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)

While many studies have investigated duration discrimination in human adults and in nonhuman animals, few have investigated this ability in infants. Here, we report findings that 6-month-old infants are able to discriminate brief durations, and, as with other animal species, their discrimination function is characterized by Weber's Law:…

We compared the ability of auditory, visual, and audiovisual (bimodal) exogenous cues to capture visuo-spatial attention under conditions of no load versus high perceptual load. Participants had to discriminate the elevation (up vs. down) of visual targets preceded by either unimodal or bimodal cues under conditions of high perceptual load (in…

Two experiments investigated baseline reviews as a relevant variable in reorganization of equivalence classes. After formation of three 4-member classes, participants learned reversals of baseline conditional discriminations and expanded the classes to 5 members each. In Experiment 1, 4 students responded on equivalence probes without baseline…

The ability to report the temporal order of 2 tactile stimuli (1 applied to each hand) has been shown to decline when the arms are crossed over compared with when they are uncrossed. However, these effects have only been measured when temporal order was reported by stimulus location. It is unknown whether this spatial manipulation of the body…

Ten autistic children and 10 normal nursery school children, matched for mean developmental age, were presented with figure stimuli and had variable irrelevant cues in two-choice simultaneous discrimination learning. Performance of the autistic group did not vary as a function of irrelevant variability, a result attributed to poor performance of…

Lowenkron and colleagues (Lowenkron, 1984; 1991; 1998; 2006; Lowenkron and Colvin, 1992) describe a model that explains complex behavior using only well-established behavioral principles, concepts and terms. The model, called "joint control," is especially useful for understanding complex and delayed discriminations within a purely behavioral…

Errorless learning refers to a variety of discrimination learning techniques that eliminate or minimize responding to incorrect choices. This article describes experimental roots of errorless learning and applied errorless strategies. Specifically, previous research on stimulus fading, stimulus shaping, response prevention, delayed prompting,…

Research supported by U.S. Office of Education contract OE-6-8934.

Research was conducted on two selective attention systems in learning situations. The theoretical and experimental approaches are presented in a set of six papers. One paper considered directions in attention theory and five papers report experiments with pigeon and children subjects. The two attention systems are (1) coding response, which…

The amount of reinforcement received during initial learning activities has a direct effect on the ability to transfer training. (CK)

Progressively delayed extra-stimulus prompts were used to help kindergarten children discriminate left-right mirror-image stimuli in four experiments. Results showed that most subjects rapidly learned to respond to the orientation prompts; delayed orientation prompting was always successful regardless of how the prompts were eliminated; and the…

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.…

Eight autistic children and young adolescents (mean age 12.9 years) were compared to normal chronological age controls. Ss were required to discriminate briefly presented visual stimuli when they were preceded or followed by a visual noise mask and when they were not. The minimum stimulus exposure duration for criterion identification of unmasked…