More on millisecond timing and tachistoscope applications for the IBM PC

This paper describes a method of establishing time intervals at a precision of better than 1 msec, using QuickBASIC 4.0, for running real time experiments on an IBM PC without an 8087 coprocessor. This method is far superior to the TIMER function provided by BASIC, which has a precision of only 110 msec. Also described is an assembly language subroutine that corrects a problem in QuickBASIC 3.0 and QuickBASIC 4.0 to allow proper switching between screens in the CGA text mode for use of the PC as a tachistoscope. A tachistoscope program listing shows how to use the screen subroutine and how to establish intertriai intervals and record reaction times using the timing subroutines.     

The Effects of Flavor-Aversion Learning on Instrumental Performance

Two experiments investigated the role of lithium-mediated environmental conditioning on instrumental performance. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a novel taste consumed in one arm of a T maze prior to lithium-induced toxicosis reduced performance in this environment whereas similar aversions conditioned in the home cage failed to alter maze performance. Experiment 2 showed that maze performance in a straight alleyway was decremented during extinction only in a group that actually traversed the alley prior to drinking saccharin and receiving lithium injections. This demonstrated that the instrumental decrement observed in Experiment 1 was due not only to the presence of an unpalatable flavor in the goalbox during the test.

     

Teaching social skills to emotionally disturbed adolescent inpatients

A social skills training program was evaluated with emotionally disturbed adolescent inpatients. The targeted social skills required an action or reaction within six skill areas. The program was adapted from a commercially available social skills training game that features the use of response specific feedback, self-monitoring, individualized reinforcers, and individualized performance criteria. A peer conducted the baseline and posttraining sessions while the training was conducted by an adult who had no previous interactive history with the subjects. A multiple baseline design across groups demonstrated that the program increased appropriate responding in all skill areas and that these effects generalized during the posttraining peer conducted sessions. A generalization test indicated that the subjects used their newly learned skills with a novel adult outside the training setting. The program appears quite applicable to emotionally disturbed adolescents since it targets skills in a variety of areas and employs standardized procedures to enhance replicability.     

Trading relations in the perception of speech by 5-year-old children

Five-year-old children were tested for perceptual trading relations between a temporal cue (silence duration) and a spectral cue (F₁ onset frequency) for the “say-stay” distinction. Identification functions were obtained for two synthetic “say-stay” continua, each containing systematic variations in the amount of silence following the /s/ noise. In one continuum, the vocalic portion had a lower F₁ onset than in the other continuum. Children showed a smaller trading relation than has been found with adults. They did not differ from adults, however, in their perception of an “ay-day” continuum formed by varying F₁ onset frequency only. The results of a discrimination task in which the two acoustic cues were made to “cooperate” or “conflict” phonetically supported the notion of perceptual equivalence of the temporal and spectral cues along a single phonetic dimension. The results indicate that young children, like adults, perceptually integrate multiple cues to a speech contrast in a phonetically relevant manner, but that they may not give the same perceptual weights to the various cues as do adults.     

Family therapy alone is not enough or the dirty story of Dorian

When serious malfunctioning of an individual occurs in a secondary system (school, hospital, rehabilitation center, dormitory setting), the tendency often is to focus on the family as both the cause of the malfunctioning and the arena of intervention. Many times, family therapy alone is not enough because a parallel destructive constellation has formed around the Identified Patient in the secondary system as well and the symptoms catalyze that system's own maladaptive patterns. Often the IP is caught in the web of rigid pathological patterns of interactions between the two systems. A unique model of conjoined intersystemic intervention for dealing with such resistance to change is presented.     

Young infants’ perception of liquid coarticulatory influences on following stop consonants

Phonetic segments are coarticulated in speech. Accordingly, the articulatory and acoustic properties of the speech signal during the time frame traditionally identified with a given phoneme are highly context-sensitive. For example, due to carryover coarticulation, the front tongue-tip position for HI results in more fronted tongue-body contact for a /g/ preceded by /l/ than for a /g/ preceded by /r/. Perception by mature listeners shows a complementary sensitivity—when a synthetic /da/-/ga/ continuum is preceded by either /al/ or /ar/, adults hear more /g/s following HI rather than Irl. That is, some of the fronting information in the temporal domain of the stop is perceptually attributed to /l/ (Mann, 1980). We replicated this finding and extended it to a signaldetection test of discrimination with adults, using triads of disyllables. Three equidistant items from a /da/-/ga/ continuum were used preceded by /al/ and /ar/. In the identification test, adults had identified item ga5 as “ga”, and dal as “da”, following both /al/ and /ar/, whereas they identified the crucial item d/ga3 predominantly as “ga” after /al/ but as “da” after /ar/. In the discrimination test, they discriminated d/ga3 from dal preceded by /al/ but not /ar/; compatibly, they discriminated d/ga3 readily from ga5 preceded by /ar/ but poorly preceded by /al/. We obtained similar results with 4-month-old infants. Following habituation to either ald/ga3 or ard/ga3, infants heard either the corresponding ga5 or dal disyllable. As predicted, the infants discrimi-nated d/ga3 from dal following /al/ but not /ar/; conversely, they discriminated d/ga3 from ga5 following /ar/ but not /al/. The results suggest that prelinguistic infants disentangle consonant-consonant coarticulatory influences in speech in an adult-like fashion.     

The aggression-coercion cycle: Use of seclusion and restraint in a child psychiatric hospital

The widespread use of seclusion and restraint in child psychiatric hospitals to manage aggression and noncompliance is based on the assumption that coercive consequences reduce the frequency of undesirable behaviors exhibited by the patients. We report a study of the use of seclusion and restraint in a public child psychiatric hospital during a 3-year period. Twenty-eight percent of the patients had been secluded or restrained a total of 1670 times. About 25% of these patients had been secluded more than five times during their hospitalization, and 32% had been placed in restraints more than once. Behaviors that typically resulted in repeated seclusion included physical aggression toward staff, verbal aggression toward peers, non-compliant or oppositional behavior, and self-harm. Variables that predicted patients most at risk for repeated seclusion included age, gender, and psychiatric diagnosis. The predictor variables for those most at risk for repeated restraint included age, property destruction, and self-harm. The high rates of use of seclusion and restraint suggest that these methods for controlling the behavior of children and adolescents in this child psychiatric hospital may not have been therapeutic. We suggest that staff in such hospitals engage in a pattern of behavior characterized by an aggression-coercion cycle, in which increasingly aggressive and coercive behaviors are exhibited by both patients and staff.