Drake CE  Wilson KG 《Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior》2008,89(3):333-340

Conducting studies using an undergraduate participant pool is fraught with difficulties. Among them are problems with adequately motivating subjects both to come to the study, and once there, to actively engage the experimental task. Thirty-one college students participated in a matching-to-sample (MTS) study involving substantial training, testing, retraining, and retesting of conditional discriminations and equivalence relations among four 4-member classes of nonsensical words. The study was conducted during the end of the semester, when performance often had been observed to be poorer than at other points in the semester. Eleven of the participants, in addition to standard instructions about the task, received additional instructions specifying molar consequences for high rates of \"correct\" responses throughout the procedure. This subset of participants displayed markedly improved performance as compared to those who did not receive the additional instructions. Results suggest that specification of molar contingencies improves participants' sensitivity to molecular contingencies within the study. Instructions that specify and increase the consequential functions of feedback provided during MTS trials may be one means of reducing unwanted variability in human MTS performance.  相似文献   

    

Dube WW  McIlvane WJ 《Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior》2001,75(1):15-23

Behavioral momentum was examined in 2 individuals with severe mental retardation via within-subject manipulations of obtained reinforcer rates. Subjects performed self-paced discrimination problems presented on a touch screen computer monitor. Two different problems, Tasks A and B, alternated in blocks of 15 trials on a multiple schedule. Reinforcers were snack foods. The reinforcement schedule for Task A was continuous (fixed-ratio 1) and the schedule for Task B was continuous in some conditions and variable ratio in other conditions. Behavioral momentum was assessed in test sessions by prefeeding, presenting response-independent food, and making available alternatives to the tasks. When the obtained reinforcer rate for Task A was at least twice that for Task B, resistance to change was greater for Task A. When both reinforcer rates and response rates were a pproximately equal for the two tasks, resistance to change was approximately equal. These results are consistent with behavioral momentum effects. They extend previous findings with humans by examining momentum in self-initiated discrete-trial discrimination tasks with ratio schedules, and by isolating relative reinforcer rates as a controlling variable via within-subject manipulations.  相似文献   

  总被引：8，自引：8，他引：0  

L Fields  B J Adams  T Verhave  S Newman 《Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior》1990,53(3):345-358

A four-member equivalence class (A → B → C → D) can be formed by training AB, BC, and CD. The nodal stimuli, B and C, mediate all of the derivative (transitive and equivalence) relations in the class. The derivative relations AC, CA, BD, and DB are separated by one node, whereas AD and DA are separated by two nodes. How do the number of nodes that separate the stimuli in a derivative relation influence the induction of stimulus control exerted by that relation? Seven college students learned two four-member classes made up of nonsense syllables. After training, all derivative relations were presented repeatedly without informative feedback. Stimulus control exerted by each derivative relation was assessed concurrently. For the 7 subjects, control exerted by the derivative relations increased gradually with repeated presentations. With 6 of the 7 subjects, the one-node relations exerted more control than the two-node relations during the process. However, the disparity between the one- and two-node relations decreased with repeated presentations. Eventually, all derivative relations exerted complete control. The control exerted by derivative relations during induction was inversely related to the number of nodes separating the terms in the derivative relations. These results demonstrate that nodal distance is a determinant of the relatedness of stimuli in equivalence classes. The findings are discussed in terms of remote association, semantic memory networks, and the study of transitive inference.  相似文献   

    

Ritter FE  Bibby PA 《Cognitive Science》2008,32(5):862-892

We have developed a process model that learns in multiple ways while finding faults in a simple control panel device. The model predicts human participants' learning through its own learning. The model's performance was systematically compared to human learning data, including the time course and specific sequence of learned behaviors. These comparisons show that the model accounts very well for measures such as problem-solving strategy, the relative difficulty of faults, and average fault-finding time. More important, because the model learns and transfers its learning across problems, it also accounts for the faster problem-solving times due to learning when examined across participants, across faults, and across the series of 20 trials on an individual participant basis. The model shows how learning while problem solving can lead to more recognition-based performance, and helps explain how the shape of the learning curve can arise through learning and be modified by differential transfer. Overall, the quality of the correspondence appears to have arisen from procedural, declarative, and episodic learning all taking place within individual problem-solving episodes.  相似文献   

  总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2  

Keehner M  Hegarty M  Cohen C  Khooshabeh P  Montello DR 《Cognitive Science》2008,32(7):1099-1132

Three experiments examined the effects of interactive visualizations and spatial abilities on a task requiring participants to infer and draw cross sections of a three-dimensional (3D) object. The experiments manipulated whether participants could interactively control a virtual 3D visualization of the object while performing the task, and compared participants who were allowed interactive control of the visualization to those who were not allowed control. In Experiment 1, interactivity produced better performance than passive viewing, but the advantage of interactivity disappeared in Experiment 2 when visual input for the two conditions in a yoked design was equalized. In Experiments 2 and 3, differences in how interactive participants manipulated the visualization were large and related to performance. In Experiment 3, non-interactive participants who watched optimal movements of the display performed as well as interactive participants who manipulated the visualization effectively and better than interactive participants who manipulated the visualization ineffectively. Spatial ability made an independent contribution to performance on the spatial reasoning task, but did not predict patterns of interactive behavior. These experiments indicate that providing participants with active control of a computer visualization does not necessarily enhance task performance, whereas seeing the most task-relevant information does, and this is true regardless of whether the task-relevant information is obtained actively or passively.  相似文献   

    

Dixon MR 《Journal of applied behavior analysis》2003,36(2):271-284

  相似文献   

    

S D Lane  T S Critchfield 《Journal of applied behavior analysis》1998,31(1):21-41

This study explored whether an identity-matching-based stimulus equivalence procedure could be used to teach vowel and consonant stimulus classes to 2 adolescent females with moderate mental retardation. Delayed match-to-sample trials presented a compound sample stimulus consisting of printed letters and a spoken word (“vowel” or “consonant”). The correct comparison stimulus matched only one of the letters in the compound sample. Subsequently, test trials assessed whether arbitrary relations had formed among the individual stimuli from each compound sample and whether stimuli from different compound samples had merged into larger stimulus classes. Both participants acquired five-member classes of vowel and consonant stimuli, which subsequently generalized to vocal classification and to identification in the context of four-letter words. Follow-up tests showed that the generalized performances remained intact after 6 weeks. These procedures suggest an economical approach to stimulus class development.  相似文献   

  总被引：3，自引：3，他引：0  

S D Lane  J K Clow  A Innis    T S Critchfield 《Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior》1998,70(3):267-279

This study employed a stimulus-class rating procedure to explore whether stimulus equivalence and stimulus generalization can combine to promote the formation of open-ended categories incorporating cross-modal stimuli. A pretest of simple auditory discrimination indicated that subjects (college students) could discriminate among a range of tones used in the main study. Before beginning the main study, 10 subjects learned to use a rating procedure for categorizing sets of stimuli as class consistent or class inconsistent. After completing conditional discrimination training with new stimuli (shapes and tones), the subjects demonstrated the formation of cross-modal equivalence classes. Subsequently, the class-inclusion rating procedure was reinstituted, this time with cross-modal sets of stimuli drawn from the equivalence classes. On some occasions, the tones of the equivalence classes were replaced by novel tones. The probability that these novel sets would be rated as class consistent was generally a function of the auditory distance between the novel tone and the tone that was explicitly included in the equivalence class. These data extend prior work on generalization of equivalence classes, and support the role of operant processes in human category formation.  相似文献   

  总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

Dougher MJ  Hamilton DA  Fink BC  Harrington J 《Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior》2007,88(2):179-197

In three experiments, match-to-sample procedures were used with undergraduates to establish arbitrary relational functions for three abstract visual stimuli. In the presence of samples A, B, and C, participants were trained to select the smallest, middle, and largest member, respectively, of a series of three-comparison arrays. In Experiment 1, the B (choose middle) stimulus was then used to train a steady rate of keyboard pressing before the A (choose smallest) and the C (choose largest) stimuli were presented. Participants pressed slower to A and faster to C than to B. Then B was paired with mild shock in a Pavlovian procedure with skin conductance change as the dependent variable. When presented with A and C, 6 of 8 experimental participants showed smaller skin conductance changes to A and larger skin conductance changes to C than to B. In Experiment 2, A was then used as a sample in a match-to-sample procedure to establish an arbitrary size ranking among four same-sized colored circle comparisons. One of the middle circles was then used to establish a steady rate of pressing before the other circles were presented. Five of 6 participants responded slower to the \"smaller\" circle and faster to the \"larger\" circle than they did to the \"middle\" circle. In Experiment 3, A, B, and C were then presented on a series of test trials requiring participants to pick the comparison that was less than, greater than, or equal to the sample. Novel stimuli were included on some trials. Results indicated that the relational training procedures produced derived relations among the stimuli used in training and that these allowed correct inferences of relative size ranking among novel stimuli.  相似文献   

    

Lauren K. Schnell  Tina M. Sidener  Ruth M. DeBar  Jason C. Vladescu  SungWoo Kahng 《Journal of applied behavior analysis》2018,51(1):87-98

Few studies have evaluated methods for training decision‐making when functional analysis data are undifferentiated. The current study evaluated computer‐based training to teach 20 graduate students to arrange functional analysis conditions, analyze functional analysis data, and implement procedural modifications. Participants were exposed to training materials using interactive software during a 1‐day session. Following the training, mean scores on the posttest, novel cases probe, and maintenance probe increased for all participants. These results replicate previous findings during a 1‐day session and include a measure of participant acceptability of the training. Recommendations for future research on computer‐based training and functional analysis are discussed.  相似文献