Algebras of Intervals and a Logic of Conditional Assertions

Intervals in boolean algebras enter into the study of conditional assertions (or events) in two ways: directly, either from intuitive arguments or from Goodman, Nguyen and Walker's representation theorem, as suitable mathematical entities to bear conditional probabilities, or indirectly, via a representation theorem for the family of algebras associated with de Finetti's three-valued logic of conditional assertions/events. Further representation theorems forge a connection with rough sets. The representation theorems and an equivalent of the boolean prime ideal theorem yield an algebraic completeness theorem for the three-valued logic. This in turn leads to a Henkin-style completeness theorem. Adequacy with respect to a family of Kripke models for de Finetti's logic, ukasiewicz's three-valued logic and Priest's Logic of Paradox is demonstrated. The extension to first-order yields a short proof of adequacy for Körner's logic of inexact predicates.     

A holistic account of the own-race effect in face recognition: evidence from a cross-cultural study

A robust finding in the cross-cultural research is that people's memories for faces of their own race are superior to their memories for other-race faces. However, the mechanisms underlying the own-race effect have not been well defined. In this study, a holistic explanation was examined in which Caucasian and Asian participants were asked to recognize features of Caucasian and Asian faces presented in isolation and in the whole face. The main finding was that Caucasian participants recognized own-race faces more holistically than Asian faces whereas Asian participants demonstrated holistic recognition for both own-race and other-race faces. The differences in holistic recognition between Caucasian and Asian participants mirrored differences in their relative experience with own-race and other-race faces. These results suggest that the own-race effect may arise from the holistic recognition of faces from a highly familiar racial group.     

The impact of semantic transparency of morphologically complex words on picture naming

We examined the contribution of semantic similarity to morphological priming effects, using the immediate (Exp. 1 and 3) and the delayed variant (Exp. 2) of picture-word interference. Distractor words were either compounds morphologically related to the picture name, but differing with respect to their semantic transparency (hummingbird, jailbird (Exp. 1); butterfly, butter dish (Exp. 3)), or form-related non-compound words (e.g., trombone). All three experiments revealed strong facilitation of picture naming due to morphologically related distractors. Form-related distractors facilitated picture naming in the immediate variant only, and to a lesser degree than compounds. Interestingly, the size of the morphemic effect was almost identical for semantically transparent and opaque complex words, which suggests that they share morphemic representations. These results suggest that morphological complexity in speech production is coded at the level of form representations, independent of semantic transparency.     

Functional analysis and treatment of self-injurious behavior in young children a summary of 30 cases

The assessment and treatment of self-injurious behavior (SIB) has received much attention in the literature; however, few studies have focused on early intervention for this behavior. In the current study, functional analyses with developmentally appropriate modifications were conducted in an outpatient clinic with 30 children (aged 10 months to 4 years 11 months) to assess SIB and problem behavior in its early stages. The reported mean age of SIB onset was 17 months, and head banging was the most prevalent topography. Functional analyses identified sources of reinforcement for SIB in 62.1% of cases; with the inclusion of all forms of problem behavior, sources of reinforcement were identified for 87.5% of cases. Function-based treatments were developed for 24 cases, with functional communication training prescribed most often (70.8% of cases). Implications of these findings for the development of early intervention programs for SIB are discussed.     

Effects of teacher-directed versus student-directed instruction on self-management of young children with disabilities

In this study, students worked independently by setting goals, selecting assignments, and recording and evaluating their results after receiving one of two different types of self-management training. During teacher-directed training, the teacher set goals, assigned work, and recorded and evaluated results for students. During student-directed training, students performed those tasks themselves. The results indicated that students engaged in the self-management behaviors more frequently during independent work following student-directed instruction than following teacher-directed instruction.     

A half century of scalloping in the work habits of the United States Congress

It has been suggested that the work environment of the United States Congress bears similarity to a fixed-interval reinforcement schedule. Consistent with this notion, Weisberg and Waldrop (1972) described a positively accelerating pattern in annual congressional bill production (selected years from 1947 to 1968) that is reminiscent of the scalloped response pattern often attributed to fixed-interval schedules, but their analysis is now dated and does not bear on the functional relations that might yield scalloping. The present study described annual congressional bill production over a period of 52 years and empirically evaluated predictions derived from four hypotheses about the mechanisms that underlie scalloping. Scalloping occurred reliably in every year. The data supported several predictions about congressional productivity based on fixed-interval schedule performance, but did not consistently support any of three alternative accounts. These findings argue for the external validity of schedule-controlled operant behavior as measured in the laboratory. The present analysis also illustrates a largely overlooked role for applied behavior analysis: that of shedding light on the functional properties of behavior in uncontrolled settings of considerable interest to the public.     

Social antecedents of children's eyewtness testimony a single-subject experimental analysis

In a laboratory simulation, a single-subject design was used to examine the effects of two types of social influence on children's eyewitness testimony, which has not been the subject of systematic behavioral analyses. This study replicates and extends findings from group-comparison studies, and shows that a topic of pressing social importance is amenable to analysis at the individual level, and therefore, potentially, to a behavioral analysis.     

Motivating operations and terms to describe them: some further refinements

Over the past decade, behavior analysts have increasingly used the term establishing operation (EO) to refer to environmental events that influence the behavioral effects of operant consequences. Nonetheless, some elements of current terminology regarding EOs may interfere with applied behavior analysts' efforts to predict, control, describe, and understand behavior. The present paper (a) describes how the current conceptualization of the EO is in need of revision, (b) suggests alternative terms, including the generic term motivating operation (MO), and (c) provides examples of MOs and their behavioral effects using articles from the applied behavior analysis literature.     

Developmental dyslexia in different languages: language-specific or universal?

Most of the research on developmental dyslexia comes from English-speaking countries. However, there is accumulating evidence that learning to read English is harder than learning to read other European orthographies (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). These findings therefore suggest the need to determine whether the main English findings concerning dyslexia can be generalized to other European orthographies, all of which have less irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences than English. To do this, we conducted a study with German- and English-speaking children (n=149) in which we investigated a number of theoretically important marker effects of the reading process. The results clearly show that the similarities between dyslexic readers using different orthographies are far bigger than their differences. That is, dyslexics in both countries exhibit a reading speed deficit, a nonword reading deficit that is greater than their word reading deficit, and an extremely slow and serial phonological decoding mechanism. These problems were of similar size across orthographies and persisted even with respect to younger readers that were at the same reading level. Both groups showed that they could process larger orthographic units. However, the use of this information to supplement grapheme-phoneme decoding was not fully efficient for the English dyslexics.