Biomedical subjects

F J Donis

Publications and source records attributed to F J Donis.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1996

The relationship between age and gender in workers' attitudes toward sexual harassment.

The relationship between gender, age, and workers' attitudes toward sexual harassment as measured by the Sexual Harassment Attitudes Scale was examined. Participants were full-time workers employed at a local hardware-manufacturing company or a local utility company in New England. Results indicated that the women younger than 40 years old were significantly less tolerant of sexual harassment than older women were. In contrast, male workers' tolerance of sexual harassment decreased with age up until the age of 50 years, after which their tolerance level of sexual harassment increased significantly.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1994

Context effects in visual pattern recognition by pigeons.

In the experiments described in this paper we examined the effects of contextual stimuli on pigeons' recognition of visual patterns. Experiment 1 showed a context-superiority effect. Specifically, two target forms that were identical except for location in the visual field were not discriminated when presented alone, but the compounds formed when each of these targets was placed between a nearby pair of flanking stimuli were readily discriminated. The size of the context-superiority effect decreased with increasing target-flanker separation. In Experiments 2 and 3 the two targets differed in form rather than spatial location and were readily discriminated in the absence of flankers. Under these circumstances, adding an identical pair of flankers to each target resulted in a context-inferiority effect; this is, the two target-plus-flankers compounds were less readily discriminated than the targets alone. The size of the context-inferiority effect decreased with increasing target-flanker separation. The observed effects of context are predictable from the Heinemann-Chase (1990) model of pattern recognition.

Animals↗

PubMed1993

The object-line inferiority effect in pigeons.

Eight pigeons (Columba livia) were trained to discriminate between diagonal lines presented alone or embedded in a redundant L-shape right-angle form. The stimuli were white and were presented in an environment that was otherwise totally dark. Numerous experiments done with human observers have shown a strong superiority effect when the diagonal lines are embedded in redundant contexts. However, in Experiment 1 of the present study, the pigeons discriminated significantly better between the two diagonal lines when presented alone than when they were embedded in the right-angle context. In order to check on the possibility that these results were restricted to the semi-Ganzfeld condition of Experiment 1, a second experiment was done with black stimuli presented on a white background. Results of Experiment 2 also showed a strong distractor effect. The results of the present experiments confirmed the predictions of the Heinemann and Chase model of pattern recognition by pigeons.

Animals↗