Argues that informetrics needs a rigorous mathematical basis and that informetric processes can be adequately describes within a standard probabilistic framework with stochastic modeling offering a more productive approach than other methods. Highlights include Lotka's Law; robustness and multiauthorship; and resilience and the random component.…

In Experiment 1, 6 adults with mild mental retardation were taught 3 overlapping conditional discriminations in a linear series structure, establishing the possibility of the emergence of 2 stimulus equivalence classes of 4 stimuli per class. Training employed balanced trial types in which the discriminative stimuli were presented in fixed pairs…

In recent years, functional analysis methods have been extended to classroom settings; however, research has not evaluated the extent to which consequences presented during functional analysis are associated with problem behavior under naturalistic classroom conditions. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine whether the social…

A growing body of research has documented effects of phonotactic probability on young children's nonword repetition. This study extends this research in 2 ways. First, it compares nonword repetitions by 40 young children with phonological disorders with those by 40 same-age peers with typical phonological development on a nonword repetition task…

Previously it has been shown that the left hemisphere, but not the right, of split-brain patients tends to match the frequency of previous occurrences in probability-guessing paradigms (Wolford, Miller, & Gazzaniga, 2000). This phenomenon has been attributed to an ''interpreter,'' a mechanism for making interpretations and forming hypotheses,…

The relations between intactness of the parental unit (e.g., father absent at age 14) and pubertal timing in both men and women were examined in a US national probability sample. In both men and women, an absent father at age 14 predicted an earlier age of puberty (e.g., early menarche or voice change). There was little evidence that an absent…

Probability judgments for packed descriptions of events (e.g., the probability that a businessman does business with a European country) are compared with judgments for unpacked descriptions of the same events (e.g., the probability that a businessman does business with England, France, or some other European country). The prediction that…

In an Angoff standard-setting procedure, judges estimate the probability that a hypothetical randomly selected minimally competent candidate will answer correctly each item constituting the test. In many cases, these item performance estimates are made twice, with information shared with the judges between estimates. Especially for long tests,…

In this paper a more accurate index of asymmetry is studied. Specifically, the use of the left and right variance is proposed and an index of asymmetry based on them is introduced. Several examples demonstrate its usefulness. The question of evaluating more accurately the dispersion of data about the average emerges in all non-symmetric…

This article examines the 5-year incidence, prevalence, and recurrence of intimate partner violence (IPV) among White, Black, and Hispanic intact couples in the United States. A national multistage household probability sample of couples, age 18 years or older, was interviewed in 1995 with a response rate of 85%, and reinterviewed in 2000 with a…

Prospect theory assumes nonadditive decision weights for preferences over risky gambles. Such decision weights generalize additive probabilities. This article proposes a decomposition of decision weights into a component reflecting risk attitude and a new component depending on belief. The decomposition is based on an observable preference…

This article finds the minimum number of moves to order a deck of cards by placing them in suits, but not necessarily in order.

Near the end of his illustrious career, Gottlieb lamented the continued dominance of heritability analysis in human psychology and the difficulties in winning support for the developmental point of view. Recent, spectacular progress in molecular genetic neuroscience and the genetic study of behavior, however, is rendering heritability analysis…

Although errors in reasoning about conditional probability have been the focus of interest of psychologists for a long time, the development of conditional reasoning in school students has received little attention. This paper considers the responses of 69 students across grades 3 to 13 in an attempt to model the development of appropriate…

Processing language requires the retrieval of concepts from memory in response to an ongoing stream of information. This retrieval is facilitated if one can infer the gist of a sentence, conversation, or document and use that gist to predict related concepts and disambiguate words. This article analyzes the abstract computational problem…