Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Due to its complexity, the study of the concept of impulsivity has been of interest for Economy, Sociology, Psychology and Medicine. Different measures are used to conduct research in impulsivity, these techniques are either selfreports or behavioral paradigms. Studies dealing with impulsivity and tobacco consumption are relatively new and they could be useful to understand the relationship between this tendency and smoking. It is possible that impulsivity is a factor that prevent cessation of tobacco consumption and that this tendency contributes for relapses. The present systematic review has as its central goal to discuss in detail different forms used in the literature to assess impulsivity among smokers. Based on the search on data bases such as PUBMED, SCOPUS, SCIENCEDIRECT, SPRINGER and ERIC, 3025 articles were found related with impulsivity, from which 700 directly evaluated it. Only 106 articles dealt with impulsivity related to smoking behavior and among them only 20 provided measures focused directly on impulsivity among smokers. The review concludes that the joint use of behavioral performance task plus self-reports for assessment of impulsivity, allows a better grasp in the comprehension and explanation of the target phenomena.

The responses based on equivalence-equivalence relationships have a close resemblance, both in its structure and in the behavioral demands involving with second order conditional discrimination. Traditionally, such discrimination has been used physical relationship, while relations equivalency-equivalence relationships are completely arbitrary. In this paper we compare the performance of 20 subjects in equivalence-equivalence tasks both with the classic, used from the early research in this area (Barnes, Hegarty & Smeets, 1997), as the format of second order conditional discrimination (Moreno, Cepeda, Hickman, Peñalosa & Ribes, 1991, for example). Extending the work on second- order conditional discrimination based on arbitrary relationships and assessing the possible transfer between the two formats assessment. Although there is a better implementation of the subjects in the classical equivalenceequivalence tasks, and even some facilitator effect, the results show that the tasks of second-order conditional discrimination may also involve this kind of symbolic relations.

We evaluated the effect of the mirroring and the social approval to promote the maternal responsiveness in children’s mothers with behavior problems. A program of behavioral intervention was instrumented through a single case experimental design using instructions, modeling and visual feedback. The results showed a significant increment in the index of maternal responsiveness and a reduction of the aversive behavior of the child. These findings are discussed in terms of the impact of the maternal sensibility in the training to parents in children with behavior problems.

This experimental study analyses didactic interactions which might promote learning of basic contextual competencies, operationally defined as identification tasks, through reading a didactic text. Thirty two undergraduate students were randomly assigned to four groups to explore the effects of an instruction conveying what was expected from the participant to learn (instructional objective) and of an illustration of the object referred by the text (referent object), when both factors were present (Group 1), when only one of them was present (Group 2 and 3), and when both factors were absent (Group 4). The effects were tested on two different tasks: object identification and textual identification. The presence or absence of the instructional objective failed to produce significant performance differences among groups in none of the tasks tested, independently of the referent object’s presence or absence. However, significant performance differences were found in object identification as an effect of the presence and absence of the referent object, no matter if the instructional objective was present or absent, but this effect was not observed under the same conditions in the textual identification task. Results strongly suggest that the presence of the referent object during an instructional episode is necessary for contextualization of names and referents. The presence of the instructional objective did not produce important effects on learning, but the presence of the referent object did facilitate learning of this kind of competencies.

The stimulus equivalence paradigm was used to discover whether or not preexperimental histories with respect to affective stimuli could be brought to bear in an experimental setting. In two experiments, undergraduate students were trained in A-B, A-C, and D-C conditional relations using a match-to-sample procedure. The A and B stimuli were arbitrary visual forms, and the C stimuli were Chinese ideograms. The D stimuli for one group consisted of English words like “Holiday”, “Funeral”, and “Torture” and for the other group the D stimuli consisted of human faces expressing happiness, sadness, and anger. Equivalence relations were tested between the D stimuli and the B, A, and C stimuli with the condition that D stimuli used during testing were not the same as the D stimuli used during training. Thus, subjects trained with faces were tested with words and subjects trained with words were tested with faces. Substitutional equivalence emerged for most subjects who showed non-substitutional equivalence (B-C, C-B). Substitutional equivalence emerged more readily for subjects trained with words and tested with faces than they did for subjects trained with faces and tested with words. Results are discussed in terms of stimulus function and pre-experimental histories.

common to use an only one operandum during the training as well as in the test sessions. To corroborate the appearance of CFL in presence of two levers, and with it to demonstrate that more than an anomalous phenomenon is a particular case that responds to a cost-benefit relationship among the available different sources, six rats had the opportunity to respond to two levers, of which only one of them provided the reinforcer. Three rats worked in a fixed ratio one (FR1) while the other ones three made it in a FR3. In each session it was selected in a random way a lever to produce the reinforcer, while the other one remained inactive. During the base line, the reinforcers could only be obtained when animal responding to the operative lever, while in the test phases besides the above-mentioned it was added a drinking trough with 80 ml of the same reinforcer (milk). The results during the test sessions showed a considerable number of responses to the two levers, with most of them directed to the operative lever. This number of responses diminished throughout the test phases, slowly for the group of RF1 and abruptly for the group RF3. The discussion is made in terms of patterns of exploration-exploitation of resources and of the relationship cost-benefit in each source.

The schedule-induced drinking procedure (SID) typically involves two different operations; one, depriving rats of food in their home cages and two, delivering food pellets at intervals during the experimental sessions. These procedures reliably result in the rats drinking a substantial volume of water during the session. In the present experiment each SID session was added during a 24 hour observation period. This allowed the observation of drinking before, during, and after each SID session. While food was not available at any time during 22.5 hours a day, during the one-hour SID session a 180-s fixed-time schedule delivered four- 25 milligram food pellets per feeder operation until a total of two grams were delivered. On alternate days the rats were placed in their home cages and given the amount of food necessary to keep them at 80% of their free- feeding weight. Results showed that on experimental days drinking occurred infrequently when food was withheld and concentrated within the SID session, when food was delivered according to the reinforcement schedule. This experiment shows that SID can be seen as a procedure that controls the rats distribution of their daily drinking so that drinking concentrates during the experimental session.

Using a matching to sample task pigeons were exposed to different durations of interreinforcer interval (19, 38, 76 and 152 s) according to different probability of reinforcement values (1.0, 0.5, 0.25, 0.12). The speed of acquisition was quicker and the discrimination index was higher for the pigeons exposed to a longer interreinforcer interval. It is identified to the interreinforcer interval like a more general variable that controls the accuracy levels and the acquisition speed of conditional discriminations.

Twenty-four albino rats (3-month-old at the beginning of the experiment) divided in four groups, were exposed to fifteen days of free access to water and food, followed by 3 days of food deprivation. Next five days every group was exposed to one of three kinds of water concentration of glucose. First concentration had 45g of glucose /200ml of water (180 calories), second 30g of glucose /200ml of water (120 calories), and third 15g of glucose /200ml of water (60 calories). Control group never received water concentration of glucose. Caloric food concentration remained the same. Food was available at all times during free access periods. Results suggest that modification of caloric water concentration affect the feeding behavior after food deprivation period.

The purpose of the present paper is to suggest ways in which historians may use behavior analysis as a tool to design research agendas that may help them understand complex human behavior and atypical decision making processes. This paper presents a brief outline describing the general epistemological and pragmatic virtues of approaching human behavior from a behavior analytic perspective. This outline is followed by a general description of the elements that should be taken into consideration when developing a research agenda based on behavior analytic principles. Lastly a research agenda regarding a series of puzzling events leading to the encirclement of German Sixth Army during the so called “Battle of Stalingrad,” is used to exemplify the methodology proposed in this paper.