OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING AND THE EMERGENCE OF SYMMETRY RELATIONS IN TEACHING SPANISH VOCABULARY WORDS TO TYPICALLY DEVELOPING CHILDREN

One 9‐year‐old child was taught conditional discriminations between dictated names in Spanish and their corresponding pictures across three stimulus sets while her 10‐year‐old brother observed. Posttests revealed the emergence of symmetry relations in the form of oral naming skills by both children.     

Intervention and sleeper effects: A reply to Victoria Seitz

Victoria Seitz (Developmental Review, 1981, 1, 361–373) has misperceived and misunderstood our position (A. D. B. Clarke & A. M. Clarke, Developmental Review, 1981, 344–360). For example, our argument endorsed a transactional and not a main-effect model, nor was our aim to argue that early intervention has no important later consequences, nor did we dispute Consortium findings (I. Lazar & R. Darlington, Lasting effects after preschool, Washington, D.C.: DHEW Publication No. (OHDS) 79-30178, 1978). In fact, agreements with Seitz greatly exceed disagreements. Our skepticism about whether a behavioral treatment can have long-range effects without also having earlier ones remains. Long-term changes appear to result from ongoing long-term processes.     

Do open space environments encourage children to seek immediate gratification?

This study evaluated the effects of 14 months' exposure to open space environments on preference for delayed reward. Three hundred eighty-nine pupils in open space and conventional classes in grades 4 and 5 were individually administered one of four tests for delay of gratification. These tests consisted of a choice between an immediate, smaller reward and a delayed, larger reward. Each of the four independent studies found that approximately the same percent of pupils from each educational environment selected the delayed alternative.     

Responses of boys and girls to a behaviorally focused school attitude questionnaire

In response to the Teacher Approval-Disapproval Scale (TADS), elementary school boys report receiving more personal disapproval and less personal approval from their teachers than do elementary school girls, but boys and girls do not differ in reporting how frequently their teachers distribute approvals and disapprovals to the whole class. Boys' attitudes toward being in the classroom are more negative than girls', but there is also a tendency for boys to perceive the whole class's attitude as being more negative than do girls. These results suggest that sex differences in school attitude are at least partially determined by differential teacher behavior toward boys and girls.     

Contingency management in the classroom treatment of long-term elective mutism: A case report

An 11-year-old boy with a six-year history of elective mutism in school was successfully treated with operant reinforcement and contingency management techniques. The plan was carried out by the classroom teacher with a minimum amount of management consultation. Twelve-month follow-up reveals continued maintenance of the verbal interaction indistinguishable from that of other children at school which was set as the criterion for terminating the intervention. The plan was carried out in three stages-relationship-building to develop teacher-pupil interaction into a reinforcing event, audible-response eliciting, and generalization throughout the school building and grounds.     

Emotionality in selectively bred strains of rats mediates prior shock effects on escape-avoidance conditioning.

Rats of the Maudsley Reactive and Maudsley Non-reactive strains were given 25 trials of escape-avoidance conditioning after exposure to inescapable shock. Prior shock exposure (PSE) did not affect avoidance or escape latencies, but decreased the number of avoidances made by the Maudsley non-reactive animals and increased the number of their failures to escape. The results are interpreted as demonstrating an interference with the classical conditioning of a conditioned emotional response, through a reduction in the information content of the CS following PSE. The strain differences are interpreted as due to the non-reactive animals being especially sensitive to PSE.     

Perception of internal elements of compound figures by one-month-old infants

Previous research has shown that infants younger than 2 months frequently concentrate their attention on peripheral or external features of visual stimuli and that they do not appear to process the internal elements of a compound visual stimulus composed of a simple geometric figure enclosed in a larger figure. A visual habituation-dishabituation paradigm was used to determine whether 1-month-old infants would process internal information if the internal elements of the stimulus were patterns often found to be preferred by young infants. Four groups of eight infants each were habituated to a compound stimulus consisting of a square or triangle surrounding a checkerboard or bull's-eye. Following habituation each group was presented with one of four types of stimulus: the identical stimulus (control group), a stimulus differing only in the internal component, a stimulus differing only in the external component, or a stimulus differing in both components. The results of the present study suggest that when the internal element of a compound stimulus is a highly preferred or salient stimulus, the young infant will process information about its characteristics.     

Components of geometric analogy solution

Geometric analogy solution was investigated as a function of systematic variations in the information structure of individual items. Latency data from the verification of true and false items indicated that individuals decompose figural patterns in a way that represents a sequential determination of the various elements that need to be isolated. They also appear to identify and evaluate the transformations applied to elements in a way that represents a sequential determination of the separate or successive transformations that fully specify an item rule. Analysis and evaluation of transformations took more time than element analysis and was the primary source of errors. The combined effects of element and transformation processing violated a simple additive model and the best fitting functions suggested that nonadditive increases in solution latency and error rates were due to working memory limitations associated with the representation and manipulation of item features at high levels of rule complexity. Correlational data also indicated that these factors partially account for individual differences in performance on psychometric tests. The latency and error data for true and false items are used to develop a general theoretical system that incorporates assumptions about the form of item representation, working memory factors, and processing components and strategies in analogical reasoning tasks.