Four- and five-year-old children (n=24) were put into two groups and trained to discriminate between two displays which could only be differentiated by a single distinctive feature located on one of the displays. Subjects trained with the distinctive feature located on the positive display learned the simultaneous discrimination while feature…

Progressively delayed extra-stimulus prompts were used to help kindergarten children discriminate left-right mirror-image stimuli in four experiments. Results showed that most subjects rapidly learned to respond to the orientation prompts; delayed orientation prompting was always successful regardless of how the prompts were eliminated; and the…

Two experiments show that response to explicit dimensions is not crucial to the change from easier nonreversal to easier reversal shifts during overlearning in grammar school children ages 7, 8, and 9. (WY)

Four hundred children ages 5, 9, and 12 were given a component selection task with stimuli differing in color and shape. Results indicate a greater tendency for older than younger children to withdraw attention from a normally dominant component when advantageous to adopt another feature as the primary functional cue. (Author/SB)

Findings of a series of studies involving kindergarteners indicated that the delay technique was highly effective when the prompt had the same configuration as the correct stimulus and the prompt's position prevented control by irrelevant location cues. The effectiveness of delayed orientation prompting was not always matched by its efficiency.…

Forty retarded children, a Low Mental Age (MA) Group (mean MA 3-3 years) and a High MA Group (mean MA 5-7 years) were trained on 120 different two-choice visual discrimination problems. Initial performance differences were interpreted as a differential preference for novel and familiar stimuli. (JH)

Second graders were administered a two-choice discrimination task in which irrelevant dimensions were correlated .50, .75, or 1.00 with the 100 percent rewarded cue. Results indicate that learning was most impeded in the .75 condition and was most efficient in the 1.00 condition. These results support the Hypothesis Testing Theory of…

Fifteen autistic and 15 normal Ss were trained to respond to a card containing two visual cues. The children were further tested on the single cues in order to assess whether one or both stimuli had acquired control over their responding. (Editor/RK)

Data were interpreted as suggesting that incidental learning may not be cumulative over trials, but rather, may be due to memory of the last trial. (Author)

Presents two experiments which examined: (1) the tendency to make differential cue-producing responses to the values of dimensions that vary within or between settings; and (2) the hypothesis that children have more experience with problems following a two-choice simultaneous discrimination format than a successive one. Subjects were third- and…

Investigates third- and fourth-grade children's verbal evaluations of syllables paired with different reward schedules (full, partial, or none) for "pleasantness" and "curiosity." (Author/ED)

Color and form preferences of kindergarten, first and third grade Ss were tested using standard two-dimensional geometric forms. (Author)