Behavioral flexibility allows individuals to adapt to situations in which rewards and goals change. Potentially addictive drugs may impair flexible decision-making by altering brain mechanisms that compute reward expectancies, thereby facilitating maladaptive drug use. To investigate this hypothesis, we tested the effects of oxycodone exposure on…

If judiciously applied, cognitive terminology can encourage further examination of phenomena in useful ways that may not otherwise be studied. I give examples of 3 phenomena, the study of which have benefitted from a cognitive perspective. For the first, transitive inference behavior, it appears that non-cognitive accounts cannot satisfactorily…

Confidence intervals are beginning to play an increasing role in the reporting of research findings within the social and behavioral sciences and, consequently, are becoming more prevalent in beginning classes in statistics and research methods. Confidence intervals are an attractive means of conveying experimental results, as they contain a…

The similarities between television viewing and fantasy activity (daydreaming, reverie, mind-wandering, internal dialogue) more than warrant the building of a theoretical construct, especially in the context of recent empirical research on television viewing consequences. A construct of the television viewing process, based on cognitive theories…

The selective learning hypothesis holds that individuals' learning of prose passages will be affected in varying ways by the passages' threatening or unpleasant content. To test this hypothesis, 19 college students read six prose passages--three containing threatening material and three nonthreatening--and then completed a cloze test for each…

There is increasing debate over the unidimensionality of the construct "drive" in theories of behavior. The earliest drive theory postulated a simple entity which increased or decreased as a function of external or internal stimulation and affected behavior monotonically. Duffy and Malmo have recently hypothesized that the effects of…