Humans perceptually extract quantity information from our environments, be it from simple stimuli in isolation, or from relational magnitudes formed by taking ratios of pairs of simple stimuli. Some have proposed that these two types of magnitude are processed by a common system, whereas others have proposed separate systems. To test these…

The goal of the experiment was to examine the relevance of a new French web-based assessment, Tinfolec (Test INFOrmatisé d'évaluation de la LECture), the aim of which is to evaluate the reading abilities of children in primary grades. The participants were 1,016 children from Grades 2 to 5. They completed the five tasks of Tinfolec designed to…

Children with developmental dyslexia (DD) may differ from typical readers in aspects other than reading. The notion of a general deficit in the ability to acquire and retain procedural ("how to") knowledge as long-term procedural memory has been proposed. Here, we compared the ability of elementary school children, with and without…

Variation in baseline controlling relations is suggested as one of the factors determining variability in stimulus equivalence outcomes. This study used single- comparison trials attempting to control such controlling relations. Four children learned AB, BC, and CD conditional discriminations, with 2 samples and 2 comparison stimuli. In Condition…

Subjects in three age groups judged absolute and relative frequencies of pictures and words presented in lists. There was relatively greater improvement with age in judgment of pictorial stimuli. Study results lend support to the frequency theory of discrimination learning. (DP)

Punishment, and high and low value reinforcement were compared for effects on discrimination learning in elementary school boys. (DP)

Second and sixth grade children solved a series of four-and eight-dimensional discrimination learning problems dictating selection of hypotheses which could be monitored by means of blank trials. Differential effects of stimulus complexity upon the performance of the two age groups are discussed. (GO)

Elementary school students were tested on a visual search task where letter matching was based on the visual or name characteristics of letters. Visual match lists were searched faster than name match lists by all three grades. (SBT)

Suggests that in tasks requiring the spatial coding of visual information children's performance depends on the degree of congruence between alternative spatial reference axes. (Author/MP)

Examined the learning performance of 192 fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children on either a two or four choice simultaneous color discrimination task. Compared the use of verbal reinforcement and/or punishment, under conditions of either complete or incomplete instructions. (Author/SDH)

Explores the various effects of changing the familiar orientation of words with beginning readers. (MH)

Two experiments investigated the role of kindergarten and elementary school children's spontaneous cognitive sets in pictorial discrimination learning. Data indicated that, in comparison to the behavior of older children, the behavior of kindergarteners is governed more by the perceptible than by the conceptual attributes of stimuli. (GO)

A specially designed discrimination learning task was used to investigate whether the performance of kindergarten and first grade children could be improved through explicit training with a simple hypothesis-testing strategy. (Author/MP)