results for interpreting previous findings. More broadly, given that many real‐world environments are characterized by temporal dependency, these results suggest strategies that children may use to learn the causal structure of their environments.     

The Effects of Prior Learned Strategies on Updating an Opponent's Strategy in the Rock,Paper, Scissors Game

To explore how model building adapts to changing environments, we had participants play “rock‐paper‐scissors” against a computer that played a frequency bias or a player‐dependent bias and then switched. Participants demonstrated their use of prior experience in how quickly they recognized and exploited changes in the computer's play strategy; in general, the more similar the strategies, the more efficient the updating. These findings inform our understanding of previously reported updating impairments in right‐brain damaged patients.