Overshadowing in operant conditioning as a function of discriminability

Pigeons were trained in an operant, go/no-go, discrimination by successive presentations of discrete, positive and negative trials. In separate groups, the rate of discriminaion learning based on an auditory cue, on visual cues of different discriminability, and on combined auditory and visual cues was determined. The auditory cue was tone/no-tone, the visual cue was a difference in brightness level on the key. Following discrimination training, stimulus control was tested in extinction by presenting tone or notone at each of four key-brightness levels.Learning was more rapid with two cues than with either cue singly, demonstrating summation. The contribution made by the tone cue to the learning of the discrimination decreased with increasing discriminability of the light cue. The control exerted by the tone cue also decreased (i.e., the tone cue was overshadowed) with increasing discriminability of the light cue. In certain cases, the tone cue decreased control by brightness, showing that in two-cue discriminations each cue may reduce the control exerted by the other.     

A comment on Koriat,Averill, and Malmstrom's “individual differences in habituation”

The paper considers the issues, raised by Koriat et al. (1973), of the consistency and reliability of measures of habituation currently used in personality research. It is argued that the problem of reliability is not as serious as Koriat et al. proposed and that specificity of measures of habituation is a theoretical rather than a methodological problem. It is proposed that ambiguity in the literature on the personality correlates of habituation is more likely to be due to the failure to consider the effects of stimulus conditions on habituation than to the problems of reliability and specificity.     

Response elimination: A comparison of four procedures

Four procedures for eliminating an operant response were compared within a multiple schedule. Response reduction was most rapid when reinforcement was provided for a specific alternative response. The decline in responding produced by extinction and differential reinforcement of other behavior was similar. Responding initially increased and then gradually decreased when reinforcers were delivered independently of responding at fixed times. Removal of reinforcement from the alternative-response and DRO procedures did not result in recovery of the target response. However, the shift from response-independent dilivery of reinforcers to extinction caused an initial increase in responding.     

On the universality of language dissolution: The case of a Turkish aphasic

The case of a Turkish aphasic suffering from motor aphasia is described. The transitional phonemic systems which could be observed in this patient in the course of speech rehabilitation are compared to the so-called “phonemic disintegration,” whereas the errors of his graphic performance are compared to the so-called “agrammatism” of Indo-European languages. It is found that there exists a strong parallelism between this agglutinative language and the inflecting Indo-European languages insofar as aphasic language dissolution is concerned.     

Vocational behavior and career development, 1977: A review

This review covers several books and selections from several journals published in 1977 on topics in vocational behavior and career development. Coverage includes theoretical contributions in vocational choice, development and correlates of choice, decision and indecision, assessment of career skills and interests, self-estimates, and sex bias. Material relating to the vocational behavior of adults contains sections on theory, satisfaction, performance, career development, and mid-career change. A final section is devoted to a review of studies of interventions.     

The similarity-attraction relationship: Is there an ideal one?

It is proposed that we are attracted to similar individuals because: (1) such individuals are similar to our ideals and (2) such individuals are similar to ourselves. Previous studies have employed a similarity manipulation which has confounded these two components. When the components are separated, similarity to the ideal was expected to exert a major influence and similarity to the self a minor influence on attraction. A series of experiments orthogonally manipulated similarity to self and similarity to ideal with a new technique involving content-free dimensions. The results indicated a consistent main effect for ideal similarity on liking and no consistent main effect for similarity to the self. Finally, the results also indicated that given any two of the three variables—similarity to self, similarity to ideal, and own self to own ideal discrepancy—subjects seemed able to infer the other or third variable in a fairly logical fashion.     

Learning the functional significance of mnemonic actions: A microgenetic study of strategy acquisition

How children learn to use memory strategies in a microgenetic investigation of learning and metacognition is examined. Seven- and eight-year-olds were given two memory trials with 24 pictures on each of 5 consecutive days. Days 1 and 2 were baseline, practice trials; Day 3 included strategy training; and Days 4 and 5 were unprompted tests of strategy maintenance. All children were taught how to label, rehearse, and group the pictures as well as to self-test their own memories and use blocked recall. Half of the children were shown the actions and told to do them; the other half received elaborated feedback on the usefulness and appropriateness of the techniques for remembering. The elaborated instructional group exhibited significantly greater recall, clustering, strategic study behavior, and metamemory regarding the mnemonic techniques than the other group. Path analysis provided evidence of a causal role of training and metacognitive awareness that mediated the use of sorting and higher recall. The study illustrates how learning the significance and utility of mnemonic techniques can influence children's acquisition of the tactics as self-controlled strategies. In addition, the microgenetic method affords patterns of data across time and experience that permit richer interpretations of strategy learning and memory development.     

Prospective versus retrospective coding of samples of stimuli,responses, and reinforcers in delayed matching with pigeons

Pigeons' performance with samples of stimuli (red and green), number of responses (1 and 20), and reinforcers (food and no food) was assessed in a matching-to-sample preparation. Samples of red, 20 responses, and food were each associated with the red comparison stimulus; samples of green, 1 response, and no food were each associated with the green comparison stimulus. Interest focused on whether physically different samples associated with the same comparison stimulus each establish a unique memorial representation embodying the physical attributes of the sample (retrospective coding), or whether they activate a unitary memorial representation embodying an instruction for test responding (prospective coding). In the first experiment, accuracy of choice responding was independent of whether successive sample presentations within a trial involved the same physical sample or physically different but associatively identical samples. A second experiment revealed that, in contrast to other matching preparations, accuracy was not reduced when sample elements were compounded during presentation. It was concluded that physically different samples which are associated with the same comparison stimulus are coded prospectively in terms of an instruction for choice responding.     

Toward an understanding of the fundamental attribution error: Essay diagnosticity in the attitude attribution paradigm

The observer error in attitude attribution was examined, focusing upon the perceiver's conception of the relationship between a writer's attitude and the quality of performance on an essay task. Subjects appear to have invested essays, written under assignment, with diagnostic value on the presumption of a correlation between the quality or strength of the essay and the writer's attitude. When subjects were given essays varying in direction, strength, and constraint, their attributions indicated a reversal of correspondent inference for weak essays produced under high constraint, replicating an earlier, conceptually important result (E. E. Jones, S. Worchel, G. R. Goethals, & J. Grumet, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1971, 7, 59–80). It was suggested that the attribution error need not reflect general misunderstandings about, or the low salience of, situational factors, but rather is based on the perceiver's inclination to adopt a diagnostic judgmental set in the attitude attribution paradigm.     

Perception of temporally competing speech stimuli in preschool children

The aim of this study was to investigate the perception of competing speech stimuli in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old normally developing children. A dichotic listening paradigm was used in which the temporal alignment between the two stimuli was varied to represent three levels of competition. Minimal, moderate, and maximal levels of temporal competition were represented by a Separation, Lag, and Simultaneous test condition, respectively. The subjects were behaviorally set to listen for and to report the two stimuli on each trial. The incidence of double correct responses in the test conditions was the measure of interest. The results show a sharp and linear drop in double correct scores from the Separation, to the Lag, and to the Simultaneous condition. There were no age-related differences in the Separation and the Simultaneous conditions. In the Lag condition, the performance of the 3-year-olds was significantly lower than the 4- and 5-year-olds. The findings were interpreted to be indicative of limited auditory processing ability in preschoolers for moderately and maximally competing speech stimuli.