We evaluated the effects of a discrimination training procedure for establishing praise as a reinforcer for three children with autism spectrum disorder. After establishing two praise words as discriminative stimuli and two nonsense words as S-deltas, we evaluated whether the stimuli then functioned as reinforcers by presenting each stimulus as a…

In this study, 24 individuals (ages 6-37) with down syndrome had to learn a symbolic conditional discrimination task. Participants showed better terminal accuracy and faster learning of the task when the alternative correct responses were each followed by unique different outcomes than when nondifferential outcomes were arranged. (Contains…

The results of a group of studies, the objective of which was to clarify the conditions that account for the effectiveness of verbal approbation, are reported. Among the most significant findings were: (1) that the reinforcement properties of verbal approval are susceptible to distortion, misinterpretation or enhancement and must be applied in a…

Six experiments examined the problem-solving behavior of normal and mentally retarded (MR) children with a two-choice discrimination learning situation: the effects of stimulus similarity upon types of solutions utilized by MR children; the role of redundant cues in the discrimination learning of MR subjects with differing mental ages; the…