TEACHING CHILD-CARE SKILLS TO MOTHERS WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES

The present study identified and remediated child-care skill deficits in parents with developmental disabilities to reduce their risk of child neglect. Eleven mothers with developmental disabilities who were considered by social service and child welfare agencies to be providing neglectful child care were found in baseline to have several important child-care skill deficits (e.g., bathing, diaper rash treatment, cleaning baby bottles) compared to nonhandicapped mothers. Parent training (consisting of verbal instructions, pictorial manuals, modeling, feedback, and reinforcement) resulted in rapid acquisition and maintenance of child-care skills in all mothers. Mean percentage correct scores increased from 58% in baseline to 90% in training and 91% in follow-up (M = 31 weeks). The latter two scores compare favorably to the mean score (87%) of 20 nonhandicapped mothers on the same skills. Where observable, parent training was associated with corresponding benefits to the children (e.g., elimination of diaper rash and cradle cap, increased weight gain, successful toilet training). These results indicate that parent training may be a viable option to the removal of the child from the home when parenting skill deficits place the child's well-being in jeopardy.     

THE RELATIVE MOTIVATIONAL PROPERTIES OF SENSORY AND EDIBLE REINFORCERS IN TEACHING AUTISTIC CHILDREN

We compared the effects of sensory and edible reinforcers on resistance to satiation in three autistic children while learning visual discrimination tasks. Within-subject designs were used to compare a single sensory reinforcer with a single edible reinforcer and to compare multiple sensory reinforcers with multiple edibles. Results indicated that multiple sensory reinforcers maintained responding over more trials than did multiple edible reinforcers; however, the use of single sensory reinforcers and single edibles resulted in about equal numbers of trials to satiation. Both multiple and single sensory reinforcers produced higher percentages of correct responses than edible reinforcers. The findings are discussed in terms of the advantages of sensory reinforcers in teaching autistic children.     

Variable-interval schedules of timeout from avoidance

Rats were trained on concurrent schedules in which pressing one lever postponed shock and pressing the other occasionally produced a 2-min timeout during which the shock-postponement schedule was suspended and its correlated stimuli were removed. Throughout, the shock-postponement schedule maintained proficient levels of avoidance. Nevertheless, in Experiment 1 responding on the timeout lever was established rapidly, was maintained at stable levels on variable-interval schedules, was extinguished by withholding timeout, was reestablished when timeout was reintroduced, and was brought under discriminative control with a multiple variable-interval extinction schedule of timeout. These results are in contrast with Verhave's (1962) conclusion that timeout is an ineffective reinforcer when presented to rats on intermittent schedules. In Experiment 2 the consequence of responding on the timeout lever was altered so that the shock-postponement schedule remained in effect even though the stimulus conditions associated with timeout were produced for 2 min. Responding extinguished, indicating that suspension of the shock-postponement schedule, not stimulus change, was the source of reinforcement. By establishing the reinforcing efficacy of timeout with standard variable-interval schedules, these experiments illustrate a procedure for studying negative reinforcement in the same way as positive reinforcement.     

Child abuse and neglect by parents with disabilities: A tale of two families

Two families, in which the children had been placed in foster care due to abuse and neglect by parents who had disabilities, were studied. In the first case, the mother was instructed in skills that our assessment suggested were important for her child's survival. The mother readily acquired and applied these skills, a fact reflected both in changes in her behavior and in changes in the child's well-being. In the second case, the parent's incremental resumption of child custody was made contingent upon completion of relevant parenting tasks. Initially, improvements in the completion of such tasks were evident, but over time and with the onset of militating factors, no further progress was made and all parental rights were terminated. The implications of these cases for behavior analysis and the effort to reunite and preserve families are discussed.     

Sensory superstition on multiple interval schedules.

Pigeons were exposed to multiple schedules in which an irregular repeating sequence of five stimulus components was correlated with the same reinforcement schedule throughout. Stable, idiosyncratic, response-rate differences developed across components. Components were rank-ordered by response rate; an approximately linear relation was found between rank order and the deviation of mean response rate from the overall mean rate. Nonzero slopes of this line were found for multiple fixed-interval and variable-time schedules and for multiple variable-interval schedules both when number of reinforcements was the same in all components and when it varied. The steepest function slopes were found in the variable schedules with relatively long interfood intervals and relatively short component durations. When just one stimulus was correlated with all components of a multiple variable-interval schedule, the slope of the line was close to zero. The results suggest that food-rate differences may be induced initially by different reactions to the stimuli and subsequently maintained by food.     

自发性知觉经络反应中产生刺麻感和积极情绪的原因

自发性知觉经络反应(autonomous sensory meridian response,ASMR)是指在特定的视听刺激下,某些个体(ASMR敏感个体)在头皮后部、颈部乃至全身体验到一种令人极度愉快和放松的刺麻感的现象。其中,刺麻感的产生可能是个体大脑中负责感觉和肌肉运动的脑区高度激活引起的; 而与情绪和奖赏有关脑区的高度激活以及心率和呼吸频率的下降可能是产生愉快和放松感的重要原因。相比普通个体,ASMR敏感个体具有较高的神经质、共情特质、感觉受暗示性和特质正念。这可能说明ASMR敏感个体的感觉敏感性较高,情绪稳定性较弱,且比较关注自己身体的内外感受。这些个性特质可能导致ASMR敏感个体对某些视听刺激中所包含的一些感觉和情绪信息更加敏感,对其反应也更加强烈。目前,ASMR已经被用于抑郁,压力,失眠和慢性疼痛等的临床治疗以及商业广告之中。但ASMR可能会干扰个体的执行功能,在认知控制需求较高的情景下应尽量避免接触ASMR刺激。     

Bridging ears and eyes when learning spoken words: On the effects of bilingual experience at 30 months

From the very first moments of their lives, infants selectively attend to the visible orofacial movements of their social partners and apply their exquisite speech perception skills to the service of lexical learning. Here we explore how early bilingual experience modulates children's ability to use visible speech as they form new lexical representations. Using a cross‐modal word‐learning task, bilingual children aged 30 months were tested on their ability to learn new lexical mappings in either the auditory or the visual modality. Lexical recognition was assessed either in the same modality as the one used at learning (‘same modality’ condition: auditory test after auditory learning, visual test after visual learning) or in the other modality (‘cross‐modality’ condition: visual test after auditory learning, auditory test after visual learning). The results revealed that like their monolingual peers, bilingual children successfully learn new words in either the auditory or the visual modality and show cross‐modal recognition of words following auditory learning. Interestingly, as opposed to monolinguals, they also demonstrate cross‐modal recognition of words upon visual learning. Collectively, these findings indicate a bilingual edge in visual word learning, expressed in the capacity to form a recoverable cross‐modal representation of visually learned words.     

A sensory contact model for the study of aggressive and submissive behavior in male mice

The technique for simultaneous development of aggressive and submissive behaviors as a result of successive experiences of defeats or victories in daily intermale confrontations in male mice permanently living under sensory contact conditions is offered for behavioral, pharmacological, and neurophysiological studies of mechanisms of agonistic social relations. Distant sensory contact is achieved by placing a pair of males into a common cage separated by a transparent partition with holes permitting visual contact and the individuals perceiving each other's odors but preventing any physical at contact all times except for 10-min daily tests. These conditions essentially elicit aggression in winner males and quickly result in submission by losers of the same strain of mice. The meaning of consecutive stages of the technique, the problem of controls, and applications of this model are discussed.     

Visual aspects of centrally elicited attack behavior in the cat: “Patterned reflexes” associated with selection of and approach to a rat

It has been previously suggested that the electrical brain stimulation which elicits quiet-biting attack in the cat actively affects the way the central nervous system processes visual and tactile information concerned with the reflexes involved in the terminal aspects of attack. In order to examine the effects of brain stimulation on a nonterminal aspect of attack – the stimulated cat's selection of and approach to a rat – cats were implanted with attack-eliciting electrodes in both the lateral hypothalamus and the midbrain ventral tegmental area. These cats were then tested in an 8-ft-long cage, one end of which was divided into three, 2-ft-long parallel compartments, whose openings faced the end of the cage from which the cat commenced its approach. An anesthetized rat was placed at the back of one compartment, a bowl of food at the back of another compartment, and the third compartment contained no object. It was found in the first experiment that the attack elicited by nearly all electrodes was selectively directed at the rat. However, the success of the cat in finding the compartment containing the rat varied dramatically for different electrodes in the same cat. Further, these differences were stable and did not change as the cat gained experience with the task. The results suggested that the stimulation of different brain sites in the same cat differentially affected the visual neural mechanisms involved in guiding a cat to a rat. Previous studies have also suggested that the effects of brain stimulation which elicits quiet-biting attack are largely lateralized to the side of the brain stimulated. In order to determine if the effects of stimulation on the neural mechanisms mediating the visually guided approach of a cat to a rat were also lateralized, attempts were made in a second experiment to disrupt the visual input to one side of the brain by unilaterally transecting the optic tract. It was found that this manipulation interfered with the visually guided selective approach to a rat, if the cat was stimulated through hypothalamic or mid-brain electrodes ipsilateral to the optic tract transection, but not if the hypothalamic or midbrain stimulation was on the contralateral (visually intact) side of the brain. However, any final interpretation of the results was confounded by the finding in all of these cats of a complex syndrome of neglect of all contralateral sensory information.     

A simple method to dissociate sensory-attentional and motor-intentional biases in unilateral visual neglect

A variant of a line bisection test was devised. Patients with unilateral visual neglect and control subjects were asked to perform the test, which consisted of two subtasks: a verbal and a manual task. The verbal task was newly designed and did not require manual responses from the subjects. The manual task was similar to conventional line bisection tasks. This paper reports and discusses the results obtained from each task and their correlations. This technique is compatible with bedside examinations, does not require a complex apparatus, and provides useful data for the assessment of unilateral visual neglect.