A skill essential for successful inclusion in general education settings is the ability to learn by observing others. Research, however, has documented children with autism display significant deficits in the fundamental skills necessary for observational learning. This article outlines the skills essential for observational learning from an…

Behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuropsychological studies have revealed large developmental differences in various learning paradigms where learning from positive and negative feedback is essential. The differences are possibly due to the use of distinct strategies that may be related to spatial working memory and attentional control. In…

Research was conducted on two selective attention systems in learning situations. The theoretical and experimental approaches are presented in a set of six papers. One paper considered directions in attention theory and five papers report experiments with pigeon and children subjects. The two attention systems are (1) coding response, which…

The present investigation was conducted to determine if stimulus overselectivity in 19 autistic children (5 to 12 years old) is changed as a function of repeated exposure to testing. (Author/SBH)

Two groups of mentally retarded children (MA: 4 to 8 years) were pretrained using two different methods. It was predicted that shift performance of the two groups trained to use different strategies would resemble those of two different developmental levels. (MP)

Two experiments used phoneme counting tasks to investigate the foundations of phonemic awareness. Found that first graders and college students had some ability to distinguish between monophthongs (as in "he") and diphthongs (as in "how"), and they tended to count fewer "sounds" for syllables ending with the more…

Examined effects of a click signaling arrival of a visual stimulus to be timed on temporal discrimination in 3-, 5-, and 8-year-olds. Found that in all groups, the proportion of long responses increased with the stimulus duration, although the steepness of functions increased with age. Stimulus duration was judged longer with than without the…

Two experiments explored the nature of perceptual development in 5- and 10-year olds and adults. The primary finding was that preassessed salience significantly influenced 5-year olds' ability to discriminate two objects, while salience did not affect 10-year olds' or adults' response times. Results showed that salience effects in perceptual…