Decreases in behavioral investigation of novel stimuli over time may be mediated by a variety of factors including changes in attention, internal state, and motivation. Sensory cortical adaptation, a decrease in sensory cortical responsiveness over prolonged stimulation, may also play a role. In olfaction, metabotropic glutamate receptors on…

In tactile learning, sucrose is the unconditioned stimulus and reward, which is usually applied to the antenna to elicit proboscis extension and which the bee can drink when it is subsequently applied to the extended proboscis. The conditioned stimulus is a tactile object that the bee can scan with its antennae. In this paper we describe the…

The effect of both geometric and extra-geometric factors on children's production of "in" is reported (free-response paradigm). Eighty children across four age groups (means 4;1, 5;5, 6;1, and 7;1) were shown video scenes of puppets placing real objects in various positions with reference to a bowl and a plate. Located objects were placed at three…

Understanding the intentional actions of others is a fundamental part of human social cognition and behavior. An important question is therefore whether other animal species, especially our nearest relatives the chimpanzees, also understand the intentional actions of others. Here we show that chimpanzees spontaneously (without training) behave…

This paper examined conceptual versus perceptual priming in identification of incomplete pictures by using a short-term priming paradigm, in which information that may be useful in identifying a fragmented target is presented just prior to the target's presentation. The target was a picture that slowly and continuously became complete and the…

Six experiments investigated 7-month-old infants' capacity to learn about the self-propelled motion of an object. After observing 1 wind-up toy animal move on its own and a second wind-up toy animal move passively by an experimenter's hand, infants looked reliably longer at the former object during a subsequent stationary test, providing evidence…

As instances of behavior, words interact with environments. But they also interact with each other and with other kinds of behavior. Because of the interlocking nature of the contingencies into which words enter, their behavioral properties may become increasingly removed from nonverbal contingencies, and their relationship to those contingencies…

Behavior analysts have offered accounts of the behavior involved in matching to sample and delayed matching to sample. But until recently have not offered a behavioral analysis of generalized matching-to-sample. The concept of joint control, however, seems especially suited to such an analysis The present study used a joint-control procedure to…

In the present study, joint-control training was applied when teaching manded selection responses to children with autism. Four vocal children with autism participated in the first experiment, two males (ages seven and eight) and two females (ages seven and nine). The results showed that it was only after object-word naming was trained under joint…

Receptor:ligand interactions account for numerous reactions critical to biochemistry and molecular biology. While students are typically exposed to some examples, such as hemoglobin binding of oxygen and signal transduction pathways, the topic could easily be expanded. Theory and kinetic analysis, types of receptors, and the experimental assay…

The authors present a comprehensive consideration of the process characteristics of visual search in contexts that vary in their meaningfulness. The authors frame hypotheses regarding process architecture, stopping rule, capacity, and channel independence, using analytic results and a rigorously specified dynamic system to characterize a set of…

A word from a dense neighborhood is often read aloud faster than a word from a sparse neighborhood. This advantage is usually attributed to orthography, but orthographic and phonological neighbors are typically confounded. Two experiments investigated the effect of neighborhood density on reading aloud when phonological density was varied while…

It only makes sense to talk about the position of a moving object if one specifies the time at which its position is of interest. The authors here show that when a flash or tone specifies the moment of interest, subjects estimate the moving object to be closer to where it passes the fixation point and further in its direction of motion than it…

In a previous study, it was shown that the attentional blink (AB)--the failure to recall the 2nd of 2 visual targets (T1 and T2) presented within 500 ms in rapid serial visual presentation--is reduced when T2 is preceded by a distractor that shares a feature with T2 (e.g., color; Nieuwenstein, Chun, van der Lubbe & Hooge, 2005). Here, this cuing…

Visual attention is preattentively drawn to abrupt onsets of stimuli appearing in a visual array. In this experiment, I examined the speed of attentional capture for persons with and without mental retardation. Participants identified target stimuli that were signaled by a valid location cue (20% of the time), an invalid location cue (60% of the…