Avoidance of heat by rats: Effects of thermal context on rapidity of extinction

Rats were trained to avoid radiant heat in a one-way, jump-up apparatus. The animals that could avoid heat responded more frequently and more rapidly than did yoked controls that received heat, but for whom no avoidance contingency was deliberately arranged. Control animals trained with light, rather than heat, did not learn to avoid. Using this jump-up avoidance, rats were trained to avoid heat in a room maintained at 27°C. They were then given a series of extinction trials, with no heat presentations, with the temperature maintained at either 27 or 7°C. Placing the rats in a cold environment facilitated extinction of heat avoidance behavior, but only in animals that had previously experienced heat while they were in the cold. Prior heat experience administered in a warm, rather than cold, context was not sufficient to potentiate the effect of ambient temperature on avoidance extinction. Implications of these results for theories of avoidance learning are discussed.     

Duration of failure,causal attributions for failure,and subsequent reactions

Subjects were given a preliminary problem solving task of either short or long duration, and were told that they could shorten the duration of aversive noise bursts by correctly solving the problems. They were then given false feedback that they had done either well or poorly on the problems. Two groups of failing subjects were given information designed to lead them to attribute failure to either lack of ability or a difficult task. Two additional groups received “success” or “failure” feedback without any attributional cues. Failure-induced stress was reported to be greater under short duration conditions than under long duration conditions, and increased to the extent that subjects were led to believe they were personally responsible for failure. Following the preliminary failure period, task performance in the same situation and task performance and persistence in a different situation were assessed. In each case, performance and persistence decreased (a) following short-duration failure when subjects were led to attribute failure to a difficult task, and (b) following long-duration failure when subjects were led to attribute failure to lack of ability. These results are discussed within a framework that emphasizes the role of casual attributions in mediating the effects of failure.     

Objective self-awareness,standards of evaluation,and moral behavior

In a performance setting, subjects were given an opportunity to cheat without fear of detection on puzzle problems. Subjects were led to believe that successful performance was due to ability in some conditions, but to luck in other conditions. In fact, most of the problems were insolvable, so that success was impossible without cheating. Self-awareness was induced in half the subjects by having them sit in front of a mirror and listen to a tape recording of their own voice as they worked on the puzzle problems; the remaining subjects were not exposed to a mirror and listened to a tape of someone else's voice as they worked on the problems. It was predicted that cheating frequency would be higher under ability attribution conditions than under luck attribution conditions, and that this effect of performance attribution would be greater among self-aware subjects than among non-self-aware subjects. Results confirmed these hypotheses. Discussion centered on the differential use of morality and competence standards for behavior when in a state of self-awareness.     

Perceptions of the magnitude and diversity of social support

Three studies were conducted to test the hypotheses that subjects would overestimate the proportion of their peers who shared their opinion on an issue and that they would perceive their own opinion group as consisting of people with a wider and more diverse range of values and outlooks than those holding different opinions. The first study was conducted following a period of intense debate about sixism on a college campus. Subjects estimated student opinion on issues related to sexism and indicated how diverse or similar they perceived supporters and nonsupporters of the women's movement to be. In a second study subjects estimated the proportion of students who evaluated President Carter's performance as good, fair, or poor and then indicated how diverse or similar the three groups of students were who held these various opinions. A third study closely replicated the second, using the issue of divestiture of college-owned stock in South Africa. In all three studies, subjects were divided into groups on the basis of their own attitudes. Results consistently supported the hypotheses.     

Interference in memory for pictorial information

Subjects studied either faces composed from visual features or verbal facts composed from concepts. Recognition times were increased for both faces and facts when they were composed of elements that occurred in multiple study items. In Experiment 1 the interfering effect of other study items was much larger for verbal facts than for faces. This difference was largely eliminated in Experiment 2 where care was taken to control the features by which the faces were encoded. Experiment 2 also showed that verbal information could interfere with pictorial information and vice versa. However, this cross-modality interference was much weaker than within-modality interference. The data are consistent with the ACT theory in which pictorial material and verbal material are stored together in an abstract propositional network. The subnode model (Anderson, Language, memory, and thought, Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1976) can account for the greater within- than cross-modality interference.     

Social judgments of spurious and causal relations between attributes and outcomes

People can learn about relations between attributes and outcomes by observing the attributes and outcomes of others, but, as this experiment indicates, such learning is not always veridical. Each subject received information about the ages, educations, and salaries of groups of employees in a fictitious corporation. Within a group, either age or education was related to salaries and the two attributes were either orthogonal or correlated. In each case, subjects judged the strength of the causal relation between each attribute and salaries. The results confirmed our hypothesis that observers are more likely to view a causally relevant attribute as irrelevant, and a causally irrelevant attribute as relevant, when relevant and irrelevant attributes are correlated. However, this tendency seemed to be mediated by subjects' bias to prefer education as an explanation of salary differences: That is, when age and education were correlated, subjects tended to view education as relevant even when it was irrelevant and age as irrelevant even when it was relevant. The results suggest that when attributes are correlated, factors extraneous to observed data may have a major influence on inferred attribute-outcome associations.     

Consistent curricular choice and congruence of subsequent changes

Curriculum choices of 324 male and 157 female liberal arts students who took the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory (SCII) during freshman orientation were classified as congruent or incongruent on the basis of rated correspondence between three-letter codes derived from (SCII) Holland theme scales and expressed curricular choice. The choices of those subjects reporting one or more changes in five semesters were examined for level of congruence using a two-way analysis of variance with repeated measures. While serious methodological limitations are noted, analysis of variance procedures indicated that congruent subjects tended to be more stable, more differentiated, and more academically oriented than incongruent subjects. Among subjects who reported one or more changes, Artistic subjects decreased in congruence while Investigative subjects showed no overall change. Results are discussed in terms of recent theory and previous research.     

Delayed matching in the pigeon: Effect on performance of sample-specific observing responses and differential delay behavior

Pigeons were trained on a delayed matching-to-sample task with a 0-sec delay and then transferred to a 1-sec delay (Experiment 1) or were trained with mixed 0-sec/1-sec delays and then transferred to longer mixed delays up to 28 sec (Experiment 2). Four groups were distinguished by the nature of the observing response required to each sample color (red and blue). For Group NN pecks were allowed to neither color. For Group PcPc pecks were required to both colors. For Group PcN pecks were required to red but were not allowed to blue. For Group PcPt pecks were required at the center key in the presence of red, but at a key located directly above the center key in the presence of blue. The results of both experiments indicated significant effects of both Pecking vs Not Pecking, and Sample-Specific vs Sample-Independent Responding. At the longer delays individual differences in sample-specific delay behavior were a better predictor of performance than the behavior required in the presence of the sample.     

Recovery from aphasia: Spontaneous speech versus language comprehension

Seventy-four aphasic patients, subdivided into four groups (fluent, mixed, nonfluent, and severely nonfluent), were tested three times in the course of 1 year to assess recovery of spontaneous speech and sentence comprehension. Although 12 of the 28 spontaneous speech variables employed showed significant time changes, some of these changes indicated improvement and others deterioration. There was no overall clinical improvement in spontaneous speech in any group. On the sentence comprehension tests, however, all four groups did show considerable, significant improvement. There were no qualitative or quantitative differences among the groups in the course of recovery, despite the fact that the groups differed in the severity of aphasia as well as on the fluency dimension. In certain patients there was also some improvement in spontaneous speech, but this did not in most cases correlate with an improvement in either fluency or sentence comprehension. Possible reasons why receptive abilities improved more than expressive abilities are discussed.