In this study of errorless learning a procedure is tested which allows the subject himself to adjust the speed at which a supplementary stimulus aid is withdrawn. A standard match-to-sample apparatus with 1 sample window above and 4 matching (response) windows below was used. Tokens were delivered for correct responses and the correct matching…

Forty retarded children, a Low Mental Age (MA) Group (mean MA 3-3 years) and a High MA Group (mean MA 5-7 years) were trained on 120 different two-choice visual discrimination problems. Initial performance differences were interpreted as a differential preference for novel and familiar stimuli. (JH)

These results provide a more precise attentional interpretation of both preference and pretraining effects. (Authors)

Viewing a threatening stimulus can bias visual attention toward that location. Such effects have typically been investigated only in the visual modality, despite the fact that many threatening stimuli are most dangerous when close to or in contact with the body. Recent multisensory research indicates that a neutral visual stimulus, such as a light…

This study examined children's use of category information as a discrimination cue to avoid intrusions in recall and false alarms in recognition of items outside given categories. Forty-eight children in grades 1 and 4 were administered one of three conditions of a recognition task in which all study words were members of one of two familiar…

The present investigation was conducted to determine if stimulus overselectivity in 19 autistic children (5 to 12 years old) is changed as a function of repeated exposure to testing. (Author/SBH)

Results of a study with 10 moderately retarded adolescents on the salience of transverse compound stimuli (combinations of positive and negative cues) were interpreted as an instance of developmental changes in unlearned stimulus salience hierarchies. The low saliency of transverse compounds was suggested to be related to reading difficulties.…

Results indicated the level of correct responding was higher under the "specific reinforcement" condition than under either "nonspecific" or "variable reinforcement" conditions, suggesting that a strategy of reinforcement which includes cue values of the discriminative stimulus may strengthen the learning process. (Author/CL)

Learning to discriminate between spatial locations defined by two adjacent arms of a radial maze in the conditioned cue preference paradigm requires two kinds of information: latent spatial learning when the rats explore the maze with no food available, and learning about food availability in two spatial locations when the rats are then confined…

The purpose of this study was to identify the nature of the information which preschool-age children must attend to and maintain within problems in order to solve a series of two-choice simultaneous discrimination problems. Twenty-four preschool children participated in the experiment. The stimuli used in these problems consisted of planometric…

The study attempted to minimize nonspecific response strategies which supposedly mask the positive effect of perceptual pretraining on initial discrimination learning within the predifferentiation paradigm. The subjects were 44 first- and second-graders. Experimental-group subjects received rules learning (RL), pretraining, initial discrimination…