Residential Mobility and Prosocial Development Within a Single City

Neighborhood social dynamics have been shown to impact behavioral development in residents, including levels of prosociality (i.e. positive social behavior). This study explores whether residential moves to neighborhoods with different social dynamics can influence further prosocial development. Prosociality, five domains of social support, and residential location were tracked between 2006 and 2009 in 397 adolescents across a small city in upstate New York. Analysis compared the role of the different forms of social support in prosocial development for movers versus non-movers. The effects of one's neighborhood of residence at Time 2 were also compared between movers and non-movers. Prosocial development in these two groups responded similarly to all forms of social support, including from neighbors. Movers experienced a greater increase in prosociality the more residentially stable the adolescent population of their new neighborhood of residence. Such neighborhood characteristics were not influential in the prosocial development of non-movers.     

Stimulus expectancy modulates inferior frontal gyrus and premotor cortex activity in auditory perception

In studies on auditory speech perception, participants are often asked to perform active tasks, e.g. decide whether the perceived sound is a speech sound or not. However, information about the stimulus, inherent in such tasks, may induce expectations that cause altered activations not only in the auditory cortex, but also in frontal areas such as inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and motor cortices, even in the absence of an explicit task. To investigate this, we applied spectral mixes of a flute sound and either vowels or specific music instrument sounds (e.g. trumpet) in an fMRI study, in combination with three different instructions. The instructions either revealed no information about stimulus features, or explicit information about either the music instrument or the vowel features. The results demonstrated that, besides an involvement of posterior temporal areas, stimulus expectancy modulated in particular a network comprising IFG and premotor cortices during this passive listening task.     

Sequential dependencies in driving

The effect of recent experience on current behavior has been studied extensively in simple laboratory tasks. We explore the nature of sequential effects in the more naturalistic setting of automobile driving. Driving is a safety-critical task in which delayed response times may have severe consequences. Using a realistic driving simulator, we find significant sequential effects in pedal-press response times that depend on the history of recent stimuli and responses. Response times are slowed up to 100 ms in particular cases, a delay that has dangerous practical consequences. Further, we observe a significant number of history-related pedal misapplications, which have recently been noted as a cause for concern in the automotive safety community. By anticipating these consequences of sequential context, driver assistance systems could mitigate the effects of performance degradations and thus critically improve driver safety.     

青少年网络游戏与心理健康:动机的调节与中介

先前研究对游戏动机在网游与心理健康关系中的作用缺乏明确的认识,相关领域的研究也存在争议。通过实证研究发现:(1)成就和归属动机对网游-健康关系均具有显著的调节作用,但方向相反;成就动机具有类似防御的积极作用,归属动机的调节作用显示了以网游满足归属需要带来的消极后果;(2)享乐动机不完全中介了网游-健康关系(系数为负),以享乐动机的满足作为网游目的的人,较少沉迷于网络游戏,心理健康问题也较少。     

关联效应中对情绪诱词的错误再认的实验研究

采用DRM范式,考察了在汉字单字词语音关联和形声关联条件下对具有情绪色彩的关键诱词的错误再认情况,结果表明:(1)汉字中存在着语音和字形关联,但是语音关联下的对诱词的错误再认率很低。(2)语音关联、形声关联条件下,尽管学习阶段没有出现带有情绪色彩的词,被试仍然对情绪诱词都产生了显著的错误再认。(3)形声关联下对关键诱词的错误再认近于语音关联的两倍,可见概括性的强度影响错误记忆的大小。     

INTERACTION EFFECTS IN MULTIELEMENT DESIGNS: INEVITABLE,DESIRABLE, AND IGNORABLE

A single-subject design often used to compare the effectiveness of two or more independent variables (like treatment programs) is the multielement (alternating treatments or simultaneous treatments) design. Variants of this design approximate the concurrent comparison of the effects of two or more variables (or levels of variables) by programming the variables (or levels) in rapid alternation, typically across or within daily sessions. Properly combined with conventional reversal designs, these designs can also display a variety of interaction effects, some of them worrisome, others highly desirable for the future development of the field. A worrisome model is the possibility that when Treatment B alternates rapidly with Treatment C, the effects of each will not be the same as when each is the only treatment used. A desirable model is the use of the multielement design as a fast-paced component of an otherwise conventional reversal design examining contextual control of some relationship: the possibility that some behavior responds differently to Controlling Variables A and B in Context X than in Context Y. This second possibility opens single-subject designs to the more efficient examination of all interactive effects and is highly desirable, considering the prevalence and importance of interactions in determining the limits and the generality of currently understood behavioral phenomena.     

Consumption-leisure tradeoffs in pigeons: Effects of changing marginal wage rates by varying amount of reinforcement

Pigeons' rates of responding and food reinforcement under simple random-ratio schedules were compared with those obtained under comparable ratio schedules in which free food deliveries were added, but the duration of each food delivery was halved. These ratio-with-free-food schedules were constructed so that, were the pigeon to maintain the same rate of responding as it had under the simple ratio schedule, total food obtained (earned plus free) would remain unchanged. However, any reduction in responding would reduce total food consumption below that under the simple ratio schedule. These “compensated wage decreases” led to decreases in responding and decreases in food consumption, as predicted by an economic model of labor supply. Moreover, the reductions in responding increased as the ratio value increased (i.e., as wage rates decreased). Pigeons, therefore, substituted leisure for consumption. The relationship between these procedures and negative-income-tax programs is noted.     

THE EFFECTS OF CONTINGENT AND NONCONTINGENT REWARDS ON THE I.Q. SCORES OF CHILDREN OF ABOVE-AVERAGE INTELLIGENCE1

This study investigated the effects of candy reinforcement on I.Q. test scores in first and second graders of above-average intelligence. Thirty-six subjects were randomly assigned to one of three groups and either given candy contingent on correct responses, noncontingently, or not given candy. After measuring all subjects on Form L of the revised Stanford Binet, each subject in the contingent group was given an M & M immediately following each correct answer on Form M, while a yoked-comparison subject received the same number of M & M's before responding to a question and therefore without regard to correctness of answers. It was expected that both types of candy administration would produce higher I.Q. change scores than the no-candy control group, but there were no statistically significant differences among the three treatments. The differences between the first and second test scores were 4.17 (contingent), 4.67 (noncontingent), and 1.00 (no reinforcement). Reasons for this failure to replicate previous findings were discussed.     

The effects of varying the distribution of generalization stimuli within a constant range upon the bisection of a sound-intensity interval by rats

Two male, albino rats were trained on a two-valued, self-paced, discrete-trials auditory discrimination. In the presence of a high-intensity stimulus (90 decibels SPL, 4 kiloHertz), response A was reinforced; in the presence of a low-intensity stimulus (50 decibels SPL, 4 kiloHertz), response B was reinforced. When discrimination performance was asymptotic, stimuli intermediate in intensity were presented with the training stimuli in a maintained generalization paradigm. Generalization gradients were derived from the relative frequencies of response A in the presence of each stimulus. A relative frequency of 0.50 was then determined and used as the bisection point of the intensity interval defined by the 90- and 50-decibel stimuli. The bisection point varied with the distribution of the stimuli presented in generalization. This effect was similar to context effects seen in human psychophysics.     

Conjunctive schedules of response-dependent and response-independent reinforcement

Pigeons received food when they emitted the number of responses specified by a fixed-ratio schedule, and the time specified by a fixed-time schedule had elapsed. The order of meeting the response and time requirements was irrelevant. In different conditions, stimuli signalled completion of one, both, or neither requirement. Ratio size interacted with stimulus condition to determine performance. When a stimulus signalled the end of the fixed-time period, under all ratios the birds tended to respond after the stimulus appeared. When stimuli followed both components, small ratios produced responding during the fixed-time period, and other ratios resulted in responses after the time period had elapsed. With either no stimulus changes, or with a stimulus correlated with completion of the ratio alone, responding first increased and then decreased as the ratio increased. Low and high ratios produced stable response frequencies and patterns in successive intervals. Intermediate ratios resulted in two types of performance. Intervals with long initial pauses and few responses during the fixed-time period were followed by intervals with short pauses and numerous responses and vice versa. The source of these dynamic effects was hypothesized to be number of responses per reinforcer in one condition and response-reinforcer contiguity in the other.