Modeling and Visualizing the Codevelopment of Word and Nonword Reading in Children From First Through Fourth Grade: Informing Developmental Trajectories of Children With Dyslexia

Developmental studies examining relations between word reading (WR) and decoding in typical and dyslexic populations routinely cut the reading distribution to form distinct groups. However, dichotomizing continuous variables to study development is problematic for multiple reasons. Instead, we modeled and visualized the parallel growth of WR and nonword reading (NWR) factor scores longitudinally in a Grade 1–4 developmental sample (N = 588). The results indicate that while WR and NWR growth factors are highly related (r = .71), the relation between WR and NWR trajectories change as a function of initial WR. Results are interpreted within computational models of dyslexia in which children with dyslexia overfit orthography → phonology relations at the level of the word, limiting the development of sublexical representations needed to read nonwords.     

Looking for inhibition of return in pigeons

We conducted four experiments in order to investigate whether pigeons' responses to a recently attended (i.e., recently pecked) location are inhibited. In Experiments 1 and 2, stimulus displays were similar to those used in studies of inhibition of return (IOR) with humans; responses to cued targets tended to be facilitated rather than inhibited. In Experiments 3 and 4, birds were presented with stimulus displays that mimicked clusters of small grains and were relatively localized, which should have been more appropriate for detecting IOR in pigeons. The results from these experiments again provided evidence for facilitation of responding to cued targets, rather than for IOR.     

A fading procedure facilitates the maintenance of observing responses when the more valued stimulus is not produced

Pigeons served in two experiments in which responding on an observing key converted a two-component mixed schedule to the corresponding multiple schedule of reinforcement. Presentation of the stimulus correlated with the more valued component was faded out (probabilistically) over sessions, so that ultimately an observing response produced only the stimulus correlated with the less valued component. Observing was well maintained after a fading procedure when a stimulus was produced by a single response, regardless of whether the less valued stimulus was associated with food or with extinction (Experiment 1). However, observing was not well maintained after a fading procedure when a stimulus was produced according to an intermittent schedule (Experiment 2). Taken together, the results of the two experiments suggest that the absence of an exteroceptive stimulus change after a single response may become discriminative in its own right for the more valued component, and that the fading procedure is an effective means of promoting this discrimination. However, if observing responses produce a stimulus change according to an intermittent schedule, then the absence of a stimulus change after a response is correlated with both components. Under these conditions, the absence of stimulus change is not discriminative for either component, even with fading, and observing is not maintained.