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 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…

Second graders were administered a two-choice discrimination task in which irrelevant dimensions were correlated .50, .75, or 1.00 with the 100 percent rewarded cue. Results indicate that learning was most impeded in the .75 condition and was most efficient in the 1.00 condition. These results support the Hypothesis Testing Theory of…

Presents two experiments which examined: (1) the tendency to make differential cue-producing responses to the values of dimensions that vary within or between settings; and (2) the hypothesis that children have more experience with problems following a two-choice simultaneous discrimination format than a successive one. Subjects were third- and…

Investigates third- and fourth-grade children's verbal evaluations of syllables paired with different reward schedules (full, partial, or none) for "pleasantness" and "curiosity." (Author/ED)

Results lend partial support to the proposition that the effectiveness of a particular rehearsal strategy depends on the degree to which it provides a discriminative cue for the materials on hand: With homonym pairs, imagery constituted such a discriminative cue, while vocalization did not; with synonym pairs, the converse was true. (Authors/CB)

Second-grade children were trained on an optional shift task in order to assess the relation between the amount of overtraining and (a) the type of shift executed by Ss, and (b) the breadth of learning. (Editor)

A total of 128 first- and second-graders participated in two sets of shift problems: (1) four extra-dimensional shifts; and (2) shift problems with two types of cue-reinforcement conditions (same and reversal). (ED)

Experiment I was designed to demonstrate that young children fail to abstract the positive cue as the relevant stimulus event in a restricted concept-learning task. Sixteen kindergarten and 16 fourth grade subjects were trained to criterion on a Kendler-type task, whereupon each subject was presented a pair of new instances which contrasted only…

This study was designed to investigate the role of the social desirability response tendency in the discrimination learning of first and fifth grade children. (BD)

An extension of discrimination-learning theory based on the inhibition of stimulus intensity was proposed and supported as a mechanism of cognitive development. Among 48 normal and 37 educable mentally retarded children the predominant category of transistional children conserved at a low level of stimulus intensity but failed to conserve at a…

Two experiments examine the sorts of cues that might be available to facilitate children's ability to discriminate between memories for their own actions. Results suggest that the differences in discrimination performance demonstrate the importance of kinesthetic cues and visible consequences for children's memory discrimination. (Author/RWB)

Presolution reversal prevented or significantly retarded learning in kindergarten and first-grade children but did not hinder learning in fifth-grade children. (Authors)