Autistic and typical children mastered a simultaneous discrimination task with three sets of all-tactile compound stimuli. During training, responding to one stimulus (S+) resulted in rewards whereas responding to the alternative (S-) was extinguished. Test 1 was conducted with recombinations of S+ and S- elements. In Test 2, the test stimulus to…

The age effect in this study was such that younger children required proportionately more experience with reward than nonreward before they were able to improve their performance on reward problems over six sessions. (Author)

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 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…