Argues that learning is an invariant process best understood from a dialectical perspective which demands that learning be viewed as an interaction between the organism and the environment. This view is contrasted with traditional operant approaches and with a Piagetian approach. (Author/DB)

Operant conditioning techniques were used to teach a visually impaired deaf girl (six years old) to emit eye contact within a classroom for deaf-blind children. (Author/CL)

Explains how a teaching method such as allowing students to raise gerbils at home can encourage students to gain experience with the fundamental techniques of operant conditioning which are otherwise generally unavailable to students in large introductory psychology courses. (DB)

Criticism of the study relating effects of therapist warmth to desensitization include: the use of surrogate, student subjects; nonstandard desensitization procedures; and no control group. Morris and Suckerman respond that the first two criticisms rely on selective reading of the literature and the third is irrelevant. (NG)

A total of 12 elementary school children participated in a study on the effect of percentage in variable amounts of reinforcement under several variable interval schedules. (MS)

A guest editorial comments on the acrimonious rhetoric and arguments exhibited in the debate over the use of aversives with individuals with mental retardation. The editorial urges members of the field to refocus their framing of the issues around respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. (JDD)

Treatment of behavioral problems of 3 girls (ages 31-37 months) with Rett's disorder is discussed. Behavioral treatment using operant conditioning principles did little to alter the course of the disorder for these individuals. The one consistent improvement for the girls was a decrease in tantrums. (SW)

Operant conditioning of the H-reflex, the electrical analog of the spinal stretch reflex, is a simple model of skill acquisition and involves plasticity in the spinal cord. Previous work showed that the cerebellum is essential for down-conditioning the H-reflex. This study asks whether the cerebellum is also essential for maintaining…

Gottlieb's (1991/2007) target article represents a milestone in our understanding of the impact of social experience on developmental malleability. Interactions across the species-typical and operant behavior categories are increasingly understood to exist. The social contingencies present in the normal species-typical developmental manifold are…

Mice from replicate lines, selectively bred based on high daily wheel-running rates, run more total revolutions and at higher average speeds than do mice from nonselected control lines. Based on this difference it was assumed that selected mice would find the opportunity to run in a wheel a more efficacious consequence. To assess this assumption…

The production of complex sequences like music or speech requires the rapid and temporally precise production of events (e.g., notes and chords), often at fast rates. Memory retrieval in these circumstances may rely on the simultaneous activation of both the current event and the surrounding context (Lashley, 1951). We describe an extension to a…

Evaluated with 12 children (9- to 25-months-old) were the efficacy and reliability of auditory stimulus-response control training and assessment procedures. (Author/LS)

This article focuses on the use of "timeout" as a classroom behavior modification technique. The questions and guidelines are presented in a flow chart format in order to facilitate easy and quick use by practitioners. (Author)

The objective of this investigation was two-fold; to examine systematically the importance of visual-holding cues during inter-response intervals, and to monitor concurrent visual behavior in an operant learning situation which incorporated a spatially displaced feedback locus. (Author)

The paper analyses issues in the hearing assessment of multihandicapped deaf-blind children. The experiences of the authors as consultants to centers for deaf-blind children are briefly noted. Advantages and disadvantages are considered for two basic approaches to hearing assessment: the electrophysiologic in which electricity from neural…