One of the world's most famous pyramids is not located in Egypt but is on a music album cover by the band Pink Floyd. However, not a pyramid but a prism, the iconic image of a beam of light turning into a rainbow is a powerful symbol that captures the complexities of colour perception across cultures and individuals. This study examines how…

Eight autistic children and young adolescents (mean age 12.9 years) were compared to normal chronological age controls. Ss were required to discriminate briefly presented visual stimuli when they were preceded or followed by a visual noise mask and when they were not. The minimum stimulus exposure duration for criterion identification of unmasked…

Frequency difference thresholds were determined for fourteen 4- to 9-month-old infants (mean age, 6 months 10 days) using a discrimination learning paradigm, following a one-up, two-down staircase procedure. The subject heard 500 msec tone bursts repeated at a rate of one per sec, with a fixed standard frequency. At various points in this pulse…

This study attempts to assess differences in the three aspects of cognitive complexity--differentiation, discrimination, and integration--as functions of information about and interest in the relevant domain. The two groups of subjects consisted of 20 members of a local sports car club and an equal number from a local garden club. Each group had…

This study focused on the influence of gender schemas on children's abilities to focus their attention away from or toward stimuli containing the dimension of gender. Children identified as gender schematic and aschematic participated in a nonreversal discrimination learning paradigm in which one relevant dimension was gender-relevant and another…

In order to test detection thresholds and discrimination for certain speech sounds, 10 individuals received tape recorded programs of speech signals transduced into vibrotactile information. Stimuli were presented to the fingertip, palm, wrist, forearm, and thigh. Results indicated that thresholds of detection could be elicited at all five body…

The effect of stimulus novelty, an attentional variable, on learning set acquisition was investigated. Learning set (LS) acquisition refers to an improvement in performance across a series of problems which have a common basis of solution. The design of this study involved two groups, one in which the positive stimulus on Trial 2 involved the…

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 need for continuous instruction of five severely or profoundly impaired (SPI) students (12-18 years old) was examined in light of recent court decisions regarding extended year schooling. SPI Ss and a control group of normal IQ Ss were taught new discriminations. After a 3-month break, the discriminations were taught with procedures, methods,…

Snyder's (1974) construct of self-monitoring in communication refers to the degree of self-observation and self-control, guided by situational cues to social appropriateness. To investigate the relationship of level of self-monitoring (high or low) to the ability to accurately discriminate varying levels of incongruent communication, 62 college…

The study evaluated the usefulness of 48 hours of Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST) as a treatment for eight autistic children (between 5 and 11 years old). Ss were placed in a dimly lit room which contained only a mattress, told to ask for toilet facilities when needed, and then left alone except for when meals were brought in.…

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…

Six nonverbal, autistic boys (ages 6 to 11) were studied to assess what was learned when signs and spoken words were presented simultaneously. The boys were taught to discriminate among several available objects when given commands consisting of simultaneously signed and spoken object labels. Each of the six children mastered all of the…

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…

This document describes the Conceptual Learning and Development (CLD) model of concept formation. According to the CLD analysis, a single concept is learned in the following successive levels of attainment: concrete, identity, classification, and formal. The four levels are considered applicable to concepts that are defined (or could be defined)…