This study was part of a longitudinal investigation of the impact of deafness on the cognitive, social, and communicative development of infants. The current study reports analyses of the vocalizations of deaf and hearing infants and their Deaf or hearing mothers during normal face-to-face interactions when the infants were 9 months old. Results indicate essentially no differences in the amount of positive or negative vocalizations emitted by infants in any of the four groups observed. However, there is a heightened use of vocal games by hearing mothers interacting with deaf infants, indicating that these mothers are incorporating several additional sensory modalities into their vocal expressions. This is interpreted as one way in which parents make their vocal communication more salient and accessible to an infant with a hearing loss. Deaf mothers are also highly active and engaged with their infants, but have been found to rely more extensively on vigorous tactile contact rather than auditory input during these same interactions.

Caffeine consumption, a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon with significant health implications may be governed by some of the same principles which affect other drug use [1]. We hypothesized that pharmacological and expectancy effects may be two of those principles. A balanced placebo design was used with 100 male undergraduates to separate caffeine's active drug effects from the expectancy of having consumed caffeine on mood, performance, and physiological measures. The manipulation of expectancies was highly effective on subjects' judgments of caffeine dosage, regardless of actual caffeine content. As predicted, expectancy set and caffeine content appeared equally powerful, and worked additively, to affect subjects' ratings of how much the coffee influenced their mood and performance. Main effects on systolic and diastolic blood pressure, pulse rate, and a fatigue measure were found for caffeine vs. no caffeine groups only. Additional increases in diastolic blood pressure for smokers were noted within the caffeine-receiving conditions. Results are discussed with heuristic and health implications.

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A running-wheel-movement-detection system is described for use with an IBM-compatible system and a serial mouse. It is an adaptation of a system developed for use on a Commodore 64. The IBM-compatible system provides obvious advantages in speed, memory, data storage, and programming ease over the earlier Commodore 64 system.

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