The effects of signaled reward on sign tracking and response rate

If, while responding on a variable interval schedule, rats are given a brief cue prior to reward, their response rate is markedly lower than the rate for yoked partners who receive the cue randomly with respect to reward. This signaled-reward phenomenon has been explained in terms of sign tracking. Two experiments reported here replicated the phenomenon and examined sign tracking directly through visual inspection of the animals’ behavior. Although sign tracking did, indeed, occur more in the signaled reward condition, it did not fully account for the difference in response rates.     

Doubling Down: President Barack Obama’s Doubled Persona after the Zimmerman Verdict

This article analyzes President Barack Obama’s remarks following the acquittal of George Zimmerman on the charge of murdering Trayvon Martin. Speaking directly to, for, or about African Americans would lead some to accuse him of speaking primarily as a black man, while ignoring the idea of race would lead some to accuse him of failing to acknowledge its omnipresence in American life. To manage these constraints, the president employed what we have termed a doubled persona; that is, he enacted two different speaking personae and envisioned a distinct audience persona for each speaking persona: He spoke both as a black president and as a president who is black.     

Do university rankings matter? A qualitative exploration of institutional selection at three southern Ontario universities

Concern with university rankings have become widespread throughout post-secondary education (PSE), fuelled in part by administrative concerns that demotions down the rank ladder will produce negative institutional outcomes. There is reason to believe, however, that ranking ‘effects’ may be partially muted in Canadian PSE due to the (1) national system’s flatter hierarchical structure and (2) the generally inconsistent findings produced by domestic research on rankings. Through this study, we provide a qualitative analysis of how rankings shaped the institutional selection processes of 90 undergraduate students across three universities in southern Ontario, Canada. Our data indicate that these students rarely consulted ranking publications, relying instead on reputational information available through their informal networks (e.g. peers, family). We theorise that the unique structural characteristics of Canadian PSE minimise the influence of rankings within this jurisdiction, and discuss the practical implications of this finding for both scholars and administrators.     

Androgen and the Development of Human Sex-typical Behavior: Rough-and-Tumble Play and Sex of Preferred Playmates in Children with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH)

We hypothesized that girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), who experience higher than normal levels of androgens prenatally, would show masculinization of behaviors that show sex differences. Therefore, we examined rough-and-tumble play and sex of preferred playmates in 3–8-year-old children with CAH and in unaffected 3–8-year-old male and female relatives. The hypothesized sex differences in rough-and-tumble play were seen, with unaffected boys showing more rough-and-tumble play than unaffected girls. However, CAH girls were similar to unaffected girls. Additionally, CAH boys showed reduced rough-and-tumble play. In contrast, sex of preferred playmates showed the hypothesized pattern of results. There were sex differences, with unaffected boys preferring boys and unaffected girls preferring girls. In addition, the preferences of girls with CAH were masculinized compared to those of unaffected girls. Results are discussed in terms of possible influences of social, hormonal, and illness factors.     

The under-recognition of the significance of social class conceptions of education in Piketty’s Capital

Abstract

Piketty’s Capital has created enormous interest around the world, not least in educational circles. One reason for this may be his readiness to refer, in a book largely focused on economic history, to the ways that education has, and might, contribute to better and more equal social outcomes. This article welcomes this approach, but argues that Piketty’s suggestions remain somewhat limited due to his adherence to a more or less distributional, rather than relational, approach, and then sets out to address this issue by arguing that the assumption that it is the distribution of credentials which accounts for their contribution is mistaken. Instead, the article advances arguments which recognize the separate contributions of the content of credentials, and their valorization. The main focus of this article is thus on the different ways educational credentials are realized, which, it is argued, is a major basis for the maintenance of educational inequality.     

Academic achievement and individual differences in the learning processes of Israeli high-school students

The Inventory of Learning Processes (ILP), originally developed by Schmeck et al. (1977), assesses individual differences in information processing styles of college level students. The inventory consists of four scales: Deep Processing (DP), Methodical Study (MS), Fact Retention (FR), and Elaborative Processing (EP). Three aspects of the ILP scales have been studied for 9th and 11th grade high-school students. First, the internal consistency reliabilities of the ILP scales, two of which DP and MS were satisfactory. Second, the factor structure obtained in this study included three out of the four original factors. FR was not reconstructed. Third, the relationship between academic achievement and information processing of high-school students have been analyzed. Deep Processing (DP) came out as the most prominent style in its relation to academic achievement, particularly among the younger students.     

Transfer of escape conditioning to extinction of a food-reinforced response

Four experiments test the hypothesis that escape learning in response to shock will transfer to a similar food-reinforced response and affect resistance to appetitive extinction. In the first two experiments, subjects were given escape training in a straight alley followed by continuous food reinforcement and then extinction. Prior escape training resulted in greater resistance to extinction of the food-reinforced response as compared to several control procedures. In the third experiment, the escape response was manipulated to be compatible or incompatible with the subsequent food-reinforced response. Greater resistance to extinction was shown when the two responses were compatible. The fourth experiment confirmed and extended this finding. The relationship of the present results to Amsel’s theory of persistence was discussed.