Several 3- to 5-year-old children participated in this study designed to discover the necessary procedures to establish nonresponding in preschool children during delay of reinforcement. The children were divided into two groups: (1) the programed group (PG), to which a 60-second delay period was introduced gradually and (2) the baseline group…

Two 4-year-old children were shown the use of an apparatus whereby they could obtain toys and candy by making certain responses. The apparatus was a matching-to-sample device on which were arranged five response buttons in a circle and one in the middle. Each response button had a display window for the stimulus. Four of the five windows on the…

The present experiments investigated the effects of several classical conditioning manipulations on the performance of young children in an instrumental discrimination learning situation. Two predictions from general conditioning-extinction theory were tested: (1) acquisition of an instrumental response to a stimulus for a positive reinforcer in a…

Measures of active sleep, quiet sleep, sucking, crying, body size and gestational age were factor analyzed for 137 normal newborns at 2 days of age. The results yielded 3 stable factors: reactivity-irritability, maturity, and reflexive and discriminative sucking. (JMB)

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.…

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)

This study tested the prediction that a satiation effect would be observed only for noncontingent social stimuli, and not for groups presented with contingent stimuli. (Author/SB)

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)

Three studies involving groups of four- to five-year-old children examined whether the discriminative properties of prompts are critical for establishing a difficult (septagon, octagon) discrimination through time delay. Results confirm superiority of multiple-stimulus, distinctive-feature prompts, implying that stimulus dimensions of prompts are…

The results of the present study indicated that learning under feedback type A (presentation of correct response) occurred more rapidly than under type B (presentation of the position of the correct response). (Author)

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

Performance was consistently higher for pictures than for words, and this difference was unaffected by age, response mode, or presentation paradigm. (Author)

Results indicate that the RCR (rehearsal-of-the-correct-alternative response) plays an important role such that when the RCR is inhibited, performance is reduced. (Authors/CB)