Correspondence between resident- and staff-report on the QABF: Do justice-involved youth agree with residential staff?

Residents in juvenile residential treatment facilities (JRTFs) often display various emotional, behavioral, and educational needs. Researchers have recently developed behavioral interventions to increase residents' appropriate behavior such as cooperation with facility staff instructions, accepting feedback from facility staff, and tolerating unpleasant events. However, there is not a generally accepted tool for assessing the operant function of residents' problem behavior in JRTFs. For various logistical reasons, indirect functional assessments may be more appropriate in a JRTF than manipulating either antecedent or consequent events. This study obtained scores on the Questions About Behavior Function (QABF) assessment for 17 residents from two dormitory staff members for each resident. To increase the number of respondents, each resident completed a QABF for their own behavior. Results revealed moderate to high correspondence (i.e., agreement) for highest and lowest potential operant function of problem behavior between combinations of JRTF staff and residents. These preliminary findings suggest additional research with the QABF in JRTFs is warranted.     

On Turkey Identification

As human relations skills are more widely taught and used, they are inevitably misused as well, often by some particularly fowl aggressors. This article is intended as a brief self-defense course identifying those who undergo this strange, but usually temporary, metamorphosis into “turkeys.” It provides a rough categorization of subspecies with their identifying characteristics and a proposal for return to personhood.     

Detection of a deficit in visual discrimination of pattern following lesions of anterior cortex: role of type of motivation.

6 albino rats were trained under appetitive motivation to perform diametrically opposed visual discriminations of pattern via opposite eyes. Small lesions were subsequently placed unilaterally in anterior neocortex. Following a period of post-surgical recovery, subjects were re-trained on the diammetrically opposed discriminations in alternating 10-trial blocks. Every subject made more post-surgical errors on the discrimination mediated by the eye contralateral to the lesion. Since albino rats have virtually complete decussation of the visual system, this indicates selective impairment in mediation of performance of pattern discrimination in the part of the lesioned hemispheres. Thus, findings previously obtained in studies involving aversive motivation are general to appetitively motivated tasks.     

A History of the Association of Medical School Psychologists

While psychologists have been active faculty members in medical schools for over 85 years, they lacked organization on the national level until 1981. This history traces the background of psychology's involvement in medical schools, landmark events that affected the discipline, and progress since formal organization has occurred. Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost     

Direct lexical control of eye movements in reading: evidence from a survival analysis of fixation durations

Participants' eye movements were monitored in an experiment that manipulated the frequency of target words (high vs. low) as well as their availability for parafoveal processing during fixations on the pre-target word (valid vs. invalid preview). The influence of the word-frequency by preview validity manipulation on the distributions of first fixation duration was examined by using ex-Gaussian fitting as well as a novel survival analysis technique which provided precise estimates of the timing of the first discernible influence of word frequency on first fixation duration. Using this technique, we found a significant influence of word frequency on fixation duration in normal reading (valid preview) as early as 145ms from the start of fixation. We also demonstrated an equally rapid non-lexical influence on first fixation duration as a function of initial landing position (location) on target words. The time-course of frequency effects, but not location effects was strongly influenced by preview validity, demonstrating the crucial role of parafoveal processing in enabling direct lexical control of reading fixation times. Implications for models of eye-movement control are discussed.     

Previous reward decreases errors of commission on later ‘No‐Go’ trials in children 4 to 12 years of age: evidence for a context monitoring account

Inhibitory control is widely hypothesized to be the cornerstone of executive function in childhood and the central deficit in a number of developmental disorders, including attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, recent evidence from adults indicates that performance on response inhibition tasks may primarily reflect non‐inhibitory attentional control (context monitoring) processes. Yet it may be that inhibition plays a more central role in childhood – a time when the architecture of cognitive processes might be more transparent due to wide variability in skill level. Here we directly test inhibitory and context monitoring explanations of task performance on a Go/No‐Go task in a large group of children 4–12 years of age. We conclude that traditional inhibitory conceptualizations of task performance on the Go/No‐Go task cannot account for our findings, calling into question evidence supporting a central role for inhibitory control in cognitive development or developmental psychopathology.