The report describes the development of the final 2 years of an intensive elementary school curriculum for fifth and sixth grade educable mentally retarded (EMR) children, to provide them with an opportunity to achieve their maximum potential for intellectual development, productivity, independence, and psychological well-being. Most of the…

This study examines serial habituation in a sample of 54 infants aged 2, 3, and 4 months to determine whether age changes are partially a function of different "strategies" rather than simply different rates of habituation. The serial habituation hypothesis proposes that attention and habituation of attention proceed in order of the relative…

The bibliography on learning in mentally handicapped persons is divided into the following topic categories: applied behavior change, classical conditioning, discrimination, generalization, motor learning, reinforcement, verbal learning, and miscellaneous. An author index is included. (KW)

Two factors of predicted learning disorders were investigated: (1) inability to maintain appropriate classroom behavior (BEH), (2) perceptual discrimination deficit (PERC). Three groups of first-graders (BEH, PERC, normal control) were administered measures of impulse control, distractability, auditory discrimination, and visual discrimination.…

To differentiate behaviorally, success-strivers and failure-avoiders within a group of educable mentally handicapped, two experiments were conducted. The effects of learning potential status (gainers, nongainers, high scorers) and motivational style (success strivers, failure avoiders) on discrimination learning when reinforcement was varied was…

Four studies with infants and preschool-age children examined various pattern perception tasks considered to be related to the perceptual basis of the development of reading skills. Study 1 used 28 neonates to test the hypothesis that supplemental stimulation (rocking, patting, holding) has measurable effects upon attention to visual patterns.…

Factors were investigated under acquisition and retention conditions which might be expected to counteract interference brought on by mixing sight and phonics methods. Experiment 1 dealt with training kindergarten children to attend to and encode letter pattern cues and the word's contextual cues. Subjects were trained individually in a series of…

This study was designed to assess the relative effectiveness of four components of pretraining on a subsequent simultaneous discrimination and reversal: (1) making same-different judgments about the two stimuli; (2) making a specific observing response to the critical feature of the stimuli; (3) simple familiarization with the stimuli; and (4)…

The study assessed contributions of different novelty pairings and reward types to exploration behavior across three successive discrimination learning problems in a 3 x 2 x 3 mixed design. After learning a simple two choice discrimination problem, Headstart subjects responded to six double reward trials and six extinction trials. A…

Additional support to a stimulus-response (S-R) association by the use of an extraneous stimulus is called "prompting." Prompting has an effect on learner achievement particularly if the prompting agent is identical on successive S-R trials. This experiment sought to analyze the differences in learner achievement when different prompting stimuli…

Research was conducted relevant to two questions: First, does generalized imitation reflect the child's failure to discriminate reinforced from non-reinforced occasions? Second, are the results which characterize generalized imitation a function of confounded social and instructional influences that operate within the procedures used in…

Changes that occurred in the use of the dimensions of power and function were investigated in a cross-sectional study of second-born and only children aged five to 13 years. The investigation focused on age of child, sex of child, sex of sibling, age-spacing between sibling and sibling status of child. Results indicated that children significantly…

The verbal discrimination learning of elementary school children was assessed in two experiments. In both experiments, Ss were given either regular discrimination learning instructions (control), instructions to pronounce the correct pair member aloud three times during study trials (vocalization), or instructions to generate a visual image of the…

A model for the analysis of simple human conceptual behavior, based on the apparent similarities of human conceptual behavior and that of infrahuman subjects, is developed. A minimum definition of conceptual behavior is given: A single response, verbal or nonverbal, under the discriminative control of a group of stimuli whose parameters are…

A correspondence is suggested between the two different abilities underlying performance on intellectual or learning tasks discussed by Jensen and the two response processes postulated by various mediational models of discrimination learning. To test this, two groups of nursery school children differentiated by the measurable social class of their…