Auditory processing of relational information by young infants

The ability of 5-month-old infants to process relational information was assessed by means of a habituation-dishabituation paradigm with cardiac deceleration as the response measure. Infants were first habituated to a six-tone pattern and then shifted either to a transposition of the standard pattern or to a control pattern which comprised the elements of the transposed pattern in scrambled order. Dishabituation was not evident in the case of the transposed group but was clearly evident for the control group. These results indicate that infants can process relational information from tonal patterns.     

Actors,observers, and the attribution process: Toward a reconceptualization

Jones and Nisbett hypothesize that actors attribute their actions to situational requirements whereas observers attribute the same actions to personal dispositions. This hypothesis is critically examined and a reconceptualization is proposed. Our conceptual analysis focuses on the attributional consequences of differences between actors and observers in: (a) availability of information about the contemporary and historical determinants of the actor's behavior, and (b) susceptibility to possible motivational distortions and cognitive biases. The relationship between this formulation and Jones and Nisbett's analysis of differences between self-perception and interpersonal perception is discussed.     

Relationships between assessment and treatment within a behavioral perspective

Three alternative strategies to link assessment and treatment within a behavioral perspective are described. First is the functional analysis in which the maintaining variables of the target behavior are identified in assessment and modified in treatment. Although this strategy appears to be frequently successful based on positive treatment outcome, critical tests are seldom done: hypothesized functional analyses are not tested prior to intervention; nor is treatment outcome based on one functional analysis pitted against treatment outcome based on an alternative functional analysis. The second strategy is the keystone target behavior strategy. From among multiple possible target behaviors, one is selected for intervention that produces therapeutic response covariation. The third strategy is the diagnostic strategy. A treatment is selected for a particular client based on its overall success in treating a particular disorder. Empirical comparisons are needed to evaluate the effectiveness of these different strategies, linking assessment and treatment for different disorders.Portions of this paper were presented as invited addresses at the meetings of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, Philadelphia, November 1984, and of the American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, August 1986.     

Self-reinforcement: An assessment of external influences

Two experiments were carried out in which low- and high-demand characteristics of self-reward were assessed in a multiple-baseline design across subjects. In the first experiment, arithmetic performance of four children was systematically assessed under no-reinforcement, self-reward/low-demand and self-reward/high-demand phases. In the second experiment, the performance of four children on a less meaningful task was assessed under the same conditions employed in Experiment 1. Results indicated that performance rates were relatively stable during the no-reinforcement phase but that these rates dropped markedly during the self-reward/low-demand phase for all eight subjects. Further, increased rates of performance were achieved under the self-reward/high-demand phase for all subjects. Results are discussed in terms of the assessment of the self-reinforcement procedure, current definitions of self-reinforcement, and the need to view self-reinforcement as existing on a continuum of external demand characteristics.This project was supported in whole by a faculty research grant awarded to the first author and completed while the second author was a visiting associate professor at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic.     

Behavioral confirmation in social interaction: From social perception to social reality

A perceiver's actions, although based upon initially erroneous beliefs about a target individual may channel social interaction in ways that cause the behavior of the target to confirm the perceiver's beliefs. To chart this process of behavioral confirmation, we observed successive interactions between one target and two perceivers. In the first interaction, targets who interacted with perceivers who anticipated hostile partners displayed greater behavioral hostility than targets whose perceivers expected nonhostile partners. Only when targets regarded their actions as reflections of personal dispositions did these behavioral differences in hostility persevere into their subsequent interactions with naive perceivers who had no prior knowledge about them. Theoretical implications of the behavioral confirmation construct for social perception processes are discussed.     

The acquisition of abstract letter codes

A modification of Posner's letter-matching paradigm proposed by Beller (1971) was employed to study the development of abstract visual and name codes for letters. Second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade students (ages 8, 10, and 12 years, respectively) were presented in advance one of a pair of to-be-matched letters. Case agreement (upper- and lowercase) between the prime letter and the letter pair was manipulated to differentiate facilitation based on concrete features of the stimulus letter from that based on the letter's abstract visual code. For physical matches second graders showed greater facilitation from same-case primes than from different-case primes, whereas sixth graders benefited equally from both types of prime. For same-name and different conditions, no qualitative developmental differences were revealed as all subjects benefited from letter primes irrespective of case agreement. The acquisition and utilization of abstract visual codes for letters are a later acquisition than name codes, which were clearly operative at the lowest grade level in the present experiment.     

Phonological processing in Broca's aphasics

Phonological processing was investigated in nine Broca's aphasics. A receptive phonological task examined knowledge of phonotactic rules. Three lists of “word” pairs, phoneme sequences, were constructed such that one member was possible in English and the other was not. The lists varied in distance from English or phonemic structure (CCVC vs. CCVCC). Following auditory presentation, the aphasic was required to indicate which of the two “words” was possible in English. The productive task was an articulation test for monosyllabic and polysyllabic words. The high positive correlation between receptive and productive scores suggested that, rather than motor speech sequencing problems being exclusively involved, more general phonological-articulatory processes were disrupted. Several hypotheses were advanced to describe the nature of this disruption.     

Are generalised scalar implicatures generated by default? An on-line investigation into the role of context in generating pragmatic inferences

Recent research in semantics and pragmatics has revived the debate about whether there are two cognitively distinct categories of conversational implicatures: generalised and particularised. Generalised conversational implicatures are so-called because they seem to arise more or less independently of contextual support. Particularised implicatures are more context-bound. The Default view is that generalised implicatures are default inferences and that their computation is relatively autonomous--being computed by some default mechanism and only being open to cancellation at a second stage when contextual assumptions are taken into consideration (i.a.). It is at that second stage where contextual assumptions are considered that particularised implications are computed. By contrast, Context-Driven theorists claim that both generalised and particularised implicatures are generated by the same process and only where there is contextual support (Chierchia, 2004; Horn, 1984; Levinson, 2000 i.a.). In this paper, we present three on-line studies of the prototypical cases of generalised implicatures: the scalar implicatures 'some of the Fs' > 'not all the Fs' and 'X or Y' > 'either X or Y but not both'. These studies were designed to test the context-dependence and autonomy of the implicatures. Our results suggest that these scalar implicatures are dependent on the conversational context and that they show none of the autonomy predicted by the Default view. We conclude with a discussion of the degree to which such implicatures are purely context-driven and whether an interactionist default position may also be plausible.