Three experiments investigated seven-month-old infants' ability to discriminate the facial expressions of happiness and fear. (CM)

A four-step instructional procedure to assist the learning disabled child to distinguish the distinctive features of letters is described. The procedure involves distinguishing the lower case "b" via a fading out technique from its upper case counterpart "B." The letter directionality can be cued so that the "b-d" distinction is readily apparent.…

A discrimination reversal problem was presented to 192 children varying in age from 3 to 5 years. At the end of both the initial learning and transfer trials, probe trials were introduced to ascertain the response rule describing children's choices. (Author/SB)

This study is the first demonstration of sequential contrast effects with human subjects during the acquisition of a discrimination without errors. Results are discussed in terms of Terrace's theory of errorless learning. (Editor/RK)

To investigate developmental changes across age and sex in acquisition of form discrimination, 40 children aged 3 and 4 were presented with a rotated, letter-like form discrimination matching task. (JC)

Findings of a series of studies involving kindergarteners indicated that the delay technique was highly effective when the prompt had the same configuration as the correct stimulus and the prompt's position prevented control by irrelevant location cues. The effectiveness of delayed orientation prompting was not always matched by its efficiency.…

Data suggest that human newborns are capable of making a chromatic discrimination within the spectral region above 540 nm (the Rayleigh region), but their ability is limited to chromatic stimuli of very wide spectral separation and of very large size. Possible neurological bases underlying this immaturity are discussed. (RH)

Results indicated that in both adults and infants combined cues facilitate discrimination of the phonemic contrast regardless of whether the cues cooperate or conflict. The three experiments did not support a phonetic interpretation of conflicting/cooperating cues for the perception of final stop consonant voicing. (Author/DB)

Comparison of the auditory frequency resolving ability of preschool children, school-aged children, and adults found data from children as young as three-years-old that were qualitatively indistinguishable from adult data though threshold estimates from young children were more variable from run to run than from adults. Increasing age improved…

This study found correlations (.45 to .59) between scores on a battery of auditory discrimination tasks and measures of intelligence and academic aptitude in two samples of college students. An implication is that intelligence is a potential confounding variable in studies of the auditory perceptual abilities of various clinical populations.…

This investigation examined the response strategies and discrimination accuracy of adults and children (aged 5-10) as the ratio of same to different trials was varied across 3 conditions of an auditory discrimination task. All subjects changed response strategies depending on the ratio of same-to-different trials. (DB)

This study investigated the relationship between categorical perception and dyslexia by comparing the discrimination responses of 19 children with dyslexia and 17 average readers to sinewave analogues of speech sounds presented as either nonspeech whistles or as speech sounds. The study found an increased perceptibility of within-category…

Compared the performance of children with and without autism in object-based positive and negative priming tasks within a visual search procedure. Found object-based positive and negative priming effects in both groups, with no group differences in the magnitude of the effects. Compared to typically developing children, children with autism were…