These 2 papers examine the application of reinforcement principles in natural social settings. The first paper concentrates on the methodology of applied research, using an experimental as opposed to an observational strategy. That is, the experimenter intervenes with special "treatments" in a real-life social institution, much as he would in a…

Eight graduate students were used as experimenters in this study to assess the effects of experimentally induced experimenter outcome bias with respect to selected suprasegmental phenomena (pitch, stress, and terminal intonation) emitted by the experimenters during the instruction reading phase of a behavioral experiment. Experimenters were led to…

Conjugate reinforcement is a new attention measure which has emerged from experimental psychology. It can provide accurate measurement of a subject's attention to a stimulus. In conjugate reinforcement, the duration of the stimulus varies directly and immediately with the subject's rate of response. In this process, the subject must demonstrate…

Two groups of five preschool children were trained to press a key for marbles for four sessions of variable ratio reinforcement (VR6). Subsequently, response decrement for the groups was compared during conditions of fixed and variable differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO and VDRO). Fixed DRO was more effective for decreasing response…

A delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) task was used to test several hypotheses about sources of retroactive inhibition (RI) in pigeon short-term memory. (Editor)

Given an opportunity to choose between an immediate, small reward and a delayed, large reward, pigeons may commit themselves to the large reward, but if the choice is encountered they will almost always select the immediate, small reward. This study tested a model, developed by H. Rachlin and his co-workers, concerning some general theories of…

The present study, by requiring subjects to decide whether the two words in a stimulus pair have the same or different meanings, is an attempt to measure the time necessary to encode a printed word into a representation of its meaning which is available for subsequent matching. (Author)

The present study used a two-choice spatial probability-learning situation (Bitterman, 1975; Wilson & Oscar, 1966) in order to explore the hypothesis that Korsakoff patients differ from control subjects in the way in which they respond to changes in reinforcement contingencies. (Author)

In the present study each subject's rehearsal strategy was monitored by recording his eye movements as he studied a series of lists of eight simultaneously presented words. (Author/RK)

The author attempts to obtain some new evidence on simple addition processes in adults in order to evaluate the two additon models offered by Groen and Parkman (1972); a simple counting model and a more complex retrieval model, involving direct access and counting. (Author/RK)

Compared five distinct classes of models of how people judge the relative sizes of named objects. Four basic experiments were all concerned with the amount of time necessary to decide which of two named things is larger. (Editor/RK)

Examines the latency of associative activation in memory by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between a prime word and a test word, thereby establishing the minimum SOA needed to produce a significant associative priming effect on lexical decision times. (Author/RK)

The contrasting approaches of differential psychology and cognitive psychology to the same individual differences data are outlined. Using data from the Clark and Chase sentence-picture verification task, four loci of conflict between these two disciplines are identified: (1) theory versus measurement; (2) meaningfulness versus reliability; (3)…

Two tachistoscopic tests of cerebral lateralization, one measuring spatial functions and one measuring verbal function, were administered to 73 subjects classified by handedness, hand posture writing, and sex. Tests the proposal that an inverted hand posture is indicative of a language hemisphere ipsalateral to the dominant hand and that the…

Grant and Roberts found that houselight presented throughout the delay period on a delayed matching-to-sample task caused pigeons to demonstrate a much lower level of accuracy than was found when the delay was spent in darkness. A series of experiments was carried out to examine possible mechanisms responsible for this light-induced retroactive…