In our everyday life, we often need to anticipate the potential occurrence of events and their consequences. In this context, the way we represent contingencies can determine our ability to adapt to the environment. However, it is not clear how agents encode and organize available knowledge about the future to react to possible states of the…

Schedules of reinforcement typically produce reliable patterns of behaviour, and one factor that can cause deviations from these normally reliable patterns is schizotypy. Low scorers on the unusual experiences subscale of the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences performed as expected on a yoked random-ratio (RR), random-interval…

The authors report a series of experiments in which they use the masked congruence priming paradigm to investigate the processing of masked primes in the manual and verbal response modalities. In the manual response modality, they found that masked incongruent primes produced interference relative to both congruent and neutral primes. This…

Partial replication of the Luria and Tikhomirov experiments in the verbal regulation of behavior has led to results and conclusions contradictory to those of the Russian researchers. Subjects for these experiments included mentally handicapped children and adults. The results of four sets of experiments are presented. In general, the basic…

Three extrinsic factors were manipulated in a problem-solving task performed by 80 ten-year-old children of I Q 90-110. The factors were: the presence or absence of the name of the concept given in feedback, specific instructions, and whether the child was allowed to verbalize. The task was a modification of Vygotsky's experiment on concept…

This research studies the effects of censoring a communication, overriding the censor, and the attractiveness of the censor on the potential audience's attitude and desire to hear the communication. The subjects, 144 undergraduate psychology students, were told that a speech which they were to have heard had been censored by a positively,…

This study investigates the pattern of teacher questioning regarding three elements: sequence, student respondent, and cognitive process. The rationale for this type of teaching rests on the claims for teaching students the process of critical (reflective) thinking. In this type of teaching it is necessary to have data before the students. Only…

The paper discusses some of the "belief systems knowledge" used in language understanding. It begins with a presentation of a theory of personal causation. The theory supplies the tools to account for purposeful behavior. Using primitives of the theory, the social aspect of an action can be described. The social aspect is that which depends on…

This monograph represents the results of an attempt to construct at least one portion of a theoretical framework for describing and analyzing the performance routines used by the native actor to realize his competence to make culturally appropriate decisions. In general the concern is to describe in theoretical terms the structure and operation of…

The purpose of this research project is to specify critical events within a person during linguistic processing. The experiments reported here cover such topics as the effects of increased reading rate on covert processes, covert behavior as a direct electro-myographic measure of mediating responses, enhancement of speech perception by…