Based on an MA thesis (Ahammer) submitted to West Virginia University.

Simple discriminations are involved in many functional skills; additionally, they are components of conditional discriminations (identity and arbitrary matching-to-sample), which are involved in a wide array of other important performances. Many individuals with severe disabilities have difficulty acquiring simple discriminations with standard…

Based on the author's M.A. dissertation submitted to the University of Illinois, Urbana.

Research supported in part by OEO Headstart Subcontract No. 1410 with Michigan State University Headstart Evaluation and Research Center.

THE EXTENT TO WHICH INCENTIVES INFLUENCE CHILDREN'S LEARNING WAS STUDIED BY INVESTIGATORS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT. BOTH VERBAL AND MATERIAL REWARDS WERE OFFERED TO SELECTED GROUPS OF CHILDREN WHICH VARIED IN NUMBER FROM 48 TO 80 CHILDREN. A DIFFERENTIAL METHOD PERMITTED THE CHILDREN TO EXPLORE THE RANGE OF REWARDS SO THAT THE COMPARATIVE…

It was the purpose of this study to ascertain whether the culturally disadvantaged child, who appeared to adhere to the principle of immediate gratification, had learned, as a function of his participation in Head Start, a more future-related orientation when compared to his non-Head Start counterparts. One hundred and eighty-seven 4- and…

The purpose of this study was to determine if children given spatial relationship training had learned a definition and/or conceptualization of "in front" which was limited to two distinctly different classes of objects functioning in a specific relationship. Twenty-one children who had completed the "in front" training were given three sets of…

Twenty-eight five- and seven-year-old children were reinforced for key pressing according to a DRL (differential reinforcement of low rates) five-second schedule of reinforcement. (Author)

Nine mentally handicapped adults were studied in order to assess the differential susceptibility of mentally handicapped individuals to sensory and social reinforcers. (Author/BD)

Findings were: it did not matter whether the seriation involved the hues used in subsequent tasks or other hues; the presence or absence of reinforcement during perceptual pretraining did not affect pretraining, training, or transposition behavior; and seriation pretraining produced increased transposition in the intermediate-hue problem.…

Study attempts to clarify the attentional versus perceptual learning functions of presence of the discriminative stimuli during delay. (Authors)

Discrimination - learning behavior of children is analyzed in terms of two theoretical orientaitons: the mediational - attention conception, and a coordinated single-unit and mediational S-R formulation. The influence of verbal labels and other symbolic representational responses is discussed. (NH)