Fear-motivated vicious-circle behavior maintained through secondary punishment

Two experiments attempted to establish vicious-circle behavior through fear motivation combined with secondary punishment. In Experiment 1, rats were trained with two CSs, a tone and a buzzer, paired with shock in different contexts. Secondary punishment based on delay and trace conditioning procedures facilitated running in fear-motivated rats, relative to four control groups. In Experiment 2, rats were given pairings of a tone CS with shock, and a buzzer CS with a drop into a water tank. Fear-motivated rats which received secondary punishment during either 33% or 100% of test trials exhibited self-punitive running relative to a nonpunished (0%) group and a backward-conditioning control group. Results indicate that “all secondary” vicious-circle behavior can be established through Pavlovian conditioning, thus supporting a conditioned fear interpretation.     

Reinstatement of postresponse stimuli prior to reward in delayed-reward discrimination learning by pigeons

Delayed-reward learning in pigeons was examined using a simultaneous red-green visual discrimination task in which the conditions during the delay interval were varied between groups. The nondifferential group received training in which the stimulus present during the 1-min delay was the same following a peck on the correct and incorrect colors. The other three groups received 1-min delay training in which different stimuli occurred in the delay interval following correct and incorrect choices. The differential group received continuous, differential stimuli during the delay. The reinstatement group received the differential stimuli in the 10 sec immediately following the choice and during the last 10 sec of the delay. The reversedcue group was treated in the same way, except that the 10-sec delay stimulus immediately following an incorrect response was also presented for 10 sec prior to reward on correct choices, and the stimulus following a correct response also occurred 10 sec before nonreward on incorrect choices. Nondifferential birds failed to learn the discrimination, while differential and reinstatement birds learned it readily. The reversed-cue birds learned to choose the incorrect stimulus. Differential and reinstatement birds showed no decrement in performance when the delay was increased to 2 min. These findings suggest that similarity of prereward and postresponse delay stimuli controls choice responding in long-delay learning, a finding compatible with both memorial and conditioned reinforcement interpretations.     

Matching Cloze as an Evaluation Procedure for Slow Learning Children

The matching cloze procedure, which does not require language production skills and which is simple enough for the classroom teacher to construct unaided, was originally developed to measure reading skills of elementary English‐second‐language pupils. The results of this pilot study with opportunity school children indicate the validity of the procedure as an evaluation technique for slow learning children.     

Constituting information technology research: the experience of IT researchers

The collective consciousness of effective groups of researchers is characterized by shared understandings of their research object or territory. In this study, we adopted a phenomenographic approach to investigate information technology (IT) research, and its objects and territories, as they are constituted in the experience of IT researchers. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with researchers representing different sub‐disciplines. Analysis revealed the variation in meaning associated with the idea of IT research; and the awareness structures through which participants experience variation in ways of seeing the object and territories of IT research. Eight ways of seeing IT research were found. The outcomes of our project appear to make visible the changes and developments that are an essential part of the character and experience of contemporary IT research.