Stressful life events can have profound effects on our cognitive and motor abilities, from those that could be construed as adaptive to those not so. In this review, I discuss the general notion that acute stressful experience necessarily impairs our abilities to learn and remember. The effects of stress on operant conditioning, that is, learned…

The treatment of a 10-year-old elective mute boy is reported in detail. A learning principles based approach was used in a one-to-one therapeutic setting. Relatively normal speaking patterns were established after 15 months of treatment. (Author)

Suggests that if psychologists of learning are to be of assistance to the teachers in open learning classrooms, they will have to reconsider the effect of assuming associative connections as a valid unit for the foundation underlying human learning. (Author/AM)

This article discusses basic learning processes utilized by children with profound intellectual disabilities, including classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and habituation. The article also explores how these learning processes may be used in assessing the capabilities and preferences of children with profound intellectual disabilities.…

Visual fixation on one of two blank targets was reinforced with either visual or auditory stimuli in one of 3 intensity sequences: (1) low, medium, high; (2) medium, high, low; and (3) high, low, medium. An analysis of variance of learning scores for the 48 14-week-old infants resulted in a significant interaction of intensity and order and in a…

Five children with autism and mental retardation learned to discriminate objects in response to spoken names or to match amounts to numbers with a combined blocking procedure. The procedure involved presenting the same spoken word until 10 consecutive correct responses occurred and keeping the left-right location of objects constant. (Contains…

In order to evaluate possibilities of fitting myoelectrically controlled prosthetic arms on infants, this study examined whether 32 infants (1-6 months) could learn to control environmental contingencies by means of contracting the forearm flexor muscle group. Results indicated that older subjects (age greater than 104 days) demonstrated learning,…

The author compares two philosophies of language instruction (medical and behavioral models); evaluates four major elements of the teaching/learning process (stimulus, pupil response, consequation, and feedback); as critical variables in developing a lesson plan; and discusses the effects of selection of pupils, teachers and space on language…

The generalization of "trained" creativity in easel painting to untrained creativity in blockbuilding was examined in two preschool boys. Verbal reinforcement of every different form painted in a picture increased both the number of different forms per picture and new forms (those appearing for the first time in the total output of…

Research on learning and conditioning suggests that verbal response modification does not occur in the absence of the subject's ability to define verbally (1) the response-reinforcement relationships and (2) his intention to change his behavior in the direction of reinforcement. This seems to be true for operant conditioning of verbal behavior,…