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…

Eighty-two educable and trainable mentally retarded children (6-18 years old) judged whether a series of visual stimuli matched a standard. With each judgment the investigator verbalized "right" or "wrong" and then provided full feedback of cue similarities and differences that supported each judgment. Trained Ss exhibited total intradimensional…

Efficiency of three discrimination training procedures was compared for 21 mentally handicapped children. Results showed that two programmed techniques (graded stimulus and prompt fading) did not differ significantly, but both were significantly superior to trial-and-error learning. (Author/CL)

This study examined the discriminability of lexigrams versus printed words with eight adults with severe mental retardation. A match-to-sample teaching paradigm was used. Subjects discriminated lexigrams better than printed letters and were more successful at matching lexigrams to referent objects than matching printed words to referent objects.…

Evaluated was the use of easy to hard visual discrimination vocational training procedures with 24 institutionalized trainable mentally retarded Ss (16-43 years old). (PT)

Two experiments studied the influence of an individual's cognitive style on concept identification. Subjects were high school males, classified into levels of cognitive style according to their performance on the Hidden Figures Test. For the first experiment, three non-overlapping groups of 30 each were required to classify figural patterns, which…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a multimedia computer-based instructional program with four middle school students with moderate/severe mental retardation in establishing match-to-sample skills and generalizing those skills to the natural setting (a grocery store). In vivo probes found mean and median duration to find target items…