With the rise of wearable technologies, mobile devices and artificial intelligence comes a growing pressure to understand downstream effects of cognitive offloading on children's future thinking and behavior. Here, we explored whether compelling children to use an indiscriminate cognitive offloading strategy affects their subsequent strategy…

This study purports to bridge the gap in research directed at people with Low Functioning Autism (LFA) by exploring if sensory discrimination ability can be used to assess cognitive functioning in children with LFA. The study was done in two phases: (i) a pilot phase (with 4 male participants; mean age = 3 years 6.5 months)--which tried to…

Stimulus over-selectivity is a phenomenon often displayed by individuals with many forms of developmental and intellectual disabilities, and also by individuals lacking such disabilities who are under cognitive strain. It occurs when only one of potentially many aspects of the environment controls behavior. Adult participants were trained and…

This study investigates the ability of 6-month-old infants to attend to the continuous properties of a set of discrete entities. Infants were habituated to dot arrays that were constant in cumulative surface area yet varied in number for small (less than 4) or large (greater than 3) sets. Results revealed that infants detected a 4-fold (but not…

The ability of preverbal infants to form and use ill-defined categories, to respond differentially to contrasting categories, and to use specific dimensions in learning these categories is examined in 20 infants 10 months of age. Results show that infants are not only capable of learning two ill-defined categories, but that they can do so with…

Strategies of kindergarten children in discrimination learning were studied in a factorial design with temporal placements of two introtact probes and two types of pretraining. Results support the expectation that the posttrial probe would improve the short-term efficiency of children in both pretraining conditions. (Author/MP)

Newborns were habituated to white squares of varying size and luminance and retested with colored squares for recovery of habituation. Newborns could discriminate yellow-green from white in large squares, but not in small squares. They could not discriminate blue, blue-green, or purple from white. Results suggest newborns have little…

Three studies were conducted to investigate reasons for the difficulties that children under 5 years of age experience with class inclusion tasks. The studies tested the claim that such tasks have a structural complexity that is beyond the children's processing ability. In experiment 1, class inclusion tasks were compared with other classification…

Two experiments examined the determinants of children's belief or disbelief of statements made to them by other children. In both, the personal characteristics of the child transmitting the message were varied against message type and age of child receiving the message; transmitter characteristics were relative age and social dominance. (RH)

Background: Studies from the amnesia literature suggest that errorless learning can produce superior results to errorful learning. However, it was found in a previous investigation by the present authors that errorless and errorful therapy produced equivalent results for patients with aphasic word-finding difficulties. A study in the academic…

Recent research suggests that humans and other animals have sophisticated abilities to extract both statistical dependencies and rule-based regularities from sequences. Most of this research stresses the flexibility and generality of such processes. Here the authors take up an equally important project, namely, to explore the limits of such…

This study concerns children's understanding of spatial relationships and their expression in drawings and photographs. Sixty children (ages 5, 8, and 11) were asked to discriminate and reproduce three types of depth relationships in either drawings or photographs: enclosure, where a larger object is placed directly behind a smaller object;…

An attempt was made to document the beginning of children's ability to make cognitive-emotional discriminations between skill-dependent outcomes and chance-dependent outcomes of performance on tasks. Children between the ages of 2 and 5 years were administered structurally similar achievement games and effect games. It was thought that as soon as…

Arima's Discrimination Learning Test (DLT) was reconfigured, made into a self-paced mode, and administered to potential recruits in order to determine if: (1) a previous study indicating a lack of difference in learning performance between white and nonwhites would hold up; and (2) the correlations between scores attained on the DLT and scores…