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In this interpretative paper, I consider four sets of methodological issues that may be relevant to improving the concealed information test (CIT) as an instrument of applied differential psychophysiology. The first set has to do with psychophysiological measurement in the CIT (e.g., specific sensitivity testing in lab vs. field). Secondly, I consider the relationships between the psychological process of deception and the CIT. Thirdly, I consider the problem of laboratory-to-field generalization of the CIT, a consideration that includes a discussion of whether the lab/field differences are merely quantitative or actually qualitative. Finally, I discuss theories concerning the hypothetical mechanisms underlying the CIT, and argue that while the purely cognitive, Sokolovian, orienting response (OR) account is widely accepted as the sole mechanism, there is evidence to suggest that not just motivational, but even emotional mechanisms are also relevant.

Tobacco smoking or nicotine administration on its own can influence cognitive task performance. This study examined the effects of acute nicotine administration on verbal task performance and a physiological index of arousal. Healthy non-smoking participants received either a 2-mg sublingual nicotine tablet or placebo. Participants next completed various verbal tasks while heart rate recordings were taken concurrently. Nicotine increased heart rate relative to a pre-administration baseline period, indicating that the new method of nicotine administration increased cardiovascular arousal. Nicotine was associated with reduced accuracy in a verbal matching task and reduced accuracy and increased reaction time in an anagram task, but had no effect on performance during an analogy or verbal fluency task. The data suggest that nicotine-naive individuals are unlikely to gain any benefit to their verbal ability from the single acute intake of nicotine, such as that obtained from cigarette smoking or by u...

The effect of an acute administration of nicotine on arousal and visual-spatial ability in healthy non-smoking participants was investigated. Healthy adult volunteers with a mean age of 19.98 years received a transdermal nicotine or placebo patch prior to completing a water-level task and two mental rotation tasks while concurrent psychophysiological recordings were taken. Nicotine administration showed a sexually dimorphic effect on arousal (skin conductance level and heart rate). Evidence of superior performance in males compared to females was found in reaction time and accuracy measures for the visual-spatial tasks. However, performance reflected the interaction between sex and nicotine. Nicotine slowed reaction times in the mental rotation tasks more extensively in females than males. Nicotine also reduced confidence in performance during the water-level task in males, but not in females. The effects of nicotine on visual-spatial ability may reflect the interactive effects of sex and changes in arousal levels induced by nicotine administration.

This paper presents a conceptual analysis of a decade-old movement in Canada to purportedly raise ethical standards in research with human subjects, even though no systematic evidence has ever been presented either that there are serious ethical problems (especially in psychological research), or that the solutions imposed by the movement would improve the ethical situation, and not harm research's fundamental epistemological enterprise. The movement began with the activities of a committee from Canada's three major government research councils, the Tri-Council Committee (TCC). Like all ideological enterprises, it provided taxonomic chaos by, for example, confusing ethics with epistemology and feelings of discomfort concerning an area of investigation with intellectual expertise about that area. It also went beyond its American counterparts by calling its proposals a code of conduct rather than guidelines, and proposing that if a so-called research participant (i.e., a subject) did not like the in...

La sensibilite reactive lors du test psychophysiologique appele Concealed Information Test (CIT) utilise pour induire la culpabilite criminelle se rapporte au degre selon lequel les reactions autonomes de lapersonne qui subit le test en reponse aux propositions rattachees aux details du crime que l'on sait etre connus seulement du coupable sont plus importantes que les reactions aux propositions dont on ne connait pas la veracite. Les mecanismes psychologiques hypothetiques qui interviennent dans la sensibilite reactive au CIT sont en regle generale consideres comme etant d'ordre attentionnel, d'orientation ou cognitif plutot que d'ordre emotionnel. Toutefois, le CIT comporte une composante emotionnelle potentielle, en particulier lorsque le test est administre sur le terrain plutot qu'en laboratoire. Cette composante emotionnelle depend des questions de comparaison qui sont etroitement reliees a un crime (grave et qui suppose par consequent un contenu plus emotif) par rapport aux questions qui sont moins reliees. Dans la presente etude (qui ne relate pas une experience faisant appel a la manipulation de variables independantes), les resultats obtenus sur le CIT par 30 suspects japonais ayant, par la suite, ete trouves coupables d'un crime grave sont examines sous l'angle de la mesure conventionnelle de la resistance de la peau et d'une nouvelle mesure, introduite recemment, de la reponse respiratoire et apneique (qui est rarement utilisee en laboratoire mais frequemment sur le terrain). Seule la mesure respiratoire a demontre la presence d'une sensibilite specifique significative; les deux mesures ont demontre une sensibilite reactive non differentielle et fortement significative.

La distincion diferencial/experimental que especifico Cronbach es importante porque una explicacion adecuada del fenomeno psicologico requiere que reconozcamos la validez de los dos enfoques, a la par que una combinacion de los mismos. Este trabajo trata de mostrar que la obra de Pavlov en psicologia, basada en las primeras tradiciones investigadoras que se remontan hasta los presocraticos, proporciona una posible forma de conseguir esta combinacion, aunque se deban anadir metodos de observacion sistematica frente a la meramente anecdotica. Se contrasta el enfoque conductual metodologico de Pavlov con el conductismo metafisico, ejemplificado explicitamente en Watson y Skinner e implicitamente en las explicaciones del procesamiento de la informacion o de la metafora computacional, empleadas por la psicologia “cognitiva” actual. Una caracteristica del enfoque metafisico es que variables diferenciales individuales como el sexo son basicamente ignoradas o relegadas a categorias ideologicas, como ocurre cuando se considera el sexo como mera “construccion social”. Se presentan ejemplos de investigaciones, antes y despues de la “revolucion cognitiva”, en los que los metodos experimental y diferencial se combinan, apareciendo las diferencias individuales como fenomenos dignos de investigacion mas que como factores molestos que meramente acrecientan el error experimental.

The concept of “political correctness” (PC) does not have a clear and simple definition on which there is even a majority, let alone universal, consensus. Nevertheless, during the last decade, and especially in North America, a series of events and positions have emerged to which the term PC is at least partially applicable. I shall begin by alluding to North American PC in institutions of higher education and in scientific organizations, which I have discussed elsewhere in more detail. I suggest that North American PC has crossed the Atlantic and elaborate upon this suggestion by discussing the recent dismissal of a tenured member of the teaching staff by Edinburgh University, and relating this case to the Du¨hring dismissal.

Advances in our biological understanding and control of cognitive functioning have not been matched in the behavioral realm. The bio-behavioral approach outlined in this paper helps to close this bio-behavioral gap by aiming for a taxonomic precision in psychology that is comparable to that in physiology. The approach is applied to the phenomenon of group sex differences, and is illustrated by referring to three sets of recently reported findings: (a) interactive effects of nicotine and sex on the trait of cognitive style; (b) sexually dimorphic cognitive style in rats and the involvement of nitric oxide as a potential physiological mechanism and (c) sexually dimorphic phasic arousal change induced by smoking a cigarette following deprivation.

A framework for accounting for emotional phenomena proposed by Sokolov and Boucsein (2000) employs conceptual dimensions that parallel those of hue, brightness, and saturation in color vision. The approach that employs the concepts of emotional quality. intensity, and saturation has been supported by psychophysical emotional scaling data gathered from a few trained observers. We report cortical evoked potential data obtained during the change between different emotions expressed in schematic faces. Twenty-five subjects (13 male, 12 female) were presented with a positive, a negative, and a neutral computer-generated face with random interstimulus intervals in a within-subjects design, together with four meaningful and four meaningless control stimuli made up from the same elements. Frontal, central, parietal, and temporal ERPs were recorded from each hemisphere. Statistically significant outcomes in the P300 and N200 range support the potential fruitfulness of the proposed color-vision-model-based approach to human emotional space.

The paper begins with a statement of the Society’s purpose and its pre-Socratic roots. The Society differs from other contemporary scientific and scientific-professional societies in that it is thoroughly apolitical, unusually open to discussion and debate, and has had a restricted scholarly written impact. I then suggest and interpret six phases in the Society’s history: (1) the pre-Socratic roots; (2) Pavlov and the young Gantt; (3) the Society’s Gantt score of years; (4) the Joe McGuigan decade; (5) the Stewart Wolf era; (6) reforming the Society. I conclude with the hope that even if the content of the Society’s interests changes, it will preserve the pre-Socratic approach against the various forms of intellectual barbarism that continue to arise.

In a water maze (WM), rats employ different and sexually dimorphic behavioral strategies to solve a place-learning task, a test of cognitive/propositional ability. Puberty is the last step in brain development and marks an important phase with regard to sexually dimorphic cognitive performance and behavior. The present study assessed possible sex differences in cognitive style before and after puberty in a WM place-learning task. Since nitric oxide (NO) is implicated in spatial learning and hippocampal function, and since brain NO(-)(2) + NO(-)(3) levels (stable metabolites of NO) display region-specific sex differences in rat brain, NO(-)(2) + NO(-)(3) levels were determined after behavioral testing. The sex-related style difference emerged very clearly but only in the adult rats, which suggests that the female behavioral strategy in the WM place-learning task requires the presence of female sex hormones at puberty. Although NO(-)(2) + NO(-)(3) levels were higher in the adult rats and males compared to prepubertal and female rats, respectively, no significant correlations emerged between brain NO and behavior. The fact that the behavioral sexually dimorphic cognitive-style effect observed here and in previous studies appears to emerge only after puberty suggests that awareness of such postpubertal sex differences may also be important in human educational and therapeutic contexts.

Numerous studies have indicated that, consistent with current "cognitive" accounts of information processing, human Pavlovian autonomic discrimination acquisition cannot occur without awareness of the CS-US relationship. However, extinction studies have suggested that awareness is not necessary, findings that, in information-processing terms, have been explained by assuming that the processing by the extinction stage is parallel (automatic) rather than serial (controlled). This explanation was tested in an 80-subject study. The first, acquisition phase was a standard semantic differential conditioning arrangement with a 96-db white noise as US, and a "long" CS-US interval of 8 s, with ten trials each of CS+ (paired with US) and CS- (unpaired) trials. In extinction (USs omitted), in order to obtain non-autonomic indices of processing and thereby test the information-processing account of "unaware" autonomic conditioning during extinction, a dichotic listening task was implemented, with the CSs presented in the unattended channel (ear), while the subject had to perform a semantic differential reaction task in an attended-to channel (other ear). In early extinction, the electrodermal response occurring at an interval of 9-15 s after CS onset (i.e., following placement of the US during acquisition) and the finger-pulse-volume response occurring at an interval of 4-11 s after CS onset both showed reliable conditioning, but reaction-time and subjective-report data for the recognized critical words indicated serial rather than parallel processing of the CSs during extinction.

RICHARD (DICK) CHAMPION'S student and faculty positions were all at the University of Sydney, and he was never a member of the Pavlovian Society. On any measure of contemporary scholarly influence such as citation indices, the current impact of his some sixty papers and book (Champion, 1969) has not been great. Yet, as I hope to show in this tribute to my supervisor, who, from 1965 was professor and (intermittently) departmental head until his retirement in 1987, and who died suddenly in July at his home in Sydney, he made significant and lasting contributions to a better understanding of Pavlovian conditioning, learning theory, psychology, and the (interdisciplinary) empirical science of behavior. In addition, Dick was, I think, a Pavlovian in spirit, but I hope that the reasons for this more speculative view will emerge more clearly as I consider his conceptual contributions to the four scientific areas in the later sections.

The effect of sex and nicotine on cognitive style was examined in rats using a water maze task that allows differentiation between cognitive ability and style. During the 12-day acquisition period with the platform in the same location (either visible or hidden) there were no effects or interactions attributable to nicotine and sex, either in terms of learning rate or asymptotic latency. On the final test day the platform was visible and shifted in its location, and on the first trial the new location was proximal to the rats starting position, in contrast to the more distal location of the platform during the previous acquisition days. This platform relocation presented the rats with a choice between two competing cognitive styles: using local visual (look-out) cues vs. navigational cues. Performance on the test day yielded a nicotine x sex interaction, such that only saline-treated female rats showed a clear preference for the perceptual-proximal look-out cognitive style by swimming straight to the newly-relocated visible platform with mean escape latency that approximated the limits of swimming speed. The other three groups did not differ from each other, and preferred navigational cues. The results show that male and female rats use different strategies in problem solving, and that nicotine shifts the female pattern to that of the male.

Canadian campuses have proved particularly hospitable to Political correctness (PC), so that although the label "velvet totalitarianism" may be tactless and even offensive, it is applicable to these Canadian "islands of repression in a sea of freedom". Areas of psychology such as developmental and individual differences are particularly, but not uniquely, vulnerable to the totalitarian, anti-epistemic principle that the soundness of a view has to be evaluated in terms of subjective comfort rather than of evidence and logic; "harder" areas like physiological psychology and neuroscience are also vulnerable. This paper discusses recent Canadian examples of gross abuses of academic freedom in the teaching of and research in psychology, as well as considering some more subtle but nevertheless influential abuses. A final point of discussion is the relation between these developments and recent problems of fragmentation in Canadian psychology as a discipline and as a profession.In this paper, I hope to convince at least some readers that even if my contentions appear extreme at first, they are nevertheless justified in the light of the evidence. The four sections to follow deal, respectively, with the four sentences of the abstract that I have provided.As one who has experienced both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism systems, I am keenly aware of the fundamental difference between those systems and those of Western democracies. That difference is primarily the severity of punishment for transgressing the dominant (in political regimes, the state) ideology. Even in the darkest days of McCarthyite fifties in the U.S., there was an enormous difference between the penalties meted out for being perceived as a communist in the U.S., and for being perceived as an enemy of the state in the Nazi or Soviet regimes. That is why I have used the qualifier "velvet" to describe what has happened on Canadian campuses during the last 10 to 15 years. To justify my application of this admittedly extreme and startling label of totalitarianism, I will discuss five features that velvet and real totalitarian systems share, in each case giving at least one example from both.Velvet totlitarianism on Canadian campusesThe first common feature is the presence of ambiguous laws and rules which are essentially uninterpretable in objective terms. So in the Soviet system there were no clear grounds for knowing when one has broken the law against being a crypto capitalist. Even in a free society, of course, laws are difficult to interpret, which is why we have so many lawyers. Still, even if there are situations where it is difficult to decide between, say, murder or justifiable homicide, under a rule of law we rely on objective criteria in trying to decide. During the McCarthy era, "Un-American" activities could be specified relatively objectively (e.g., present or past membership in the communist party), even if, in the view of most, such characterization was unjustified.On the other hand, the speech codes that have been instituted on most Canadian campuses [whether they are termed as such is irrelevant, as long as they proscribe not only harassing acts, but also harassing speech (for the distinction between acts and opinion, see Furedy, 1994)] are as uninterpretable as those of the Soviet regimes, because it is not possible to clearly indicate what speech will be "offensive" or "harassing" to some individual. Similarly, when campus rules against sexual harassment are defined solely in terms of the (subjective) comfort of the person deemed to be harassed, and not in terms of the actions of the harasser, those rules are uninterpretable and become similar to those governing crimes against the state in the totalitarian sense.The second feature that the two forms of totalitarianism share is the presence of so-called "experts" who have an influence over decisions that is grossly out of proportion to their actual expertise. …

The paper begins with an elaboration of the terms in the title, for which I claim accuracy though no comfort. Academic freedom is defined for all members of the academic community (students and faculty) as the right to be evaluated only in terms of performance (merit), and not at all in terms of opinions (comfort). The current contrasting culture of comfort on Canadian campuses is a velvet totalitarian one, where, except for the severity of punishments, all other salient features of totalitarian regimes are present. Distinctions that are clear in principle (though difficult to make in practice, under some circumstances) are asserted to hold between: acts and opinions; opinions and performance; academic freedom and power; symmetrical and asymmetrical power relationships; issue- and person-directed opinions. The paper concludes with brief comments on the papers of Professors Bond (1996), Kubara (1996), and Wilson (1996), which were included in the Symposium on Climate Issues, Speech Codes, and Academic Freedom published in Interchange, Volume 27, #2, 1996.

The reactive sensitivities of T-wave amplitude (TWA), pulse-transit time (PTT) and heart rate (HR) were examined in response to psychological, physiological, and combined challenges. In one experiment, 20 subjects performed 1-min arithmetic and combined arithmetic-with-cycling tasks, with HR and TWA being measured. The former showed significant reactive sensitivity, but TWA attenuation reached significance only in the combined challenge situation. In another experiment, 18 males performed 1 min arithmetic tasks, before, during, and following sustained low and moderate intensity cycling. Pulse-transit time was also gauged in this second study. The results showed that HR increased reliably to all challenges, TWA attenuated in response to the arithmetic task both at rest and during exercise, but displayed the paradoxical augmentation to sustained exercise, and PTT decreased significantly to exercise, but it did not decrease reliably to the arithmetic task in any of the conditions. These results suggest that the time course (tonic versus phasic) of the challenge, rather than its psychological or physiological nature, may be the determinant factor in TWA reversal.

Although the title of Honts et al.'s paper suggests that it will be a reply to the specific, logico-ethical problem of the CQT polygraph (the Polygrapher's Dilemma), the text deals only tangentially with this logico-ethical problem, and engages, instead, in a diffuse discussion of related, but different, ethical, methodological, and empirical problems of the CQT polygraph. This paper seeks to restore some clarity to the discussion by reminding us of certain basic distinctions among logico-ethical, ethical, methodological, and empirical problems. In the light of these distinctions, the relevant literature, and the essential characteristics of the CQT (which continue to be obscured by the use of systematically misleading terminology), I stand by my claim that, on the ethico-logical grounds (i.e. the CQT Polygrapher's Dilemma formulated in my 1993 paper [1]), as well as ethical, methodological, and evidential grounds (which have been detailed elsewhere), the CQT should be abandoned as a serious method of detecting deception, no matter how useful it may be to practitioners as an interrogatory prop.

In the differentiation-of-deception paradigm (DDP), the experimental and control conditions, respectively, consist of questions answered deceptively (D) and honestly (H). Previous DDP studies with the electrodermal SCR as the dependent variable have yielded the basic increase in responding to D relative to H questions (D > H), and have indicated that this effect is probably not due to cognitive factors such as differential retrieval difficulty, and is also relatively unaffected by motivational factors. To test the notion that the D > H effect does not represent genuine deception because of the elimination of the element of choice in the DDP, the present study varied, between two groups of 16 subjects, the degree to which subjects could choose which questions they would answer deceptively. If choice were necessary, or even important, for the differentiation-of-deception phenomenon, the D > H effect should have been greater in the free-choice condition, but the (nonsignificant) trend was in a direction opposite to this prediction. Another orthogonally-varied, between-subject manipulation, was the relative frequency of D and H items. The basic electrodermal D > H phenomenon, including the curious lack of response habituation during the session, has now been duplicated over a variety of conditions, but the mechanisms underlying the phenomenon are far from being well understood.

The combined effects of exercise and mental challenge on heart rate (HR) and T-wave amplitude (TWA) were studied. Twenty male students cycled at low (40% of their relative maximal HR reserve (MHRR), for 15 min) and medium (60% MHRR, for 10 min) intensity exercise workloads. Subjects performed a series of mental arithmetic problems for one minute each time: two min before cycling, 10 min into low intensity cycling, 10 min into medium intensity cycling, and two and 20 min, respectively, after cycling. During both exercise workloads, the mental arithmetic elicited significant additional increases in HR. Although TWA decreased in response to mental arithmetic at rest, no changes in TWA were observed in response to mental task during exercise. However, TWA increased significantly following the mental challenge. These results suggest that even a mild mental challenge is capable of inducing further changes in the autonomic response during low and moderate exercise.

The so-called ‘control’ question ‘test’ (CQT) has been criticized on methodological and ethical grounds by psychophysiologist. The ethical analyses have focussed on the possibility that the CQT's interrogative features may elicit false confessions, but an empirical problem is that the rate of these false confessions is difficult to establish. In this conceptual note, this author raises a logico-ethical problem for the CQT, called the Polygrapher's Dilemma (PD). The two horns of the PD are to damage the innocent examinee classified as deceptive and damage to those examinees' psychological well being who are classified as non-deceptive to the relevant questions and who are not even debriefed concerning their feelings of unease about issues raised by the comparison, so-called ‘control’ questions. Although there may be arguments about which of the PD's two horns are more serious, there is no doubt that both are, in an absolute sense, ethically negative. Nor is there an ethically justifiable third alternative available. It is also contended that not only practitioners but also researchers (who use the CQT in laboratory, ‘mock-crime’ situations) are affected by PD. Finally, it is noted that PD exist only for the CQT procedure and not for the more standardized and scientifically based Guilty Knowledge Technique.

Differences related to age and to specific neurological (Parkinsonian) damage were studied by contrasting, respectively, old (mean age 64 years) and young (27 years) subjects (N = 15), and old-normal (N = 15) and old-Parkinsonian (N = 15) subjects. Both behavioral as well as psychophysiological dependent variables were employed. The behavioral measure was performance on a discrimination learning task, while the psychophysiological measures were based on habituation to a repeated tone stimulus and on a Pavlovian differential conditioning preparation. The behavioral task showed predominantly age-related differences, with the young learning faster. Another age-related difference was interpreted as showing a more insight-like learning process in the young. Response-bias (beta) values did not differ between groups. Age-related differences also emerged more clearly than specific-neurological-damage differences in the psychophysiological data. The older subjects manifested markedly less autonomic conditioning, which was probably due to a lowering of reactivity, as well as the emergence of habituation to the (loud-noise) unconditional stimulus. A correlational analysis of discrimination conditioning also yielded age-related differences. Most notably, reactivity played a greater role in conditioning in the old than in the young subjects. The results illustrated how psychophysiological measures can provide information that complements those provided by behavioral measures.

Psychophysiological measures, which are not contaminated by demand characteristics, are potentially useful for improving systems and for examining psychological processes in human—computer interaction. In this study we report the use of minute-by-minute scored heart-rate (HR) and skinconductance level (SCL) in a 25-subject experiment. Each subject was presented with two simulated bank-transaction tasks, one user-friendly and the other userhostile. To check whether any differences were due simply to sheer difficulty, easy (forward digit-span) and hard (backward digit-span) memory tasks were presented to all subjects. The HR was higher during the computer (problem-solving) tasks than the memory tasks, but was unaffected by task difficulty, whereas SCL was uniquely elevated during the hard (user-hostile) computer task. The HR result is interpreted as reflecting parasympathetic withdrawal, while the SCL result suggests that the user-hostile software produced sympathetic excitation of the sort associated with the fight-or-flight reaction. SCL may serve as a good measure of user-friendliness.

This paper reports sex differences in cognitive task performance that emerged when 39 Australian university undergraduates (19 men, 20 women) were asked to solve verbal (lexical) and visual-spatial cognitive matching tasks which varied in difficulty and visual field of presentation. Sex significantly interacted with task type, task difficulty, laterality, and changes in performance across trials. The results revealed that the significant individual-differences' variable of sex does not always emerge as a significant main effect, but instead in terms of significant interactions with other variables manipulated experimentally. Our results show that sex differences must be taken into account when conducting experiments into human cognitive-task performance.

The democstration of deception as a psychological process requires a comparison of physiological responding to questions answered honestly or deceptively, under conditions which differ only with respect to deception. Such electrodermal (skin conductance response (SCR) differentiation was recently reported in the Differentiation-of-Deception Paradigm. The present study had two empirical goals: (a) to assess the possible confounding role of retrieval-difficulty and novelty in producing the differentiation effect; (b) to ascertain any influencing effects of a memorial (‘cumulative’ mental load) and two motivational (Monetary-Incentive and Ego-Involvement) factors on the electrodermal differentiation phenomenon and on overall responding. In addition to the basic Deceptive vs. Honest manipulation of the Differentiation-of-Deception Paradigm, the present study varied, within 60 subjects, Question Type (easily retrieved Autobiographical vs. more difficult-to-retrieve Biographical). The two two-level motivational factors were varied between subjects. Finally, to assess the confounding issue, voice latency (VL), known to be sensitive to retrieval-difficulty, was measured in addition to SCR. SCRs to deceptive answers exceeded those to the honestly-answered questions, demonstrating the differentiation phenomenon. Results showed that although VL and SCR was significantly greater to Biographical than to Autobiographical questions, the differentiation effect emerged only in the SCR and not in VL, which suggests that memorial difficulty does not confound the electrodermal differentiation effect.

The Rescorla-Wagner theory, which Lachnit and Kimmel's transswitching evidence has apparently contradicted, is fundamentally cognitive, inasmuch as it views Pavlovian conditioning as “the learning of relations among events”. Kimmel and Lachnit's criticism that Lovibond's theory-saving defence “does little more than immunize a theory against problematic empirical findings” is analogous to the charge of circularity in explanation that cognitive, Tolmanian researchers used to bring against their S-R, Hullian opponents. A way out of the circle in human autonomie transswitching is to measure the cognitive process of relational conditional stimulus-unconditional stimulus contingency learning throughout the experiment, as has been done in simple Pavlovian human autonomic conditioning, although it may also be desirable to check whether such continuous measurement changes the basic transswitching phenomenon itself. The other issue briefly commented on is the relation between animal and human experiments and theoretical formulations, where the more basic distinction may be not between animals and humans, but between conditional stimulus-instrumental response and conditional stimulus-conditional response preparations. The latter preparations (of which human electrodermal transswitching is an instance) appear to be sensitive to S-R as well as (cognitive) S-S factors.

This comment notes that in arguing for his US-US associative theory of habituation to emotionally arousing stimuli, Goddard (1991) cites, as supportive evidence, experiments that, in fact, are either not associative, or do not involve emotionally arousing (or unconditional) stimuli. Such an overelastic use of these basic terms brings into some question whether Goddard's theory is genuinely testable, i.e., open to refutation through contrary evidence.

The demonstration of deception as a psychophysiological phenomenon requires a comparison of physiological responses to two conditions (experimental and control) which differ only with respect to deception. Such electrodermal (skin conductance response) differentiation was recently reported in the Differentiation of Deception paradigm, which controls for two potentially important sources of confounding in polygraph (often referred to as the Detection of Deception): differential question significance and differential frequency of question occurence. The present study manipulated (between 32 subjects in a 2 x 2 design) two two-level. subjective factors in the paradigm: Perceived Accuracy of polygraphy (written and oral instructions characterising accuracy as high vs low) and Perceived Memorial Content (20 more complex, less personal, and less meaningful questions vs 6 less complex, more personal, and more meaningful questions). Significant differentiation of deception was again obtained, as was evidence for the effectiveness of the manipulations. However, the deception phenomenon was not clearly affected by either of the two subjective factors. In addition, one post-hoc test showed significantly increased differentiation under the low Perceieved Accuracy condition, which is contrary to the widespread belief of polygraphers that high perceived accuracy is not only important but even essential for the detection of deception. However, the applied, polygraphic aim of detecting guilt in individuals is quite different from the scientific, psychophysiological aim of differentiating deception as a psychological process, and the phenomena involved probably have different causes.

The present study focused on electrodermal differentiation between relevant and neutral items in the Guilty Knowledge paradigm. Three factors were varied in a between-subjects design. The role of deception was examined by varying the type of verbal answer to the questions ("yes," "no," and remaining silent). The intention to deceive factor was examined by contrasting subjects told to delay their answer ("yes" or "no") with those told to produce their answer immediately. Finally, motivation to avoid detection was manipulated by having half the subjects monetarily rewarded for an important (ego relevant) detection task (high motivation), whereas the remaining subjects were neither rewarded nor told that the task was important. The results indicated that a deceptive answer ("no") to the relevant question was associated with an increased differential skin conductance responsivity, but better than chance detection rates were obtained with truthful ("yes") and silent conditions. Equal and significant detection rates were observed when the responses were computed immediately following question presentation, whether the subjects had answered immediately or had delayed their answers. In contrast, differential electrodermal responsivity to the delayed answers was markedly attenuated. The motivation factor had no main or interactive effects on differential responsivity. The present results, together with those obtained in previous studies, suggest that whereas deception is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for psychophysiological detection, it may facilitate detection. Possible mechanisms through which such a facilitation could occur were considered.

Shanks' characterizations of the positions taken in papers that he comments on are inaccurate on a number of basic counts. For example, the papers were concerned with human autonomic Pavlovian conditioning, whereas Shanks refers to no autonomic evidence in his reply. Again, the two papers more specifically targeted by Shanks (Furedy, 1988b; Furedy & Riley, 1987) do not deny "that cognitive processes have any relevance for conditioning", but rather advocate that both cognitive and non-cognitive factors play roles that need to be empirically determined for different preparations and conditions. And the characterization of cognitive factors in those papers, contrary to Shanks, is not a teleological, intentional one, no matter how fashionable such teleological forms of cognitive psychology may be among many current philosophers and psychologists. We can proceed towards an empirical resolution of disagreements about the role of cognitive factors in human Pavlovian autonomic conditioning only if we both refer to the relevant autonomic conditioning evidence, and also characterize each others' positions with some accuracy.

Computer measured aspects of prose vocabulary as correlates of intelligence are of interest because they offer the potential of assessing intelligence in situations where more direct assessment (e.g. through IQ tests) is either impractically expensive or (as in the case of populations that lived in the past) impossible. This study assessed a word-length measure (average number of letters), two word-diversity measures (ratio of number of different to number of total words, and Yule's Characteristic K, which indicates the repeat rate for words), and a word-rarity measure (proportion of words present on a rare-words list). In the first part of the study, essays of 120 students in Grade 11 and 12 in a private American high-school for whom Cooperative School and College Ability Test (SCAT) scores (which correlate with IQ test scores) were available, were assessed in terms of the vocabulary measures. Only the word-rarity and word-length measures correlated significantly with SCAT scores, and the highest correlations were manifested by the word-rarity measure. In the study's second part, the vocabulary measures were applied to articles selected from American newspapers representing African American (119 articles), general (110 articles), and Jewish-American (109 articles) communities, among which, for whatever reasons, reliable average IQ performance differences have been found. Only the word-rarity measure discriminated in the predicted way among the three sorts of newspapers. Implications for other potential uses of the computerized word-rarity measure for assessing temporal, social, and geographic group differences in intelligence are discussed.

The basic rationale of P300-based tests of concealed information compares responses to critical ('probe') and non-critical ('irrelevant') items. Accuracy, both in the laboratory and the field, is the degree to which responding to probes exceeds that to irrelevants. The present laboratory study assessed the influence of two factors on accuracy. The first, varied between subjects, was whether the paradigm included probes, irrelevants, and target items (as is the case in most P300 preparations), or whether the paradigm included only probe and irrelevant items. The second, orthogonally varied, within-subject factor was whether the probe was an autobiographical item (the subject's name), or incidentally acquired (as in common field applications). Accuracy was greater with the subject's name as probe, perhaps because of the greater potency of autobiographical items than incidentally acquired ones, even when these are learned to a 100% accuracy. On the other hand, contrary to expectations from a work-load interpretation, the removal of the target did not affect accuracy, but rather decreased P300 magnitude to both probes and irrelevants in the non-target group.

Male and female rats use different cognitive strategies in the solution of place-learning problems in the water maze despite similar abilities. The female-type strategy has been negatively correlated with cortical nitric oxide (NO) metabolites. The present study aimed to examine the effect of NO synthase (NOS) inhibition ( N ω -nitro- l -arginine, l -NA) on cognitive ability and strategy in the water maze, and to evaluate possible sex differences. In a 2 (male versus female) ×2 ( l -NA versus saline) factorial design, rats were trained to find the platform (visible or hidden), always in the same position, for 12 days. l -NA impaired acquisition, during the earlier phases and more prominently in females. This impairment was quite dramatic and unique to females during the first day that the platform was hidden following 3 days of visible-platform conditions. After acquisition, the visible platform’s position was shifted, thereby presenting the rats with a choice (searching for the hidden platform in the previous location, i.e. adopting a conceptual cognitive style, or escaping to the visible platform in a new position, i.e. adopting a perceptual style). On the first of the four shift trials (where the newly positioned platform was proximal to the rat’s starting position), female rats showed the previously found tendency to adopt a perceptual style escape directly in clear contrast to saline-treated males. The l -NA-treated males tended to manifest female-like perceptual style, suggesting that inhibition of NO synthesis in males weakened the tendency to choose a conceptual style in this shifted-platform task. The role of NO in both cognitive and non-cognitive psychological functions is discussed.