This paper, which is particularly centered on the student's learning process, is the first half of a detailed study of selectivity in Whitehead?s philosophy of education. Here, by setting forth the analogy between the creative process exhibited in Whitehead's Theory of Prehensions and the learning process through an interpretation of the term,…

The effectiveness of three fading and two nonfading procedures were compared in training kindergarten children on an oddity problem in which shape was the relevant dimension. (SBT)

Four groups of well-functioning senior citizens (6 males and 18 females per group) over the age of 65 were presented with a series of discrimination-learning problems. All were provided four pretraining problems, appropriate to their individual condition, and encouraging self-pacing. Two levels of problem complexity (four-dimensional vs.…

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…

A sequence of studies compared two types of discrimination formation: errorless learning and trial-and-error procedures. The subjects were three boys and five girls from a university preschool. The children performed the experimental tasks at a typical match-to-sample apparatus with one sample window above and four match (response) windows below.…

Thirty subjects were presented with a visual form discrimination task requiring them to match Roman letters when a variety of transformations were held constant. They were given massed practice across four blocks of eight stimuli. Results of a repeated measures analysis of variance showed support for the distinctive features hypothesis. (JC)

To complement investigations of the direct effects of lithium toxicosis on consummatory behavior, these experiments were designed to determine the aftereffects on drinking of exposure to a conditioned stimulus previously paired with lithium. (Author/RK)

Infants ranging in age from six months to eight months were shown repeated instances of real object movement-disappearance-reappearance. Results suggest that the key changes in early cognitive development rest primarily upon the infant's gradual adaptation of old responses through encounters with new events--rather than upon the acquisition of…

Coding and recoding of hypothesis information was studied with college students and third, fifth, and seventh graders. Deficiencies in young children's ability to code, but not recode, contributes to their less efficient performance on discrimination problems. (DP)

The study was designed to investigate the learning processes in discrimination shift learning, in terms of developmental views of "logical manipulation by classification." Tasks comparing sizes of intradimensional value-classes and comparing sizes of interdimensional value-classes were devised in order to measure subjects' levels of…