This paper reviews four conceptions of the nature of sensory feedback mechanisms mediating voluntary performance, including serial chaining, This report was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant GS-1601 to the Ohio State University, administered by the author. The author is grateful to D. E. Berlyne, A. E. Goss, and A.M. Liberman for commenting on portions of an earlier draft. 2 Requests for reprints should be sent to Anthony G. Greenwald, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, 404C West 17th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210. closed-loop, and fractional anticipatory goal response mechanisms, and gives particular attention to a reformulation of the principle of ideo-motor action. At the outset, certain boundaries of the present treatment should be marked off. First, verbal mediating mechanisms and the related topics of meaning and meaningfulhess will not be given detailed coverage since it would expand this paper greatly, and perhaps unnecessarily, to attempt to do justice to the literature on verbal mediation. A number of influential writers (Goss, 1961; Luria, 1961; Miller & Dollard, 1941; Osgood, 1957; Paw lov, 1955) have assumed, as is assumed here, that verbal mediators of skilled performance differ from nonverbal mediators primarily in that the former operate at higher levels of performance organization. Accordingly, a 73 74 ANTI{ONY G. GREENWALD later section of this paper briefly treats the application to verbal behavior of principles developed herein regarding nonverbal sensory feedback mediating mechanisms. Second, since the present focus will be on mediation processes in performance of learned skills, data and theorization concerning me- diation in classical conditioning and concerning innately organized skills will not be considered...

When participants allocated time across 2 tasks (in which they generated as many words as possible from a fixed set of letters), they made frequent switches. This allowed them to allocate more time to the more productive task (i.e., the set of letters from which more words could be generated) even though times between the last word and the switch decision (“giving-up times”) were higher in the less productive task. These findings were reliable across 2 experiments using Scrabble tasks and 1 experiment using word-search puzzles. Switch decisions appeared relatively unaffected by the ease of the competing task or by explicit information about tasks ’ potential gain. The authors propose that switch decisions reflected a dual orientation to the experimental tasks. First, there was a sensitivity to continuous rate of return—an information-foraging orientation that produced a tendency to switch in keeping with R. F. Green’s (1984) rule and a tendency to stay longer in more rewarding tasks. Second, there was a tendency to switch tasks after subgoal completion. A model combining these tendencies predicted all the reliable effects in the experimental data.

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We draw together and develop previous timing models for a broad range of conditioning phenomena to reveal their common conceptual foundations: First, conditioning depends on the learning of the temporal intervals between events and the reciprocals of these intervals, the rates of event occurrence. Second, remembered intervals and rates translate into observed behavior through decision processes whose structure is adapted to noise in the decision variables. The noise and the uncertainties consequent upon it have both subjective and objective origins. A third feature of these models is their time-scale invariance, which we argue is a deeply important property evident in the available experimental data. This conceptual framework is similar to the psychophysical conceptual framework in which contemporary models of sensory processing are rooted. We contrast it with the associative conceptual framework.

This paper investigates the price stabilisation process under the policy commitment to an exchange rate based programme. I develop a formal model which allows to quantify the credibility role in the price stabilisation process and assess the extent to which the economic fundamentals can affect the reputation of policymakers. I decompose devaluation expectations into a probability that authorities are not precommitted with certainty to preannounced policy and a probability that worsened economic fundamentals force authorities to renege on the chosen fixed exchange rate policy. The model is then estimated using Russian data for the IMF stabilisation programme, preceding the rouble collapse in August 1998. I find that past fundamentals and reputation are signi…cant determinants of the devaluation expectations of the forward-looking private sector; the disinflation in Russia was fast partly because it was credible.

"In all things let me be content, In all but the great Science of my calling Let the thought never arise That I have attained to enough knowledge. 'But vouchsafe to me ever The strength, the leisure and the eagerness To add to what I know. For Art is great, And the mind of man ever growing."