To investigate the possible cue (stimulus) as opposed to motivational functions of drive and reward, this study assessed the effects of problem difficulty, reward magnitude, and drive level on the performance of rats in visual discrimination tasks entailing both choice and speed measures. (Editor/RK)

Suggests color highlighting as an effective method of improving word recognition visual discrimination skills. (RB)

Experiments showed that in verbal discrimination learning imaging the referent of the correct item was more facilitative than vocalizing the correct item, as long as the imagery structure was executed in the company of relevant motor activity. No difference between the two strategies was found in pictorial discrimination learning. (Author/BJG)

Based on PhD thesis submitted to Brown University (June 1967).

Research supported by the National Research Council (Grant APA-179) and the Medical Research Council of Canada (Grant MA-2653).

THIS STUDY INVOLVED THE IDENTIFICATION OF (1) RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN REINFORCEMENT AND PHYSICAL COMPONENTS OF COMPLEX PICTORIAL STIMULI IN DISCRIMINATION LEARNING AND (2) VARIABLES RELATED TO PRIOR EXPERIENCE WITH PICTORIAL STIMULI USED IN DISCRIMINATION LEARNING. LINE SHAPES WERE USED AS STIMULI. THESE SHAPES WERE VARIED BY ADDING SOME LINES THAT…

This study was designed to test two alternate hypotheses regarding the meaning of increased lateral head movements in infants during experiments in which the mothers' voices were displaced from their faces. One interpretation is that the lateral looking responses of the infants are attributable to maturational effects on the infants' physiological…

The effects of classical factors, such as symbol geometry, symbol brightness, and brightness contrast, upon the legibility of numerals and capital letters are discussed. Included is a consideration of the literature of the last few decades relevant to the specification of acceptable operator performance criteria which must be met by a given…

This study investigated the relation between field independence/field dependence (FI/FD) and reading success. One hundred kindergarten children from a predominantly white, middle-class community were administered a Portable Rod and Frame Test as a measure of cognitive style. The upper and lower 27% were identified and designated Field Dependent…

This paper reports initial results in the development of an inventory to measure visual reading difficulties. The instrument, called the Word Preference Inventory (WPI), asks the subject to choose between pairs of stimulus pseudo-words the one most like a given target word. An analysis of responses to the WPI from 922 children in grades K-6 and…

Research indicates that young children seem to have considerable difficulty in discrimination between the letters b, c, p, and q. Also, 4-year-olds appear to commonly make rotation and reversal errors with letter-like forms. Whether young children will perform significantly better or not in deciding whether two shapes are called same or different…

The purpose of this Title VI study was to determine which pairs of lowercase alphabet letters were most frequently confused by prereading children and therefore most likely to cause difficulty in initial reading. Two sample groups were used: 50 lower-middle-class kindergarten children with a median age of 6 years and 25 upper-middle-class nursery…