Thirty college students attempted to form three 3-node 5-member equivalence classes under the simultaneous protocol. After concurrent training of AB, BC, CD, and DE relations, all probes used to assess the emergence of symmetrical, transitive, and equivalence relations were presented for two test blocks. When the A-E stimuli were all abstract…

Stimulus overselectivity occurs when only one of potentially many aspects of the environment controls behavior. Adult participants were trained and tested on a trial-and-error discrimination learning task while engaging in a concurrent load task, and overselectivity emerged. When responding to the overselected stimulus was reduced by reinforcing a…

A linked perceptual class consists of two distinct perceptual classes, A' and B', the members of which have become related to each other. For example, a linked perceptual class might be composed of many pictures of a woman (one perceptual class) and the sounds of that woman's voice (the other perceptual class). In this case, any sound of the…

Tests the effects of stimulus variability on overgeneralization and overdiscrimination errors in children and adults. The subjects (n=64), adults and five-, seven-, and nine-year-old children, participated in a visual discrimination task. (CM)

The purpose of the two experiments was to assess the effects of two levels of stimulus redundancy and three levels of irrelevant visual stimulation on performance in a successive discrimination task and a reproduction task. The results indicate that increases in redundancy facilitated performance in the reproduction task but had no appreciable…

A well established finding in the discrimination learning literature is that pictures are learned more rapidly than their associated verbal labels. It was hypothesized in this study that the usual superiority of pictures over words in a discrimination list containing same-instance repetitions would disappear in a discrimination list containing…

Forty elementary children (six and nine year olds) and 20 college students were required to discriminate identical pairs of visual stimuli from mirror images. It was hypothesized that a key factor in performance would be the extent to which orientation was a functionally significant attribute of the stimuli. (Author/MP)

Second grade Ss and college students were tested under three conditions of the temporal relationship of feedback and stimulus information. (Editor)

This study was designed to examine the effects of age and sex on susceptibility to field dependence training and to determine whether the field dependence phenomenon is a function of cognitive style or of a general inability to make correct judgments because of confusing and inaccurate information. (MS)