Paul S. Siegel

Incentive Motivation in the Mental Retardate1

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the incentive motivation in the mental retardate. The study of incentive motivation in the mentally retarded is plagued, with the problems of experimental control, more than most other areas of psychological inquiry. One of the richest sources of confounding resides in the social interaction that so often takes place between the experimenter and the subject. A comprehensive theory of incentive motivation must accommodate the following primary phenomena: (i) the likelihood, vigor, and persistence of behavior is in substantial measure, governed by the characteristics of rewards, reinforcers, or broadly, the events occurring at the terminus of a chain of behavior; (ii) in exercising influence upon the behavior, the capacity of the reward relates to both its magnitude and its “quality;” (iii) preference value, in turn, relates to needs, learned and unlearned, and temporary and more or less permanent; and (iv) needs may be highly idiosyncratic. This chapter discusses the segment of the literature that bears directly on mental retardation. It specifically reviews the experimental studies that have manipulated the contingencies or consequences of action variously termed “rewards,” “punishments,” “incentives,” ‘‘lures,’’ “reinforcers,” and “goal-objects” and have recorded some concomitantly varying aspect of behavior in one or more groups of subjects bearing the clinical diagnosis of mental retardation.

Does negative affect beget positive affect? A test of the opponent-process theory

A modified form of the Nowlis (1965, 1970) mood adjective checklist was administered to college students just before and immediately after taking a final course examination. In agreement with prediction from the opponent-process theory of motivation developed by Solomon and Corbit (1974), dysphoria decreased reliably and, more significantly, euphoria increased.

Speed of choosing in relation to the preference value of the incentive

Speed of choosing was found to relate positively to the magnitude of the difference in preference value holding between pairs presented to retardates.

CONCEPT FORMATION: RESPONSE-TIME CONSIDERATIONS'

Methodology and instrumentation suited to the objective recording of response latencies during the learning of a concept are described and the results of an exploratory study summarized.

Application of a Guttman intensity analysis to personality measurement

Guttman’s (Guttman & Suchman, 1947) statistical strategy for determining the zero or neutral point of an attitude scale is extended in this study to the area of personality measurement. The strategy assumes that the intensity with which pro and con feelings are held will plot as a U- or a J-shaped function of attitude content. We elected for focus in the present study a modification of Miller’s (1980) Behavioral Style Scale, a personality questionnaire designed to gauge the coping strategy adopted by the individual as he/she attempts to meet imminent threat. The modified Behavioral Style Scale failed to yield the U- or J-shaped function, suggesting complex measurement.

Molar variability and the mentally retarded

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the molar variability of the mentally retarded. Molar variability, sometimes called intraindividual response variability, refers to some index of the extent to which the individual varies his or her successive choices between or among gross molar acts requiring equal effort and providing equal effectiveness in accomplishing a common end. This chapter reviews general theoretical accounts of this behavior and reviews research that has directly addressed normal-mentally retarded differences. The scattered nature of the studies that reported, makes it almost impossible to draw firm conclusions about the molar response variability (or rigidity) of the retarded. Too many of these experiments are isolated, are of limited methodological sophistication, or possess little generalization value. As difficult as it has been to answer the basic question of whether the retarded display more or less molar response variability than do normals of equal CA or MA, the effort to discover “why” such might exist has encountered even thornier problems.

Remediating Letter Reversals: Cost Considerations

This article addresses the question of costs associated with the remediation of learning disabilities. It is argued that whenever such practical considerations as teacher- or student-time prevail, the question of whether or not the training procedure is economical should be addressed. To accomplish such a cost analysis, the design must specify a meaningful scale along which costs may be gauged. The argument is illustrated with an experiment that utilized a fading technique to teach preschool children to correctly label ps and qs.

Establishment of a conditioned reinforcer in relation to shock termination—an attempt to replicate

Murray and Strandberg have offered evidence in support of the hypothesis that events signaling the termination of electric shock take on secondary reinforcement capability. The present experiment was a partial replication with Ss tested under spaced as well as massed inter trial intervals to separate elicitation from reinforcement. Results revealed no facilitating effect of the signal in either condition. However, in independence of secondary reinforcement considerations, spaced Ss yielded much greater resistance to extinction.

Demand characteristics and the response suppression hypothesis

College student subjects were given the opportunity to pull a plunger (Linsley manipulandum) or press a small panel in a three-stage design. Five minutes of free access (baseline) was followed by a 5-min contingency phase in which 10 responses to the plunger were required to free the panel for a single press. This was followed by a 5-min return to baseline. From a postexperiment questionnaire, subjects were judged to have been either aware or unaware of the contingent relation between the plunger and the panel. Those judged to have been aware yielded much higher rates of plunger pulling during the contingent phase and were more active during baseline measurement. These results raise problems for the response suppression methodology of Eisenberger, Karpman, and Trattner (1967), since they can be as readily accounted for by Orne’s (1962) demand hypothesis.

An experimental note on Tversky’ s “features of similarity”

Tversky has related degree of judged similarity between (among) objects to the degree of overlap of matching features. It is shown here that the extent to which mentally retarded children judge planometric figures to be alike is related positively to the number of matching cues.