Rapid educational rehabilitation for prison inmates

One of the major goals of prisons has been the educational rehabilitation of inmates. Studies have shown that predelinquents as well as delinquents could be motivated to achieve in academic areas through the use of an incentive system. The present study attempted to extend the behavioral yield of such a system with prison inmates. The academic performance of two inmates in math and English were compared when two levels of incentives were made contingent on that performance. The results showed that the two inmates passed academic tests as much as nine times faster under an enriched schedule of incentives than under a standard one. This increase in rate of performance was translated into actual academic achievement as one of the inmates passed 9th through 12th grade algebra in only 14 days. A standardized test confirmed this academic advancement for both inmates. These high rates of performance and academic achievement are even more dramatic in view of the fact that five months prior to this procedure, both inmates had been tested as being below average in intelligence.     

Effects of postresponse visual stimuli on visual discrimination learning in the rhesus monkey

To learn more about the mechanism (or mechanisms) involved with postresponse stimulus processing during discrimination learning, a series of studies was conducted with monkeys to determine why the combined relevant and irrelevant stimuli impair learning more than irrelevant stimuli appearing alone. It was found that: (a) the greater size and complexity of the combination of stimuli were not responsible for the greater deficit, while the presence of the relevant stimuli (S^D and S^Δ) within the stimulus combination apparently was; (b) the more similar the postresponse irrelevant stimuli were to the relevant stimuli the greater the deficit that resulted; and (c) monkeys that had earlier learned to discriminate the relevant and irrelevant features of a combination showed no learning impairment when this same stimulus combination was later presented after the response during a new learning problem. These results were interpreted as evidence that: (1) processes associated with learning a discrimination problem do not end with the execution of a choice response; (2) postresponse stimuli produce greater impairment in discrimination learning when they are distorted versions of the relevant stimuli; and (3) the impairment resulting from postresponse irrelevant stimuli occurs primarily when this misinformation is processed and misperceived as being relevant to learning the discrimination problem.     

Configural conditioning in the CER: Loss of element strength after repeated reinforced compound CS trials

Different groups of rats received different numbers of compound CS (light/noise) conditioning trials in the CER procedure. The amount of suppression evident to the single elements of the compound decreased as a function of the number of previous compound trials. This loss of CR strength was interpreted as a configuring effect. Further experimental comparisons indicated that the configuring effect could not be readily explained in terms of a generalization decrement or a stimulus novelty hypothesis.     

Effect of sample presentation time on long-delay matching in the pigeon

The effect of sample stimulus presentation time on long-delay matching in highly practiced pigeons was investigated. The birds were found capable of above chance matching performance at a delay of 60 sec provided the sample stimulus was presented for 4 sec or longer. Matching accuracy increased as a negatively accelerated function of sample stimulus presentation time and decreased as a negatively accelerated function of time since the termination of the sample. The rate of forgetting was found to be independent of sample stimulus presentation time. The data were inconsistent with a temporal discrimination interpretation of the effect of presentation time on delayed matching. The data were interpreted as supporting a simple trace strength and decay model of pigeon delayed matching.     

Group caution at the race track

McCauley, Stitt, Woods and Lipton's finding that groups were more conservative than individuals when betting at a race track has been criticized on statistical and methodological grounds. The present study which does not suffer the shortcomings for which McCauley et al. were legitimately criticized does, nonetheless, sustain their general results and conclusions. Groups were significantly more cautious than individuals when wagering $2.00 on a horse race.     

A probe trial procedure for the study of children's discrimination learning and transfer

A discrimination reversal problem was presented to 192 children varying in age from 3 to 5 years. At the end of both the initial learning and transfer trials, probe trials were introduced to ascertain the response rule describing children's choices. Results were analyzed in terms of a binary division of the children according to their responses to the probe stimuli; children who responded errorlessly (concept responders) were contrasted with children who made errors on the probes (instance responders). Using this criterion, it was found that many children transferred in a way different from the way they learned the initial problem. There was no difference in the proportion of younger and older children responding conceptually to the original problem, but older children were more likely to transfer conceptually when standard geometric blocks were used as stimuli. Future studies must consider the possiblity that learning and transfer may be accomplished by different processes whose application differs with age, the nature of the stimuli, and the stage of training.     

On the representation of language in the right hemisphere of right-handed people.

Laterality experiments using reaction time were conducted to assess the performance of the right hemisphere of normal people on verbal tasks. The results show that if the task calls for pictorial encoding of visually presented verbal material, then the right hemisphere's performance is superior to that of the left. When the task calls for linguistic analysis, the minor hemisphere displays no aptitude in dealing with the task. The latter finding is at variance with data from split-brain research. To reconcile these differences, it was proposed that language functions, though represented in the right hemisphere of normal people, are functionally localized in the left. When the control which the left hemisphere exerts over the right is weakened or removed, e.g., by commissurotomy, right hemisphere language is released. The application of this model to other neurological phenomena is briefly discussed.