IN A REPRODUCTION TASK WHICH INCLUDED INSTANCES OF SEVERAL SCHEMATA MIXED TOGETHER, SUBJECTS LEARNED TO DISTINGUISH AMONG THE SCHEMATA WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE OF RESULTS. A BEST FITTING EQUATION DESCRIBING PERFORMANCE AS A FUNCTION OF NUMBER OF REPRODUCTION TRIALS ACCURATELY PREDICTED LEARNING WITH NEW SUBJECTS AND PATTERNS RANDOMLY SAMPLED FROM A…

This research investigates frequency and type of contact young children have had with elderly persons. It also examines the relationship between this contact and children's frequency of contact with elderly persons and their ability to identify the elderly. (Author)

Eight newborn babies were tested to see whether they could make discriminating head-turn responses to the sound of a 9-second recording of a human voice coming 15 degrees, 30 degrees, and 80 degrees from the midline, from either the right or left side. Journal availability: see EC 113 765. (Author)

Seven main experiments and three pilot studies were conducted to develop and test theories of transfer of training in children. Initial tests failed to support an incentive model for learning and transfer, but a new model given strong emphasis to the role of context in learning was developed which accounted for a wide range of learning and…

Investigated were the effects of varying instructional explicitness (minimal, general, and explicit) and types of reinforcement (none, extrinsic, and intrinsic or relational) on the learning of an oddity discrimination task by 48 nursery school children. Ss were randomly assigned to six groups where general or minimal instructional explicitness…

The researchers explored factors related to negativism in 27 elementary age autistic children, where negativism was defined as the consistent avoidance of a correct response in a multiple choice discrimination task. (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.…

Studies hypothesized and tested that a judge's discriminal process is a sample from a normal distribution of all possible discriminal processes for the MMPI stimulus set; that standard deviations of two distributions of binary MMPI decisions are equal; and that discriminative capacities of judges remain fixed from one decision session to the next.…

This paper develops a stimulus selection theory, based on an extensive review of previous research, which gives weight to context change or stimulus generalization decrement. The theory assumes no special compounding or configurational process, and accounts for the learning of successive discriminations without the addition of any special process.…

Absolute ratings on the Microcounseling Skill Discrimination Scale (MSDS) confound the individual's use of the rating scale and actual ability to discriminate effective and ineffective counselor behaviors. This note suggests methods of scoring the MSDS that will eliminate variability attributable to response language and improve the validity of…

A series of investigations which simultaneously manipulated parameters of reinforcement and age and sex of children were conducted in order to further describe the learning process in children. In addition, an attempt was made to relate perceived parental discipline to performance in the discrimination learning tasks employed in this research. The…

This research explores training of development in discrimination and communication skills in counselor trainees. It is concluded that trainees may improve their communication skills; improvement of discrimination skills was not demonstrated. (MFD)

Problem drinkers in the community were subjects in a study that evaluated the therapeutic potential of learning techniques in changing abusive drinking patterns and achieving moderation. The authors conclude that moderation is a more attainable and feasible goal for problem drinkers than for chronic alcoholics. (Author)