In this study, 48 third-grade children learned a successive, two-choice discrimination under one of three conditions: (1) immediate reinforcement (IM), (2) 10-second empty delay (ED), and (3) 10-second delay with the discriminative stimuli in view of S (FD). The performances of groups IM and FD were only marginally different, and were both…

Color and form preferences of kindergarten, first and third grade Ss were tested using standard two-dimensional geometric forms. (Author)

Two experiments investigated the role of children's spontaneous conceptual "biases" in pictorial discrimination learning. The results suggested that such biases may serve either to facilitate or to interfere with discrimination learning. Moreover, in each experiment, age by treatment interactions revealed that in comparison to the behavior of…

Two research experiments were conducted to investigate the characteristic of overselective attention of autistic children, which has proven detrimental to learning when prompt fading techniques are used. It was found that autistics often respond exclusively to the prompt (the extra guiding stimulus), and fail to learn about the training stimuli.…

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)

This study tested 5- and 8-year-olds and adults in a bisection task with a sequence of stimuli in which time and number co-varied. Findings indicated that the number of stimuli interfered with 5-year-olds' performance on the temporal bisection task. Number interference decreased both with age and counting strategy. In the numerical bisection task,…

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…

Compared were performances of 12 educable mentally retarded (EMR) and 12 normal children in grade 6 on a perceptual learning task to determine whether individuals with different intelligence levels have different learning abilities. A protable minicomputer was used to present "old letters" (usual lower case letters) and "new letters" (letter-like…

Two experiments examined the determinants of children's belief or disbelief of statements made to them by other children. In both, the personal characteristics of the child transmitting the message were varied against message type and age of child receiving the message; transmitter characteristics were relative age and social dominance. (RH)

In the course of two experiments, groups of kindergarten, second, fourth, sixth grade and college students received several discrimination problems to investigate hypothesis testing behavior. (Authors/MB)