The purpose of the current study was to look at waiting behavior and how it is acquired among children with disabilities. Within this study a multi-experimental design was used to compare the effectiveness of two interventions, a signaled intervention using a visual timer and an unsignaled intervention. Both interventions were implemented across one changing criterion design that allowed for a progressive time delay to increase behavior. This experiment was also conducted across 4 participants to assess the intervention effects across multiple participants. The results showed that the signaled intervention was more effective in increasing the waiting behavior across all four participants. Three participants did see an increase in waiting behavior across the unsignaled intervention phases, although data indicates those results were not as clinically significant or consistent as the signaled intervention.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Umeå universitet, 2007. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.

The investigation examines the effects of three contexts (strong easily discriminable colors, shifting strong to weak colors, and a homogeneous white background) on cue selection in a paired associate study. Stimuli employed were high similarity consonant-consonant-consonant trigrams, and the responses were high imagery value nouns. Each S learned two lists.

Varenicline is used to treat tobacco dependence. While varenicline decreases craving during a quit attempt, no studies have investigated its effect on cue-induced craving. Varenicline has also been shown to decrease alcohol consumption in animal and humans. This double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial investigated the effect of varenicline on tobacco and alcohol cue-induced craving and alcohol consumption in dependent smokers/light drinkers. Tobacco and alcohol craving were assessed at baseline and after 2-weeks of drug administration using the QSU and ACQ. Significant decreases in cigarette and alcohol craving were observed between the pre- and post-drug session in the varenicline group on QSU Factor 1(87.5811.66 vs.70.5820.79, p=0.008) and ACQ Total (3.371.16 vs. 2.661.15, p=0.004) scores. This effect remained significant after correction for craving during neutral cues in the alcohol but not tobacco condition. No significant decreases in alcohol consumption were seen. These results suggest varenicline decreases overall craving, but not cue-induced craving specifically.

Varenicline is used to treat tobacco dependence. While varenicline decreases craving during a quit attempt, no studies have investigated its effect on cue-induced craving. Varenicline has also been shown to decrease alcohol consumption in animal and humans. This double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial investigated the effect of varenicline on tobacco and alcohol cue-induced craving and alcohol consumption in dependent smokers/light drinkers. Tobacco and alcohol craving were assessed at baseline and after 2-weeks of drug administration using the QSU and ACQ. Significant decreases in cigarette and alcohol craving were observed between the pre- and post-drug session in the varenicline group on QSU Factor 1(87.5811.66 vs.70.5820.79, p=0.008) and ACQ Total (3.371.16 vs. 2.661.15, p=0.004) scores. This effect remained significant after correction for craving during neutral cues in the alcohol but not tobacco condition. No significant decreases in alcohol consumption were seen. These results suggest varenicline decreases overall craving, but not cue-induced craving specifically.

A number of studies have examined the ability of dogs (Canis Familiaris) to follow human given cues. Dogs have been shown to reliably follow pointing cues. To date, few studies have investigated whether emotional cues are a factor in these canine choices. We tested dogs using a two-way object choice food task. Sixty large and medium breed dogs were tested in one of four conditions (positive baited, silent baited, negative non-baited and negative baited). Results showed that dogs reliably followed human pointing cues over emotional cues in three of the four conditions. In the negative non-baited bowl, dogs did not select the non-indicated, baited bowl over chance. This suggests that canines use pointing as a more salient cue than emotions in object choice tasks.

Judgments that demand consideration of pieces of information in the environment occur repeatedly throughout our lives. One professional example is that of a physician that considers multiple symptoms to make a judgment about a patient’s disease. The scientific study of such, so called, multiple-cue judgments that involve multiple pieces of information (cues: e.g., symptoms) and continuous criterion (e.g., blood pressure) has been concerned with the statistical modelling of judgment data (see Brehmer, 1994; Cooksey, 1996; Hammond & Stewart, 2001). In this thesis behavioural experiments, cognitive modelling and brain imaging is used to investigate an adaptive division of labor between multiple memory representations in multiple-cue judgment. It is hypothesized that the additive, independent linear effect of each cue can be explicitly abstracted and integrated by a serial, additive judgment process (Einhorn, Kleinmuntz, & Kleinmuntz, 1979). It is further hypothesized that a variety of sophisticated task properties, like non-additive cue combination, nonlinear relations, and inter-cue correlation, are carried implicitly by exemplar-memory (Medin & Schaffer, 1978; Nosofsky, 1984; Nosofsky & Johansen, 2000). Study I and II investigates the effect of additive versus non-additive cue-combination and verify the predicted shift in cognitive representations as a function of the underlying cue-combination rule. The third study is a review that discusses the nature of these representational shifts; are they contingent upon early perceived learning performance instead of automatic and error-driven? Study IV verifies that this shift is evident also in the neural activity associated with making judgments in additive and non-additive tasks.

Older listeners, both with and without hearing loss, often complain of difficulty understanding conversational speech. One reason for such difficulty may be a decreased ability to process the rapid changes in intensity, frequency, or temporal information that serve to differentiate speech sounds. Two important cues for the identification of stop consonants are the duration of the interruption of airflow (i.e., closure duration) and rapid spectral changes following the release of closure. Many researchers have shown that age and hearing loss affect a listener's cue weighting strategies and trading relationship between spectral and temporal cues. The study of trading relationships between speech cues enables researchers to investigate how much various listeners rely on different speech cues. Different cue weighting strategies and trading relationships have been demonstrated for individuals with hearing loss, compared to listeners with normal hearing. These differences have been attributed to the decreased ability of the individuals with hearing loss to process spectral information. While it is established that processing of temporal information deteriorates with age, it is not known whether the speech processing difficulties of older listeners are due solely to the effects of hearing loss or to separate age-related effects as well. The present study addresses this question by comparing the performance on a series of psychoacoustic and speech identification tasks of three groups of listeners (young with normal-hearing, older with normal-hearing, and older with impaired hearing) using synthetic word pairs ("slit" and "split"), in which spectral and temporal cues are altered systematically. Results of the present study suggest different cue weighting strategies and trading relationships for all three groups of listeners, with older listeners with hearing loss showing the least effect of spectral cue changes and young listeners with normal hearing showing the greatest effect of spectral cue changes. Results are consistent with previous studies showing that older listeners with and without hearing loss seem to weight spectral information less heavily than young listeners with normal hearing. Each listener group showed a different pattern of cue weighting strategies when spectral and temporal cues varied.

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EEG-Studie zur Testung der ERN bei Viel- und Wenigtrinkern mittels eines modifizierten Eriksen Flanker Task. Zusätzlich wurde der Einfluss von Alkoholbildern auf die Handlungsüberwachung getestet, um eine "Alkohol-Cue-Reaktivität" zu untersuchen. / EEG study that tests the error-related negativity of heavy and light social drinkers using a modified version of the Eriksen Flanker Task. Additionally the impact of alcoholic images was tested on the action-monitoring to examine the "alcohol-cue reactivity".