Metamemorial Knowledge of Good and Poor Readers: A Developmental Perspective

Torgesen (1977b) suggested that reading-disabled children exhibit passivity in learning situations; they fail to employ strategies that enhance learning. Such passivity resembles that of young children who lack awareness of the utility of strategies that enhance cognitive efficiency in a variety of situations (e.g., listening, reading, and memory tasks). Such awareness is one aspect of metamemory, and children with reading problems may lag behind other children with regard to this aspect. Good readers (second-, third-, and fifth-graders) and poor readers (third- and fifth-graders) were interviewed to determine their level of knowledge about a number of variables that affect memory in real-life situations. Each child was asked questions concerning his or her memory ability, and then was shown pictures depicting manipulations of the variables number, time, category, and strategy, as well as two-way combinations of the four variables. Results generally failed to support the developmental lag hypothesis. Poor readers did not resemble younger children in their awareness of variables that affect memory but exhibited knowledge commensurate with that of good readers in the same grade.     

Emergent stimulus relations depend on stimulus correlation and not on reinforcement contingencies

We aimed to investigate whether novel stimulus relations would emerge from stimulus correlations when those relations explicitly conflicted with reinforced relations. In a symbolic matching-to-sample task using kanji characters as stimuli, we arranged class-specific incorrect comparison stimuli in each of three classes. After presenting either Ax or Cx stimuli as samples, choices of Bx were reinforced and choices of Gx or Hx were not. Tests for symmetry, and combined symmetry and transitivity, showed the emergence of three 3-member (AxBxCx) stimulus classes in 5 of 5 human participants. Subsequent tests for all possible emergent relations between Ax, Bx, Cx and the class-specific incorrect comparisons Gx and Hx showed that these relations emerged for 4 of 5 the participants after extended overtraining of the baseline relations. These emergent relations must have been based on stimulus-stimulus correlations, and were not properties of the trained discriminated operants, because they required control by relations explicitly extinguished during training. This result supports theoretical accounts of emergent relations that emphasize stimulus correlation over operant contingencies.     

Effects of differential rates of alternative reinforcement on resurgence of human behavior

Despite the success of exposure‐based psychotherapies in anxiety treatment, relapse remains problematic. Resurgence, the return of previously eliminated behavior following the elimination of an alternative source of reinforcement, is a promising model of operant relapse. Nonhuman resurgence research has shown that higher rates of alternative reinforcement result in faster, more comprehensive suppression of target behavior, but also in greater resurgence when alternative reinforcement is eliminated. This study investigated rich and lean rates of alternative reinforcement on response suppression and resurgence in typically developing humans. In Phase 1, three groups (Rich, n = 18; Lean, n = 18; Control, n = 10) acquired the target response. In Phase 2, target responding was extinguished and alternative reinforcement delivered on RI 1 s, RI 3 s, and extinction schedules, respectively. Resurgence was assessed during Phase 3 under extinction conditions for all groups. Target responding was suppressed most thoroughly in Rich and partially in Lean. Target responding resurged in the Rich and Lean groups, but not in the Control group. Between groups, resurgence was more pronounced in the Rich group than the Lean and Control groups. Clinical implications of these findings, including care on the part of clinicians when identifying alternative sources of reinforcement, are discussed.     

Direct brain communication: neuroelectric and metabolic approaches at Tübingen

The brain–computer interface (BCI) provides users with the possibility of sending messages and commands to the external world without using their muscles, thus enabling communication to occur independent of movement. Such a possibility is of utmost importance for paralyzed patients who may otherwise lose their ability to communicate. Enhanced methodology and the development of faster computers have substantially improved applications and offer new possibilities in this field. To date, there have been over 20 BCI research groups working on different approaches. In this paper, we review our studies of BCI based on electric and metabolic activity of the brain.     

Spatial reasoning with external visualizations: what matters is what you see, not whether you interact

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.     

Modeling how, when, and what is learned in a simple fault-finding task

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.     

基于鼠标追踪技术的个体建构过程实时测量

个体建构研究探讨分类的低水平知觉过程及其机制, 涉及诸多自动化加工。基于手的运动可以实时地反映大脑内的信息加工过程这一原理, 鼠标追踪技术通过对被试移动电脑鼠标反应时鼠标运动轨迹的跟踪记录与分析, 对心理加工过程进行实时测量, 是实时测量心理加工过程的新技术。基于鼠标追踪技术的最新操作软件—— MouseTracker的个体建构过程实时测量研究发现, 社会类别和刻板印象遵循动态连续激活原则; 动态激活过程中, 基于面孔肤色的分类加工优先于基于面部轮廓的分类加工; 不同通道间的社会类别遵循动态整合激活原则; 个体建构过程是一个对他人的动态知觉系统, 该系统中社会类别、刻板印象、高水平认知状态以及对面孔、声音等的低水平加工之间可连续、动态地相互作用。     

Formation of partially and fully elaborated generalized equivalence classes

Most complex categories observed in real-world settings consist of perceptually disparate stimuli, such as a picture of a person's face, the person's name as written, and the same name as heard, as well as dimensional variants of some or all of these stimuli. The stimuli function as members of a single partially or fully elaborated generalized equivalence class when they occasion the mutual selection of each other after the establishment of some subset of relations among the stimuli. Indeed, it is these generalized relations among stimuli that enable an individual to respond appropriately to the inevitable flux of natural environments. The present experiments involved procedures for producing both types of generalized equivalence class and for evaluating their retention. Granting the formal and functional similarities that exist between generalized equivalence classes and natural categories, natural kinds, and fuzzy superordinate classes, the variables responsible for the emergence of the former might also account for the emergence of the latter three phenomena. In Experiment 1, After forming an A'-B' class, a B'-C relation was trained and generalization tests were conducted with B'-C, C-B', A'-C, and C'-A. Two of 5 participants passed the tests documenting the formation of A'-B'-C classes. Failures occurred in the A'-C and C-A' tests but not the B'-C and C-B' tests. Failures were also correlated with time between A'-B' class formation and C-based testing and with the absence of baseline confirmation when training and testing were separated by about one week. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 but presented baseline confirmation probes immediatley prior to testing when training and testing were separated by one week; all participants then formed partially elaborated generalized equivalence classes. In Experiment 3, 5 of 6 participants formed fully elaborated generalized equivalence classes, represented as A' = B' = C'.     

Instructional effects on performance in a matching-to-sample study

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.