Data are presented to document the initial dramatic reduction in self-injurious behavior and the ongoing effectiveness of contingent electric shock treatment of an adolescent. Positive effects of the intervention are documented, as is information on the interaction of a medical condition, psychoactive mediation status, and staff changes. (Contains…

A nested cross-over design was used to examine the effects of visual condition, type of stimuli, and language proficiency on listening comprehension items of the Test of English as a Foreign Language. Three two-way interactions were significant: proficiency by type of stimuli, type of stimuli by visual condition, and type of stimuli by time.…

States that various studies have revealed excellent recognition memory of pictures when participants are asked to remember what has been presented. Explores unpracticed memory for the English five pound bank note. States that results point to dramatic memory failure and to misrepresentations in memory. (CMK)

Examines the utility of visual cues as a form of antecedent management for promoting task engagement and lessening the effects of severe and challenging behavior among children with autism. Specific guidelines for designing and implementing activity schedules are described, and a case study is presented. (Author/CR)

Examines learning in the domain of sentence parsing and syntax tree-diagram construction to assess whether subjects could learn "vicariously" from recordings of interactions between a previous student and a tutor. Findings indicate that reusable dialog is a useful resource for the vicarious learner and that unannotated animated diagrams…

When presented with stimuli that contain illegal consonant clusters, Japanese listeners tend to hear an illusory vowel that makes their perception conform to the phonotactics of the language. Assesses an alternate hypothesis that this illusion is due to a top-down lexical effect. (Author/VWL)

In this study, younger and older adults heard either just word onsets, word onsets followed by white noise indicating word duration, or word onsets followed by signals indicating word prosody. Older adults required longer stimulus durations for word recognition with hearing sensitivity a significant factor. Word recognition was facilitated equally…

Eight crows were taught to discriminate overlapping pairs of visual stimuli (A+ B-, B+ C-, C+ D-, and D+ E-). For 4 birds, the stimuli were colored cards with a circle of the same color on the reverse side whose diameter decreased from A to E (ordered feedback group). These circles were made available for comparison to potentially help the crows…

Recent experiments suggest that the effects of drugs of abuse on the discrimination of the passage of time may differ for experimenter-imposed and subject-produced events. The current experiment examined this suggestion by determining the effects of morphine on the discrimination of interresponse times (IRTs). Pigeons pecked a center key on a…

Results of numerous human imaging studies and nonhuman neurophysiological studies on "reward" highlight a role for frontal, striatal, and thalamic regions in operant learning. By integrating operant and functional neuroimaging methodologies, the present investigation examined brain activation to two types of discriminative stimuli correlated with…

From Aesop to Sun Tzu, the importance of working together has long been acknowledged. Yet as long as cooperation has existed, so have the difficulties associated with it. Pooling two fields might mean twice the power, but this union also brings twice the jargon, twice the competing theories, and twice the head butting. Nonetheless, in this…

Infants' ability to track temporarily occluded objects that moved on circular trajectories was investigated in 20 infants using a longitudinal design. They were first seen at 6 months and then every 2nd month until the end of their 1st year. Infants were presented with occlusion events covering 20% of the target's trajectory (effective occlusion…

Prior research suggests that when very simple event sequences are used, 4.5-month-olds demonstrate the ability to individuate objects based on the continuity or disruption of their speed of motion (Wilcox & Schweinle, 2003). However, infants demonstrate their ability to individuate objects in an event-monitoring task (i.e., infants must keep track…

Young infants are very sensitive to feature distribution information in the environment. However, existing work suggests that they do not make use of correlation information to form certain perceptual categories until at least 7 months of age. We suggest that the failure to use correlation information is a by-product of familiarization procedures…

The human peripheral auditory system is fully developed at birth; however, myelination continues for several years in the higher auditory pathways. The aim of the present study was to assess the maturation course of the frequency and duration pattern tests and the middle latency response (MLR). One hundred and fifty normal participants ranging…