Conditioned reinforcement and response strength

Stimuli associated with primary reinforcers appear themselves to acquire the capacity to strengthen behavior. This paper reviews research on the strengthening effects of conditioned reinforcers within the context of contemporary quantitative choice theories and behavioral momentum theory. Based partially on the finding that variations in parameters of conditioned reinforcement appear not to affect response strength as measured by resistance to change, long-standing assertions that conditioned reinforcers do not strengthen behavior in a reinforcement-like fashion are considered. A signposts or means-to-an-end account is explored and appears to provide a plausible alternative interpretation of the effects of stimuli associated with primary reinforcers. Related suggestions that primary reinforcers also might not have their effects via a strengthening process are explored and found to be worthy of serious consideration.     

The impact of retrieval suppression on conceptual implicit memory

ABSTRACT

When people suppress retrieval of episodic memories, it can induce forgetting on later direct tests of memory for those events. Recent reports indicate that suppressing retrieval affects less conscious, unintentional retrieval of unwanted memories as well, at least on perceptually-oriented indirect tests. In the current study we examined how suppressing retrieval affects conceptual implicit memory for the suppressed content, using a category verification task. Participants studied cue-target words pairs in which the targets were exemplars of 22 semantic categories, such as vegetables or occupations. They then repeatedly retrieved or suppressed the targets in response to the cues for some of those pairs. Afterwards, they were exposed to the targets intermixed with novel items, one at a time, and asked to verify the membership of each of the words in a semantic category, as quickly as possible. Judgment response times to studied words were faster than to unstudied exemplars, reflecting repetition priming, as has been previously observed. Strikingly, the beneficial effects of prior exposure on response time were eliminated for targets that had been suppressed. Follow-up explicit memory tests also demonstrated that retrieval suppression continued to disrupt episodic recall for the items that had been just been re-exposed on the category verification test. These findings support the contention that the effects of retrieval suppression are not limited to episodic memory, but also affect indirect expressions of those memories on conceptually oriented tests, raising the possibility that underlying semantic representations of suppressed content are affected.     

Collaborative recall of details of an emotional film

Collaborative inhibition refers to the phenomenon that when several people work together to produce a single memory report, they typically produce fewer items than when the unique items in the individual reports of the same number of participants are combined (i.e., nominal recall). Yet, apart from this negative effect, collaboration may be beneficial in that group members remove errors from a collaborative report. Collaborative inhibition studies on memory for emotional stimuli are scarce. Therefore, the present study examined both collaborative inhibition and collaborative error reduction in the recall of the details of emotional material in a laboratory setting. Female undergraduates (n = 111) viewed a film clip of a fatal accident and subsequently engaged in either collaborative (n = 57) or individual recall (n = 54) in groups of three. The results show that, across several detail categories, collaborating groups recalled fewer details than nominal groups. However, overall, nominal recall produced more errors than collaborative recall. The present results extend earlier findings on both collaborative inhibition and error reduction to the recall of affectively laden material. These findings may have implications for the applied fields of forensic and clinical psychology.     

Overcoming fixation with repeated memory suppression

Fixation (blocks to memories or ideas) can be alleviated not only by encouraging productive work towards a solution, but, as the present experiments show, by reducing counterproductive work. Two experiments examined relief from fixation in a word-fragment completion task. Blockers, orthographically similar negative primes (e.g., ANALOGY), blocked solutions to word fragments (e.g., A_L_ _GY) in both experiments. After priming, but before the fragment completion test, participants repeatedly suppressed half of the blockers using the Think/No-Think paradigm, which results in memory inhibition. Inhibiting blockers did not alleviate fixation in Experiment 1 when conscious recollection of negative primes was not encouraged on the fragment completion test. In Experiment 2, however, when participants were encouraged to remember negative primes at fragment completion, relief from fixation was observed. Repeated suppression may nullify fixation effects, and promote creative thinking, particularly when fixation is caused by conscious recollection of counterproductive information.     

The CS-Preexposure Effect in Conditioned Taste-Aversion Learning in Golden Hamsters

In Experiment 1, golden hamsters were injected with either 0.9% saline or the nausea-inducing agent, lithium chloride (LiCL), immediately after consuming a flavored diet that was either novel or familiar. The LiCl-induced aversion was strong in hamsters for which the flavored diet was novel, but no significant aversion was observed in hamsters that were familiar with the flavored diet. In Experiment 2, the strength of the LiCl-induced aversion was related inversely to the amount of conditioned-stimulus (CS) preexposure and directly to the duration of the preexposure-conditioning interval. Thus, although some previous researchers have suggested that hamsters may not demonstrate the CS-preexposure effect in a conditioned taste-aversion paradigm, they clearly did so under the conditions of the present experiments, and moreover, the characteristics of the CS-preexposure effect in hamsters were generally similar to those observed in rats.     

The Effect of Negative Incentives in Serial Learning: VII. Theory of Punishment

Eighty three-, four-, five-, and six-year-old boys and girls were presented with experimental conditions where context, transformational complexity, and verbal cue were varied, Two experimental tasks, a perceptually Concrete and an Abstract task, were included and Ss were assigned to a Verbal Cue or a Nonverbal Cue condition. All Ss responded to both the present progressive and the past tenses. Results revealed significant effects of the Age and Tense factors, and improved performance on Comprehension over Production. Younger children made fewer overall errors than older ones. Ss performed better on the present progressive than on the past tense on the perceptually Concrete task, while the reverse was true on the Abstract task. These findings demonstrate that language performance is the result of a complex interrelationship between transformational complexity and the perceptual properties of linguistic structures.     

Neuroticism,BIS, and reactivity to discrete negative mood inductions

Research has established relationships between the personality dimensions of neuroticism and BIS and broad negative emotional reactivity. However, few researchers have examined the relationships among neuroticism, BIS, and discrete negative emotional reactivities. The present study examined whether individuals scoring high on neuroticism and BIS were more reactive across four discrete negative mood inductions, relative to those scoring low on these traits. Participants (n = 166) completed personality questionnaires, measures of current mood, viewed a specific mood-inducing film clip (sadness, anger, fear or disgust) and then reported their moods a second time. Results revealed that neuroticism/BIS was associated with high reactivity to the fear and sadness inductions. Neuroticism/BIS did not predict anger or disgust reactivity, but neuroticism/BIS and extraversion/BAS interacted in predicting anger. Although further research is needed to extend generalizability, it appears that neuroticism and BIS predict negative emotional reactivity broadly, but not ubiquitously.     

Vigilant Self‐regulation and Costly Punishment in Public Goods Situations

Applying regulatory focus theory to the context of social dilemma situations, the present research demonstrates that individual differences in vigilant, prevention‐focused self‐regulation predict the tendency to invest private resources to punish uncooperative interaction partners (costly punishment), a behaviour that typically has strong positive effects on the collective level of cooperation. Analyses further support the distinctiveness of the vigilance system proposed in regulatory focus theory (prevention focus) in comparison with general defensive inhibitory tendencies (measured with Carver and White's Behavioral Inhibition System scale). Results document that individual differences in prevention‐focused self‐regulation but not differences in general defensive inhibitory tendencies are positively related to costly punishment. In sum, the findings indicate that vigilant, prevention‐focused self‐regulation plays a crucial role in the context of sanctions that enforce cooperation. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interference Effects in a Numerical Stroop Paradigm in 9- to 12-year-old Children with ADHD-C

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is characterized by deficient self-regulation, poor attentional control, and poor response inhibition. To date, however, the extent to which these deficits affect basic interference control remains a matter of controversy. Secondly, ADHD has been reported to be associated with arithmetic deficits. It remains unclear whether such deficits are a secondary consequence of the above-mentioned characteristics of ADHD or whether basic numerical magnitude representations are also affected. In the present study we attempted to investigate these issues using a basic numerical interference paradigm.

Nine- to twelve-year-old children with ADHD-C (attention-deficit hyperactivity-disorder combined type) and control children without ADHD (each n = 16) were presented with two digits of possibly different physical sizes (e.g., 3 7). This numerical Stroop task requires subjects to make a magnitude classification concerning either the physical or the numerical stimulus dimension. The irrelevant dimension can be congruent (same response), incongruent (different response), or neutral (no response association).

Children with ADHD-C performed worse than control children in most analyses. The most important finding was a significant interaction of congruity effects with group in the numerical comparison task. Children with ADHD-C tended to show larger congruity and interference effects than controls, and these were not attributable to a speed-accuracy trade-off.

The results might reflect differential processing speeds, or a different degree of automatic activation of physical and numerical magnitudes in children with and without ADHD-C. Alternative explanations, such as insufficient inhibition of selective (domain-specific) attention are also discussed.     

EDITORIAL

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the usefulness of Barkley’s (1997a) model of inhibition and executive functioning in describing the deficits associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Besides group differences, the present study addressed the question of independent effects of inhibition and the other executive functions in discriminating between children with ADHD and controls and how well, in terms of sensitivity and specificity, these measures can classify the children into the correct group. The results showed that children with ADHD differed significantly from controls with regard to measures of inhibition as well as all other executive function measures, except repetition of hand movements. In logistic regression models, three different measures tapping inhibition, working memory and emotion regulation were shown to be significant independent predictors of group membership. The sensitivity for these three variables as a set was 76.2, the specificity was 90.5, with a total of 86% of the sample correctly classified. When excluding the parental rating of emotion regulation, the overall classification rate decreased some, but was still relatively high in comparison with previous studies within this area of research.