Showing papers in "Psychological Review in 1971"

Components of attention.

Abstract: The study of human attention may be divided into three components. These are alertness, selectivity, and processing capacity. This paper outlines experimental techniques designed to separate these components and examine their interrelations within comparable tasks. It is shown that a stimulus may be used to increase alertness for processing all external information, to improve selection of particular stimuli, or to do both simultaneously. Development of alertness and selectivity are separable, but they may go on together without interference. Moreover, encoding a stimulus may proceed without producing interference with other signals. Thus, the contact between an external stimulus and its representation in memory does not appear to require processing capacity. Limited capacity results are obtained when mental operations such as response selection or rehearsal must be performed on the encoded information.

The "supersitition" experiment: A reexamination of its implications for the principles of adaptive behavior.

Abstract: Replication and extension of Skinner's "superstition" experiment showed the development of two kinds of behavior at asymptote: interim activities (related to adjunctive behavior) occurred just after food delivery; the terminal response (a discriminated operant) occurred toward the end of the interval and continued until food delivery. These data suggest a view of operant conditioning (the terminal response) in terms of two sets of principles: principles of behavioral variation that describe the origins of behavior "appropriate" to a situation, in advance of reinforcement; and principles of reinforcement that describe the selective elimination of behavior so produced. This approach was supported by (a) an account of the parallels between the Law of Effect and evolution by means of natural selection, (fc) its ability to shed light on persistent problems in learning (e.g., continuity vs. noncontinuity, variability associated with extinction, the relationship between classical and instrumental conditioning, the controversy between behaviorist and cognitive approaches to learning), and (c) its ability to deal with a number of recent anomalies in the learning literature ("instinctive drift," auto-shaping, and auto-maintenance). The interim activities were interpreted in terms of interactions among motivational systems, and this view was supported by a review of the literature on adjunctive behavior and by comparison with similar phenomena in ethology (displacement, redirection, and "vacuum" activities). The proposed theoretical scheme represents a shift away from hypothetical "laws of learning" toward an interpretation of behavioral change in terms of interaction and competition among tendencies to action according to principles evolved in phylogeny.

Conjoint-measurement analysis of composition rules in psychology.

Abstract: Composition rules are theories that describe the relationships among several measurable variables. Conjoint measurement provides methods for analyzing such rules using ordinal information only. This analysis is applied to a class of four composition rules in three variables [A + P + U, (A + P) U, AP + U, APU~], which have been widely employed in different areas of psychology. It leads to the formulation of observable ordinal properties that can be used to test and diagnose which of the rules, if any, is appropriate for a given set of data.

Punishment: Method and Theory.

Abstract: A methodological framework for the analysis of punishment is outlined. The methodology, which is called a multiple-response base-line procedure, serves two purposes. First, it raises a number of new questions about the properties of punishment. Second, it permits the examination of some untested assumptions found in traditional punishment theory. Initial evidence obtained with the multiple-response methodology questions the validity of traditional theoretical assumptions and suggests two simple rules for predicting the properties of various punishment operations.