Two research experiments were conducted to investigate the characteristic of overselective attention of autistic children, which has proven detrimental to learning when prompt fading techniques are used. It was found that autistics often respond exclusively to the prompt (the extra guiding stimulus), and fail to learn about the training stimuli.…

This paper develops a stimulus selection theory, based on an extensive review of previous research, which gives weight to context change or stimulus generalization decrement. The theory assumes no special compounding or configurational process, and accounts for the learning of successive discriminations without the addition of any special process.…

Previous experiments with nursery school children have suggested that (1) subjects of preschool age do not verbalize during transfer learning or that (2) for these subjects, self-produced verbal cues have little influence on the learning process. To investigate the relative merits of these alternative positions, research was conducted among 80…