Stimulus over-selectivity is a phenomenon often displayed by individuals with many forms of developmental and intellectual disabilities, and also by individuals lacking such disabilities who are under cognitive strain. It occurs when only one of potentially many aspects of the environment controls behavior. Adult participants were trained and…

Restricted stimulus control refers to discrimination learning with atypical limitations in the range of controlling stimuli or stimulus features. In the study reported here, 4 normally capable individuals and 10 individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) performed two-sample delayed matching to sample. Sample-stimulus observing was recorded…

The learning of the relations between discriminative stimuli, choice actions, and their outcomes can be characterized as conditional discriminative choice learning. Research shows that the technique of presenting unique outcomes for specific cued choices leads to faster and more accurate learning of such relations and has great potential to be…

Three experiments involving institutionalized mentally retarded persons revealed that the antecedent stimulus manipulation (i.e., hiding the candy or the kitty) was critical to establishing correct performance, while manipulation of the consequent stimuli afffected performance slightly. Findings had implications for reinforcement conditions. (CL)

Twenty-seven retarded sheltered workshop employees were trained on discrimination tasks using combinations of preference, prompt, and task agreement. Data revealed that when the learners were prompted in the dimension of the target discrimination, fewer errors were made, training time was reduced, and fewer training trials were required to reach…

Mentally retarded children taught to discriminate the dimensions of a visual display using a matching-to-sample procedure that provided full verbal feedback of the reasons for successes and failures exhibited superiority in intradimensional transfer compared to a control group. Two years later, trained Ss maintained a slight advantage. (Author/CL)

Competing explanations of the beneficial effect of spacing in retardate discrimination learning were tested. Results are inconsistent with consolidation and rehearsal theories but support the prediction of the Geber, Greenfield, and House spacing model that forgetting from short-term memory facilities retardate learning. (Author/SB)

Subjects used more extra-dimensional shift solutions in the presence of novel cues than in the presence of familiar cues, except at the highest training level. (MH)

Three groups of severely retarded and three groups of mildly retarded individuals responded to a series of five 10-trial oddity problems under nonreward conditions. Results suggest that oddity is a stimulus characteristic to which an approach response is made, independent of its concurrent association with reward, and that stimulus value of oddity…

Sixteen adolescents with mental retardation and 16 typical adolescents participated in a negative priming procedure in two experiments. Unlike previous studies, this study found that subjects exhibited inhibition under instructions to respond on the basis of stimulus identity in a manner similar to that of individuals without mental retardation.…

Seven rhesus monkeys reared on diets high in phenylalanine to induce phenylketonuria (PKU--a metabolic disorder associated with mental retardation if untreated) were compared with normal, pair-fed, and younger controls; frontal brain-lesioned monkeys; and those raised on high-tryptophan diets in three object discrimination tasks. (Author)

Findings of the present experiment reveal that discrimination processes play an influential role in nonreinforced imitation in severly retarded children. (WY)