No description available.

This qualitative case study sought to expand what is known about training methods that improve interpersonal communication skills for mid-level leaders in corporate settings. It looked at a training methodology, Behaviour Analysis (BA, Rackham & Morgan, 1977) conducted in the context of a year-long leadership development program in a biopharmaceutical company in the United States. Interviews with 16 program participants, and post-program survey data from 83 participants across 5 years, responded to three research questions: 1. How, and in what ways, did mid-level leaders perceive the interplay between thinking about how to communicate effectively and behaving in an interpersonally effective way? (perception) 2. How did mid-level leaders apply BA post-program? (application) 3. What were the reported perceptions of mid-level leaders about a relationship between BA and perspective transformation? (meaning) The researcher had unique access to and history with the client as a facilitator and member of the program design team. A qualitative case study approach was appropriate, given the consistent program content and profiles of participants year over year as well as the availability of additional program documents for analysis. Data insights were varied and clustered by cohort. Findings were interpreted using two theoretical frames: (a) Mezirow’s (1978, 2003) work with perspective transformation, and (b) the study’s conceptual framework, based on Argyris and Schön’s (1974) seminal work on action science and single-/double-loop learning. Key findings included: (a) the element of time on learning to balance advocacy and inquiry; (b) BA acting as a disorienting dilemma and menu card for expanded communication strategies; and (c) the placement of the disorienting dilemma in the process of perspective transformation. Four conclusions were drawn: 1. Making a shift in communication skills to balance advocacy and inquiry is additive and transformative. 2. Group and/or peer learning is an important component for increasing self-awareness in corporate L&D programs. 3. Disorienting dilemmas can be engineered and are valuable for bringing unconscious behavior patterns to consciousness for skill-building in a training setting. 4. Time and reflection play critical roles in making conscious connections between espoused theories and theories-in-use to build communication skills.

'Would training in how to observe young children improve the child care student's ability to make objective observations? Would training improve their ability to identify the areas of development as exemplified in their observations? Could a practical and usable slide set be developed for the teaching of observational techniques to the high school child care student? How could the improvement in observational techniques of the child care services student be evaluated? These questions were the bases for planning this study. Therefore, it was the purpose of this study to develop and test a teacher-made slide set, depicting children's behavior, to be used in training high school child care services students to objectively observe and record children's behavior, and to classify the children's behavior as to the area of development exemplified"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "March, 1976." / "Submitted to the Department of Home Economics Education in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science." / Advisor: Mary Lee Hurt, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 44).

Lau, Sin Heng. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 17). / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

When a decision is made based on noisy evidence, it is often a good strategy to take multiple samples of evidence up to a threshold before committing to a choice. Such process, termed bounded evidence accumulation, have successfully explained human and nonhuman behavior (speed and accuracy of choices) and neural recordings quantitatively. In this thesis, we exploit the quantitative relationship between evidence, choice, and reaction times (inverse of speed), to infer decision rules that are not reported directly. In Part I, we consider decisions based on one stream of evidence. In Chapter 2, we start by examining decisions that are not reported immediately but felt to be made at some point. We show that, in a perceptual decision-making task, we can predict the proportion of choices from the reported timing of covert decisions. We suggest that the awareness of having decided corresponds to the threshold-crossing of the accumulated evidence, rather than a post hoc inference or arbitrary report. For the type of decisions reported in Chapter 2 and many others, it has been suggested that the terminating threshold is not constant but decreases over time. In Chapter 3, we propose a method that estimates the threshold without any assumption on its shape. As a step toward more complex decisions, in Part II we consider decisions based on two streams of evidence. In Chapter 4, we summarize the results from human psychophysics experiments involving simultaneous motion-color judgments. The results suggest that information bearing on two dimensions of a decision can be acquired in parallel, whereas incorporation of information into a combined decision involves serial access to these parallel streams. Here, one natural question is how complete the seriality is. In Chapter 5, we propose a method to estimate the degree of seriality of two evidence accumulation processes. Another question is whether the two streams are acquired in parallel even when the stimulus viewing duration is not limited, and hence there is no apparent advantage to parallel acquisition given the serial evidence accumulation stage. In Chapter 6, we propose a method to estimate the probability of simultaneous acquisition of two evidence streams given the choice and evidence streams. Collectively, the work in this thesis presents new ways to study decision rules quantitatively given noninvasive measures such as the contents of the evidence stream(s), decision times, and the choice.

Bidirectional Naming (BiN) is the reliable demonstration of incidentally learned word-object relations as both a listener and speaker. In Experiment I, a pilot study, I tested the effects of the establishment of BiN on the rate of learning new math and reading operants under baseline Standard Learn Unit (SLU) and Instructional Demonstration Learn Unit (IDLU) conditions. I conducted a combined multiple probe and counterbalanced ABAB/BABA reversal design across participant dyads, for which each participant’s rate of acquisition was compared under the IDLU and SLU conditions before and after the acquisition of BiN. Four participants diagnosed with developmental delays were selected for the study due to the assessed absence of both the listener and speaker components of the BiN capability. Intensive Tact Instruction (ITI) and Multiple Exemplar Instruction (MEI) were used to establish BiN. After the acquisition of BiN, all four participants demonstrated accelerated rates of learning reading and math objectives when provided the opportunity to observe a model (via IDLU instruction) prior to an instructional session, indicating a functional relation between the acquisition of BiN and the acceleration of learning via teacher-modeled instruction. In Experiment II, a demonstration study, 5 preschool students with a disability were selected following BiN probe trials and were grouped according to their BiN repertoires. A combined ABAB/BABA reversal design across learning objectives and BiN level was used to compare the rate of learning new speaker (i.e., tact) and listener (i.e., point-to) tasks across SLU and IDLU conditions. Results replicated previous findings wherein students with BiN in repertoire learned at an accelerated rate when provided IDLU instruction as compared to SLU instruction; further, participants with only the listener component of Naming (Unidirectional Naming; UniN) displayed accelerated learning under IDLU conditions for listener tasks, but not for speaker tasks. Results across both Experiments I and II indicate that students’ acquisition of the BiN capability (joint stimulus control across speaking and listening) is an essential verbal developmental capability for learning through the observation of a model in a standard classroom instructional setting. In Experiment III, a group correlational design was used to analyze the relation between students’ BiN scores and performance during the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts 3rd Edition – Preschool Version (BTBC3-P) (Boehm, 2001). Results demonstrated that a significant positive correlation exists between BiN and BTBC3-P assessment scores (p (42) = .341, p = .027). These data indicate that a student’s degree of BiN is a potential predictor of success on measures of basic concept knowledge, adding to findings from Experiments I and II that BiN is functionally related to learning at an accelerated rate and via observation.

As the application for choice architecture grow, our goal is to better understand both the short and long term effects of our interventions. Many of the world’s most pressing and complicated problems require many actions, instead of a single action. Choice architecture has been shown to be effective on one-and-done problems, but what about the more complicated problems? Can the tool we choose to influence behavior have a positive or negative effect on the likelihood of taking up a second or possibly third behavior? In Chapter 1, we explore the mechanism of risky choice framing, isolating the effect of attraction and repulsion on the number of, and the valence of, thoughts supporting either the risky or riskless outcomes. In Chapter 2, we show behavioral spillover in a lab settings, showing the effects of default setting on not only the initial behavior, but also subsequent behaviors. In Chapter 3, we take choice architecture and explore the effects of different messaging on both short and long term behavioral change.

This dissertation comprises three essays in behavioral and information economics. The first, “Estimating Information Cost Functions in Models of Rational Inattention,” uses laboratory data to analyze the properties of cost functions in models of rational inattention and determine their functional forms. The second, “Promises and Pronouncements,” uses a laboratory experiment to determine whether the propensity to tell monetarily advantageous lies depends on the ability to control the final outcome; in other words, whether reneging on a commitment (breaking a promise) is more or less likely than lying about something out of one’s control (making a false pronouncement). The third, “Costly Information and Multiattribute Choice” provides an information-theoretic explanation for some commonly observed phenomena in consumer choice when goods are defined by multiple characteristics.

In a demonstration study, Experiment I compared the naming cusp and capability for auditory, tactile, and olfactory stimuli with 6 preschool-aged children who demonstrated the naming capability for visual stimuli. Probes for listener and speaker responses were conducted following separate stimulus-stimulus pairings during which the experimenter presented a stimulus from one of the four modalities (i.e., visual, auditory, tactile, or olfactory) for the participant to observe, and named the stimulus. The names of the stimuli were counterbalanced, such that the names of each of the stimuli within each modality (e.g., visual modality) had different assigned names than the stimuli in the other modalities (e.g., auditory, tactile, and olfactory modalities). Four of the participants in Experiment I were typically developing and two participants were diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder. Five of the participants demonstrated full naming (i.e. the emission of untaught listener and speaker responses) for visual stimuli and at least 1other stimulus modality after 2 sessions of stimulus-stimulus pairings of stimuli and their names (i.e., naming experiences). One participant only demonstrated the listener half of naming for visual stimuli and did not demonstrate naming for any of the other stimulus modalities tested. Naming accrued for one or more stimulus modalities for five of the six participants after the second naming experience. Previous research investigating naming for a stimulus modality other than visual have demonstrated the acquisition of naming for auditory stimuli following stimulus-stimulus parings of visual stimuli with auditory stimuli presented with the same name. In Experiment II, I used a delayed repeated probe design across three dyads (five participants from Experiment I) to test the effects of repeated stimulus-stimulus pairings across visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory stimuli, presented simultaneously, with 1 name assigned for each modality set, on demonstrations of naming. In Experiment II the naming experiences consisted of the simultaneous presentation of four stimuli (i.e., visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory) while the experimenter labeled each stimulus while the participant observed. Five of the participants demonstrated overall increases in correct untaught speaker responses following the repeated stimulus-stimulus pairings. Some participants demonstrated decreases in correct responses across sessions, indicating certain stimuli elicited avoidance responses after repeated exposures. Five participants also demonstrated transfer of stimulus control from visual stimuli to one or more of the other stimulus modalities, indicating higher-order conditioning occurred. The findings provide further evidence for the differential development of naming across stimulus modalities for children with visual naming through stimulus-stimulus pairings.

Rapid and efficient escape behaviors in response to noxious sensory stimuli are essential for protection and survival. In Drosophila larvae, the class III (cIII) and class IV (cIV) dendritic arborization (da) neurons detect low-threshold mechanosensory and noxious stimuli, respectively. Their axons project to modality-specific locations in the neuropil, reminiscent of vertebrate dorsal horn organization. Despite extensive characterization of nociceptors across organisms, how noxious stimuli are transformed to the coordinated behaviors that protect animals from harm remains poorly understood. In larvae, noxious mechanical and thermal stimuli trigger an escape behavior consisting of sequential C-shape body bending followed by corkscrew-like rolling, and finally an increase in forward locomotion (escape crawl). The downstream circuitry controlling the sequential coordination of escape responses is largely unknown. This work identifies a population of interneurons in the nerve cord, Down-and-Back (DnB) neurons, that are activated by noxious heat, promote nociceptive behavior, and are required for robust escape responses to noxious stimuli. Activation of DnB neurons can trigger both rolling, and the initial C-shape body bend independent of rolling, revealing modularity in the initial nociceptive responses. Electron microscopic circuit reconstruction shows that DnBs receive direct input from nociceptive and mechanosensory neurons, are presynaptic to pre-motor circuits, and link indirectly to a population of command-like neurons (Goro) that control rolling. DnB activation promotes activity in Goro neurons, and coincident inactivation of Goro neurons prevents the rolling sequence but leaves intact body bending motor responses. Thus, activity from nociceptors to DnB interneurons coordinates modular elements of nociceptive escape behavior. The impact of DnB neurons may not be restricted to synaptic partners, as DnB presynaptic sites accumulate dense-core vesicles, suggesting aminergic or peptidergic signaling. Anatomical analyses show that DnB neurons receive spatially segregated input from cIII mechanosensory and cIV nociceptive neurons. However, DnB neurons do not seem to promote or be required for gentle-touch responses, suggesting a modulatory role for cIII input. Behavioral experiments suggest that cIII input presented prior to cIV input can enhance nociceptive behavior. Moreover, weak co-activation of DnB and cIII neurons can also enhance nociceptive responses, particularly C-shape bending. These results indicate that timing and level of cIII activation might determine its modulatory role. Taken together, these studies describe a novel nociceptive circuit, which integrates nociceptive and mechanosensory inputs, and controls modular motor pathways to promote robust escape behavior. Future work on this circuit could reveal neural mechanisms for sequence transitions, peptidergic modulation of nociception, and developmental mechanisms that control convergence of sensory afferents onto common synaptic partners.