Bridging the schism between behavioral and cognitive analyses.

A major schism in modern scientific psychology has occurred between behavior analysts and cognitive psychologists. The two groups speak in different languages, but the languages can be translated so that they are mutually understandable; when either language is translated into the other, similarities emerge from seeming differences. We draw an analogy between the basic units of behavior analysis (the operant and the establishing operation) and cognitive psychology (the production). We argue that both units describe behavior as a function of motivative and discriminative antecedents. In addition, the two perspectives account in analogous ways for ongoing changes in motivation and for control by verbal statements. Adherents of the two perspectives have experimentally analyzed some of the same problems and fashioned similar solutions for applied problems. We conclude that many of the commonly cited differences between the two perspectives are the result of misunderstanding, and that the real differences need not preclude communication and collaboration. The schism can be bridged.

Intelligence as a correlate of children's problem solving.

Previous work on children's problem solving was extended by directly comparing the strategies of intellectually gifted, average, and mentally retarded children on 2 two-dimensional integration problems--the balance scale and inclined plane. Comparisons of the distributions of strategies for each group showed that most gifted children integrated dimensional information by addition and many average children used lexicographic strategies. Mentally retarded children relied on a single dimension of the balance scale, but they were more likely to use lexicographic strategies for the inclined plane. Possible explanations for the large number of unclassified mentally retarded children were discussed.

Are children's rule-assessment classifications invariant across instances of problem types?

Wilkening and Anderson recently criticized Siegler's rule-assessment methodology as being insufficiently diagnostic of some rules that may be used to solve tasks like the balance scale. An implication of this criticism is that the rule-assessment method may yield classifications that vary with the problems used to assess knowledge. We tested this implication by varying the size of the product difference within problem types for both the balance-scale and the inclined-plane tasks. Many children's classifications differed from problem set to problem set. Children tended to achieve more developmentally sophisticated classifications with larger product differences, and variability in classifications was attributable to greater accuracy on all problem types with larger product differences. The variability in accuracy on the simple problem types is predicted by neither Siegler's nor Wilkening and Anderson's analyses. Possible explanations for these findings were discussed.

The classification of children's knowledge: development on the balance-scale and inclined-plane tasks.

R.S. Siegler (1981, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 46 C2, Serial No. 189) has shown that performance on several Piagetian tasks is governed by similar rule structures. The purpose of the first study was to extend his analysis to the inclined-plane task, replicate his original observations about development on the balance-scale task, and determine the consistency in children's rule usage across tasks. We found that Siegler's (1981) binary decision representations adequately characterized development on these tasks, and there was fair correspondence of rule classifications across tasks. An alternative classification procedure, used to diagnose the rules of children who failed our original classification criteria, showed that most of these children's performance patterns were very similar to Siegler's rule patterns. In the second experiment, we improved the diagnosticity of our rule-assessment protocol in light of F. Wilkening and N. H. Anderson's (1982, Psychological Bulletin, 92, 215-237) criticisms, and observed that many Rule III children's predictions were associated with those of integration rules on both tasks. Despite these methodological improvements, many children, especially 5- to 7-year-olds, evidenced use of centration and lexicographic strategies, suggesting that these classifications are not simply an artifact of problem sampling. Some of the problems associated with the classification of children's knowledge are discussed.

Longitudinal observations of individual infant's vocalizations.

Twice a week observation of five infants' vocalizations during the first 30 weeks of life showed that hearing impaired infants displayed different language patterns than normally hearing infants. Developmental differences in vocal activity were observed by six weeks of age, suggesting that hearing impaired infants may differ from unimpaired infants earlier than has been believed.