Research suggests that the experiences recollected from the dreams of persons who are deaf or who have hearing loss reflect their personal background and circumstances. However, this literature also indicated that few studies have surveyed the occurrence of color and communication styles. Individual differences in the perception of color and affect were especially noted. These differences appeared dependent upon whether the impairment was congenital or acquired. In this study, 24 deaf persons and a person with hearing loss who use American Sign Language (ASL) were compared to a sample of hearing persons regarding colors and communication occurring in their dreams. Both groups were found to communicate in dreams as they do in life, deaf persons and person with hearing loss by signing, and hearing persons by speech. The deaf persons and a person with hearing loss experienced more color and more vividness, and the time of onset for a hearing impairment showed differences among persons with hearing loss. The findings also suggest that utilizing dreams as therapeutic material when treating persons with hearing loss and nonimpaired persons may have clinical utility.

Two experiments were performed to investigate retention of a discriminative response under conditions of appetitive motivation. In Experiment 1, four groups of rats received 20 training trials in a two-choice position discrimination procedure. Following training, the subjects received 16 test trials .05, I, or 24 h later on a reversal of the original discrimination problem. The results revealed that retention of the original discriminative training was a U-shaped function of time following training (Le., a Kamin effect was observed), in terms of both associative (percent errors) and performance (response latencies) measures. The data from the second experiment ruled out certain nonassociative explanations for the results of Experiment 1. Thus, the results of these experiments extend the observation of nonmonotonic retention functions to appetitive discrimination learning and provide further support for the hypothesis that an associative mechanism is responsible for such functions.