This study is an initial investigation of the effects of a fading procedure upon acquisition and transfer of discrimination learning with children younger than 36 months of age. (CS)

Studies the allocation of attention of 100 four- and five-year-olds on a selective attention task. Results suggest that preschoolers are capable of using selective strategies when the task is made meaningful by the inclusion of a familiar script that provides supportive cognitive context. (RJC)

Discrimination learning studied in 3-year-olds, indicated that children over 30 months of age did better than younger children, and girls learned faster than boys after the first problem. (ST)

Results indicate that for children in this study's age range orientation is a less salient discriminative cue than either size or color. (Author/MB)

Examined reversal of emergent simple discriminations through stimulus contiguity. In experiment one, Baseline and Reversal phases were positive for most children. Experiments two through four examined protocol aspects that possibly contributed to successful reversal of the form discrimination; found that reversed discrimination usually was a…

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.…

Preschoolers learned colors more rapidly than sizes and forms when cup stimuli were used. They learned sizes and forms more rapidly than colors when face stimuli were used. (RL)

An evaluation of selective generalization of habituation on the basis of meaningful categories of stimuli. Also explored are the sex differences in conceptual generalization of habituation. Subjects were 36 toddlers with a mean age of 40 months. (SDH)

This study of the effects of practice on children's perceptual judgments investigates the validity of the distinctive features hypothesis and the schemata hypothesis by comparing performance on discrimination tasks using familiar stimuli (letters of the alphabet) with a variety of transformations held constant over four massed practice conditions.…

This study examined the ability of preschool children to process and use conceptual category information in a disrcimination learning task. A total of 60 boys and girls between the ages of 2 1/2 and 4 years completed a 3-choice discrimination learning task. On each of 12 trials, a child was presented with three magazine photographs: one of an…

A component selection measure developed by Hale and Morgan (1971) was used to determine children's tendency to exercise selective attention. This tendency was assessed at six different levels of training, ranging from undertraining to overtraining, and was examined at each of three ages--4 (N=116), 8 (N=216), and 12 (N=104). In the learning phase,…