Two experiments examined conditional discrimination in 4- to 6-year-olds. Children learned to choose one of two objects (e.g., circle) when the background was, say, red and to choose the other object (e.g., triangle) when the background was, say, blue. Awareness was assessed and interpreted as a marker of relational processing. In Experiment 1,…

In this article, I discuss the concepts of "private stimuli," "covert responses," and "private events," emphasizing three aspects: the conditions under which private stimuli may acquire discriminative functions to verbal responses, the conditions of unobservability of covert responses, and the complexity of events or phenomena described as…

Thirty-six retarded and 36 nonretarded children and adolescents, individually matched for mental age, were given discrimination problems at two levels of stimulus complexity to test the hypothesis that retarded persons require more trials to reach criterion on the more complex problems. (Author)

This paper discussed two probe techniques (blank trials and introacts) in explorations of problem solving by adults and children. The implications for H (hypothesis) theory, developmental theory, and developmental research are also discussed. (Editor/RK)

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)

THE ERROR FACTORS WHICH OPERATE DURING THE DISCRIMINATION LEARNING OF NORMAL CHILDREN WERE STUDIED. THREE EXPERIMENTS WERE CONDUCTED TO COMPARE RESPONSE-SHIFT AND RESPONSE-PRESERVERATION TENDENCIES OF DIFFERENT AGE GROUPS. THE FIRST EXPERIMENT INCLUDED 4-, 6-, 8-, AND 10-YEAR-OLDS WHO WERE GIVEN REWARD AND NONREWARD PROBLEMS. THE SECOND EXPERIMENT…

The effects of meaningfulness of the stimulus materials and the presence or absence of contextual cues on problem-solving behavior were investigated. Third-graders (N=80) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions and their performance in a series of discrimination problems was observed. Subjects in Conditions I and II responded to stimuli…

Studies the effects of perceptual salience on performance in problems requiring the coordination of information. Subjects were groups of children, younger adults, and older adults. For each of the age groups, those problems containing the most salient information were solved faster and more accurately than problems containing the least salient…

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…