Through four previous editions, students and instructors have relied on this book's clear, concise, and highly accessible overview of the processes and mechanisms responsible for conditioning and learning. Domjan and Delamater summarize major theories of how humans and nonhuman animals learn, along with the classic experiments that support these…

Preferences are influenced by the presence or absence of salient choice options, known as reference points. This behavioral tendency is traditionally attributed to the loss aversion and diminishing sensitivity assumptions of prospect theory. In contrast, some psychological research suggests that reference dependence is caused by attentional biases…

Concept learning is challenging in part because the meanings of many concepts depend on their relationships to other concepts. Learning these concepts in isolation can be difficult, but we present a model that discovers entire systems of related concepts. These systems can be viewed as simple theories that specify the concepts that exist in a…

Context: To understand and appropriately implement competency-based education (CBE) to its fullest potential in professional programs, an investigation of its evolution is required. Objective: To reveal the development of the CBE approach now dominating many professional programs in higher education, including Athletic Training Education Programs…

The debate between Simulation-Theory (ST) and Theory-Theory (TT) provides the dominant theoretical framework for research on "theory of mind" (ToM). Behavioural research has failed to provide clear methods for discriminating between these theories, but a number of recent studies have claimed that neuroimaging methods do allow key predictions of ST…

Social learning theory provides a useful conceptual framework for understanding abuse and the teaching and learning of antisocial or criminal behavior in young offenders. This article examines social learning theory and the quality of parent-child relationships from the perspective of behavioral analysis, and provides a rationale for a…

The most prominent theories of reading consider reading comprehension ability to be a direct consequence of lower-level reading skills. Recently however, research has shown that some children with poor comprehension ability perform normally on tests of lower-level skills (e.g., decoding). One promising line of behavioral research has found…

A cognitive interpretation is suggested to account for the inverse relation between availability of social stimuli and their subsequent efficacy in a reinforcing role. In this interpretation, the emphasis is on the interpersonal nature of the interaction between the child and the reinforcing person. (Author)

Behaviorists are opposed to the establishment of values by the individual. The net effect of this psychological school of thought has been to encourage a strong trend in American life toward conformity. (CK)

The purpose of the study was to examine if there was a significant difference between first-grade English Learners (EL) who constitute a majority (greater than 50%) of the English language mainstream classroom (homogeneous grouping) and first-grade EL who constitute a minority (less than 50%) of the English language mainstream classrooms…

This is the final report of work accomplished on project SOCRATES (System for Organizing Content to Review and Teach Educational Subjects). The project contributed to the development and operation of a computer-based facility for psychological research on variables associated with pre-programed self-instruction (PSI) and self-programed…

An attempt was made to reduce or eliminate rule effects in attribute identification (AI) tasks through AI pretraining. Thirty-six 12th-grade volunteers received 0, 4, or 8 AI problems prior to transfer to a final AI task. Results showed that even at the highest level of pretraining, rule effects were present at transfer. These findings were…