Counseling the cancer patient who wants to try unorthodox or questionable therapies.

More than half of all patients diagnosed with malignant disease eventually try an unorthodox treatment. In order to counsel their patients appropriately about alternative treatments, oncologists and other health professionals need to familiarize themselves with the most commonly used unorthodox therapies and the reasons why patients turn to these therapies. Patients often seek "alternative" therapies because of several widespread beliefs about American medicine, one being that determination and will can cure cancer, and another being that nutrition also may effect a cure. The concerned physician needs to explain why the unorthodox therapy will not be effective, and try to provide, in an acceptable way, that part of the unorthodox treatment which will not cause harm. Most importantly, physicians need to deal with their patients' interest in unorthodox therapies seriously, and to listen and answer questions, as these needs are unfailingly well met by unorthodox practitioners.

Effects of novelty and oddity on visual selective attention.

Effects of novelty and of oddity on selective attention was investigated through tachistoscopic recognition. When a pre-exposure field consisted of dots of one colour, letters of a different colour were more likely to be identified than letters of the same colour. In displays of 10 letters, two letters differing in colour from the remainder were more likely to be identified. Tachistoscopic exposure precluded determination of responses by eye movements, and there were controls for chromatic adaptation and other factors that might have biased the results.

Reinforcement values of visual patterns compared through concurrent performances.

Use of concurrent variable-interval performances confirms that more-complex visual patterns have greater reinforcement value for human subjects than less-complex patterns. The findings tally with verbal evaluative ratings and with results of previous experiments using a discrete-trial binary-choice technique.