Verbal conditioning without awareness: The use of programmed reinforcement and recurring assessment of awareness.

Kennedy, Thomas D.

doi:10.1037/h0029289

Cited by 11 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Also using DeNike's technique, Kennedy (1970Kennedy ( , 1971 found that the behaviors changed before subjects wrote down that they were confident of their hypotheses or before their verbal hypotheses were confirmed. Brewer (1974) pointed out that Kennedy's finding, that behavioral changes were associated with trying out or modifying verbal hypotheses, does not challenge, but supports the validity of the verbalized information.…”

Section: Incompleteness In Retrieval From Ltmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbal reports as data.

Ericsson

Simon²

1980

Psychological Review

3,794

2,205

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The central proposal of this article is that verbal reports are data. Accounting for verbal reports, as for other kinds of data, requires explication of the mechanisms by which the reports are generated, and the ways in which they are sensitive to experimental factors (instructions, tasks, etc.). Within the theoretical framework of human information processing, we discuss different types of processes underlying verbalization and present a model of how subjects, in response to an instruction to think aloud, verbalize information that they are attending to in short-term memory (STM). Verbalizing information is shown to affect cognitive processes only if the instructions require verbalization of information that would not otherwise be attended to. From an analysis of what would be in STM at the time of report, the model predicts what can reliably be reported. The inaccurate reports found by other research are shown to result from requesting information that was never directly heeded, thus forcing subjects to infer rather than remember their mental processes. After a long period of time during which stimulus-response relations were at the focus of attention, research in psychology is now seeking to understand in detail the mechanisms and internal structure of cognitive processes that produce these relations. In the limiting case, we would like to have process models so explicit that they could actually produce the predicted behavior from the information in the stimulus.

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Section: Incompleteness In Retrieval From Ltmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbal reports as data.

Ericsson

Simon²

1980

Psychological Review

3,794

2,205

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“…Kennedy ( 1970Kennedy ( , 1971 found that performance improved slightly in the course of the two or three blocks immediately preceding awareness. This improvement in performance is indicated by a more sensitive measurement of awareness which involves using blocks of 10 words instead of 25.…”

Section: Verbal Operant and Classical Autonomic Conditioningmentioning

confidence: 95%

Awareness: An Understudied Cognitive Factor in Behavior Therapy

Ladouceur

Mercier

1984

Psychol Rep

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Taking into consideration the importance of cognitive factors in behavior therapy, this article argues that the role played by awareness has until now been understudied in this field of therapy. A review of the literature concerning verbal conditioning, classical conditioning, knowledge of results as reinforcement, self-monitoring, effeaiveness of covert and oven practice in the treatment of phobics, perception of self efficacy, and treatment by habit reversal indicates that awareness is an implicit variable present in each case. A reinterpretation of these areas of research is presented. In addition, when this variable is evaluated systematically, the results indicate that the therapeutic impact of awareness has been underestimated. Some potential clinical applications of this position are discussed as are some new avenues of research.The role of cognitive factors in behavior therapy is the subject of considerable discussion (Ladouceur, Bouchard, & Granger, 1977). However, it would be naive and inexact to define all the various aspects of cognitive factors under the same method of treatment. While Ellis (1977) deals mainly with the irrational beliefs haboured by the client, Meichenbaum (1977) aims first and foremost at changing the negative self-verbalizations of the individual, and Beck (1976) seeks to correct the perceptions of depressed patients. On the other hand, Bandura (1977a) elaborates a model of learning which emphasizes the expectations of the subject. According to this construct, the reinforcement does not act as a stimulus-consequence to establish an automatic link between two stimuli but rather as an agent which focuses the subject's attention so that he obtains the maximum information from a given situation. In spite of these differences in the specific processes postulated, several adherents to the cognitive approach agree that the cognitive processes of the individual significantly influence observed behavior and that any therapeutic procedure should directly modify these processes, as a function of the basic postulates of each therapeutic model.Among the cognitive variables commonly postulated (within a mediational model of learning), one finds the following: attention, retention, symbolic coding, short-term and long-term memory, competence, expectancies, and mental imagery (Bandura, 1977a;Mahoney, 1974). It is surprising to find that a phenomenon like awareness has only rarely been approached as a cognitive variable 'directly influencin~ behavior.

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“…When many of these experiments were replicated with a more extensive post-experimental ques-tionnaire to assess awareness, no evidence of performance change by unaware subjects was obtained (Levin, 1961;Spielberger & Levin, 1962;DeNike, 1964). In fact, when Levin's interview (or a comparable extensive interview) has been employed to assess awareness, only one experiment (Kennedy, 1970) has reported learning by subjects who were unaware of the critical contingency for the duration of the experimental trials. The second criticism of verbal operant conditioning studies is that they have been rendered invalid because they classified subjects as 'unaware' when, in fact, these subjects employed hypotheses about the reinforcement contingency that were partially correlated with the correct contingency; these incorrectly categorized subjects could have been responsible for the above chance performance change noted in some experiments (Adams, 1957;Dulany, 1961).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbal operant conditioning without subject's awareness of reinforcement contingencies.

Williams¹

1977

Canadian Journal of Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologi

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This study was designed to test the hypothesis that performance of human subjects can be manipulated by a reinforcement contingency of which they are unaware and in spite of hypothesis testing concerning the nature of the contingency. Forty-eight subjects were given a sentence construction task and were verbally reinforced for the use of either present or past tense. Half of these subjects were continuously reinforced for use of verb tense and half were reinforced on a probabilistic 80 : zo schedule over a greater number of trials. Only the latter condition demonstrated a significant degree of performance change in the absence of contingency awareness. It is suggested that the relationship between the behavior mediated by hypothesis testing and the behavior which is reinforced is a critical variable in studies of learning without contingency awareness. This Hypothesis Interference Principle predicts that in cases such as the present experiment where the rate of performance of the reinforced behavior is not affected by performance of hypothesis-mediated behavior, performance change by unaware subjects may be found.*The author expresses gratitude to Elijah P. Lovejoy for his assistance in formulation of the study and to Russell Revlin for his careful reading of and helpful suggestions on this article.

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Verbal conditioning without awareness: The use of programmed reinforcement and recurring assessment of awareness.

Cited by 11 publications

References 14 publications

Verbal reports as data.

Verbal reports as data.

Awareness: An Understudied Cognitive Factor in Behavior Therapy

Verbal operant conditioning without subject's awareness of reinforcement contingencies.

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