Human adults are more accurate at discriminating faces from their own race than faces from another race. This "other-race effect" (ORE) has been characterized as a reflection of face processing specialization arising from differential experience with own-race faces. We examined whether 3.5-month-old infants exhibit ORE using morphed faces on which…

In this article, the author discusses and presents seven possibilities that describe how symmetry principles are reflected in behavior analysis. First, if there are apparently no functional distinctions to be made between positive and negative reinforcement, then reinforcer effectiveness (by various measures) is invariant under a simple inversion…

Acquisition of verbal behavior is a major goal of interventions for children with developmental disabilities. We evaluated the effectiveness of manipulation of an establishing operation for functional discriminated mands. Four individuals with developmental disabilities participated in a training procedure designed to teach two separate mands for…

This experiment evaluated the contributions of frequency and contingency of reinforcement to the deprivation-satiation phenomenon. The findings indicated that the perceived contingency of reinforcement is a more powerful determinant of its subsequent reinforcement effectiveness than is its frequency. (JMB)

Investigated the effect of correction and noncorrection procedures on the occurrence of the overlearning reversal effect (ORE) in 80 children 4-6 years of age. Results showing the existence of ORE at the preschool level are explained in terms of a response-switching strategy. (GO)

The results of the experiment demonstrated that Down's syndrome children are equal to non-disabled children matched on mental age, in their ability to discriminate between colors. Both Down's syndrome and non-disabled children made errors of the same kind. Other undifferentiated mentally handicapped children are less consistent in their color…

Four low-functioning mentally retarded subjects learned conditional discrimination performance in two-comparison auditory-visual and visual-visual identity matching-to-sample paradigms. Results suggested that acquisition of both positive and negative conditional relations may occur when developmentally limited individuals are trained wth…

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…

A go/no-go conditioned head-turn paradigm was used to examine the abilities of 6- and 12-month-olds to discriminate changes in temporal grouping and their perception of absolute and relative timing information when listening to patterns of white-noise bursts. (Author/RH)

Responses of symbol-naive and symbol-experienced severely mentally retarded persons to traditional orthographic letters and lexigram elements were compared. Overall, Ss's reponses to lexigrams were more accurate and faster than were responses to more complex combinations. It was concluded that perceptual features of lexigrams are easier to…

Mentally retarded children taught to discriminate the dimensions of a visual display using a matching-to-sample procedure that provided full verbal feedback of the reasons for successes and failures exhibited superiority in intradimensional transfer compared to a control group. Two years later, trained Ss maintained a slight advantage. (Author/CL)

Twenty 3- to 5-year-olds were required to discriminate between a simultaneously-presented pair of displays having common elements but differentiated by the presence of a distinctive feature in one of the displays. The effect of explicit verbal feedback for incorrect choices on the learning of discriminations was examined. (JH)

Subjects in three age groups judged absolute and relative frequencies of pictures and words presented in lists. There was relatively greater improvement with age in judgment of pictorial stimuli. Study results lend support to the frequency theory of discrimination learning. (DP)

Article describes experiment whereby it was established that with verbal-discrimination learning overt pronunciation facilitated a freer recall than covert pronunciation. (Author/MM)