Two studies found that 5 students (ages 9-10) needing emotional support acquired behaviors shown in instructive feedback conditions that were unrelated to the target behaviors, whereas target material presented with related instructive feedback stimuli were acquired at a slightly faster rate. The importance of considering novelty, interest, and…

Discusses theory of stimulus addiction, a process of human accommodation to stimuli which fosters dependency and may foster addiction. Suggests that a society of affluence may be prone to addictiveness because the more continuous the stimuli the person experiences, the more tolerance is created, and with tolerance comes stimulus deprivation.…

Variations in the aversiveness of a newborn's distress cry were examined by means of manipulation of features of fundamental frequency, intonation, and spectral complexity, and of information given to subjects about the infant's health status. Findings suggest that the listener's reaction to cry characteristics can be altered by the inducement of…

This study found that 10 adolescents with mental retardation processed stimuli varying with respect to symmetry in comparable manner to peers matched for mental age and chronological age. Results argue for the robustness of the symmetry effect across groups differing in intelligence and physically dissimilar stimulus types (checkerboard versus…

Auditory filter widths for six groups of subjects, adults and children, were tested with fixed signal level (psychophysical tuning curve procedure) and fixed masker (notched noise procedure). Found that auditory filter widths from ages six to adult were not significantly different, and auditory deficits that appear as a function of age likely…

Compared interstimulus interval (ISI) eye movements of 3-month-olds viewing an alternating picture sequence with those of infants viewing an irregular sequence. Found that all infants exhibited shifts during ISIs. Repetitive saccades declined while alternating and anticipatory saccades increased in alternating sequences. ISI shift frequency did…

Two experiments investigated lateral asymmetries in eight-month-olds' perception of contour-altered and contour-preserved melody changes. Found that infants who heard a contour-altered change showed a left-ear advantage, whereas infants who heard a contour-preserved change showed a right-ear advantage. The pattern of lateralization for melody…

Traces the decline of rhetoric and the underlying social changes that hastened its fall from grace. Argues the need for a reconstructed rhetoric. Creates a context for considering a visual rhetoric. Suggests that abstraction and scientific reductionism fail to address issues of human agency. Cites five examples of social or cultural problems that…

Proposes a minimal set of principles based on short-term and long-term memory mechanisms that can explain the major static and dynamic properties of operant behavior in both single-choice and multiresponse situations. The model predicts the major qualitative features of operant phenomena and suggests an experimental test of theoretical predictions…

This article on the use of applied behavior analysis with students who have autism focuses on selected recently developed stimulus control techniques. These include new methods for teaching conditional discrimination (matching) skills, stimulus equivalence procedures, prompt and prompt-fading techniques, and incidental teaching procedures.…

Investigated how different contexts for learning affect the development of memory-enhancing strategies in children. Subjects were children four to seven years old. Results indicated that the number of items recalled in the lesson condition was significantly greater than in the game condition, and the grade effect was also significant. (MOK)

The hyperbolic cosine unfolding model for direct responses (HCMDR) of persons to individual stimuli is elaborated in three ways. The specialization of the second parameter is shown to be a property of the data, and not arbitrary. The HCMDR is used to construct an elegant model for pairwise preferences. (SLD)

Compared the performance of children with and without autism in object-based positive and negative priming tasks within a visual search procedure. Found object-based positive and negative priming effects in both groups, with no group differences in the magnitude of the effects. Compared to typically developing children, children with autism were…

Demonstrates the value of a knowledge of linguistics and theories of human language to technical authors in terms of the communication model, grammar, rhetorical patterns, some linguistic features of technical English, semantics, and visual and graphic representation. (SC)

In this study, the looking behavior of 16 autistic and 14 non-autistic children toward cartoon-like scenes that included a human figure was measured quantitatively using an infrared eye-tracking device. Fixation behavior of autistic children was similar to that of their age-and IQ-matched normal peers. Results do not support the idea that autistic…