Ruler vs. the Apple II/FIRST system analysis of analog signals in classical conditioning

Abstract

In our judgment, the Apple IIIFIRST system (Scandrett & Gormezano, 1980) is an efficient and versatile system for experimental control and data acquisition in classical conditioning experiments. However, these attributes would be of limited value if the system did not extract measures from our analog signals with a high degree of correspondence with our ruler measurement procedures. Accordingly, we determined the system's validity in extracting measures of CR occurrence and CR latency in three conditioning experiments. Pearson productmoment correlation coefficients indicated a very satisfactory degree of agreement on measurements made by the Apple IIIFIRST system and ruler. Moreover, intraclass correlations and analysis of variance procedures applied to percent CRs and CR latency revealed several small, but divergent, differences between ruler and computer measurement of CR latency across the three experiments. However, subsequent analyses of variance revealed that the number and pattern of significant sources of variation for ruler or computer measurements were virtually identical. Accordingly, we have concluded that our system can successfully replace our traditional method of ruler measurement.Recently, Scandrett and Gorrnezano (1980) reported the development of an Apple II/FIRST system to control classical conditioning experiments, collect analog data, and extract dependent variable measures of conditioning. With the selection of the Apple II microprocessor, we have been able to establish independent Apple II/FIRST systems for each of the three facilities composing the Iowa Conditioning Laboratories at a fraction of the cost of our previous DEC PDP-8/e system (Millenson, Kehoe, Tait, & Gormezano, 1973). Specifically, the three classical conditioning laboratories are controlled by individual Apple II/FIRST systems consisting of an Apple II with 48 KB of memory, AM9511 floating-point processor, Apple II disk drive, Sanyo 9-in. video monitor, two 8255 programmable peripheral interface (PPI) chips, each providing a 24-bit digital input/output (I/O) buffer, an 8253 programmable counter/timer configured to provide a real-time clock, and a 16-channel 8-bit A/D converter (ADC0816CCN)The hardware and software development presented in this report was supported, in part, by NSF Grants BNS 76-8561 and 80-05907, NIMH Grant MH 16841, and NIDA Grant DA 01759. B. Marsha11~oodell was supported as a postdoctoral trainee under NIMH Grant MH 15773. Requests for reprints should be addressed to I. Gormezano, Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242. D. D. Dorfman's constructive comments and critical reading of the manuscript are gratefully acknowledged. calibrated to yield, for each subject, 16 A/D counts for each millimeter of movement. Moreover, Our software system, FIRST, an adaptation of FORTH (Moore, 1974), is an interactive, high-level, dictionary-based language that provides a programming and control system whose very high processing speed, flexibility, and ease of programming far exceeds that e...

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