THE ERROR FACTORS WHICH OPERATE DURING THE DISCRIMINATION LEARNING OF NORMAL CHILDREN WERE STUDIED. THREE EXPERIMENTS WERE CONDUCTED TO COMPARE RESPONSE-SHIFT AND RESPONSE-PRESERVERATION TENDENCIES OF DIFFERENT AGE GROUPS. THE FIRST EXPERIMENT INCLUDED 4-, 6-, 8-, AND 10-YEAR-OLDS WHO WERE GIVEN REWARD AND NONREWARD PROBLEMS. THE SECOND EXPERIMENT…

The effects of meaningfulness of the stimulus materials and the presence or absence of contextual cues on problem-solving behavior were investigated. Third-graders (N=80) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions and their performance in a series of discrimination problems was observed. Subjects in Conditions I and II responded to stimuli…

Research on the acquisition of sight reading vocabulary by learning disabled (LD) and normal children is reviewed. Studies are explained to have measured the effects of such variables as mode of presentation, amount of practice, and redundancy. Reported is the general conclusion that LD children do not perform as well as normal children on the…

Two studies were conducted to clarify the role of different minimum performance standards for contingent tangible reinforcement or self-dispensed evaluative reinforcement (in the absence of tangible rewards) in determining the rate and accuracy of learning. Preschool children were presented with a discrimination learning task. Their performance…

Perceptual motor development, habituation, and learning in squirrel monkeys were studied under controlled rearing and diet history conditions to determine whether the animal's level of behavioral development was similar to well-nourished animals of his own age (agemates) or his own size (sizemates). From birth to 8 weeks of age, the animals were…

Investigators in this study looked for conditions that can rapidly establish continuous stimulus control of continuous response variations, or "response mapping." Unlike previous research in stimulus control, where a single stimulus comes to control a single response, 36 5-year-old children received errorless discrimination training at…

This research project was designed to determine whether 1-week-old neonates would indicate biological recognition of their mothers. Biological recognition is defined as the particular configuration of sensory, kinesthetic, and motor cues and the temporal patterning of these cues which characterizes infants' exchange processes with their…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of real and nonsense pictures with no labels, high-frequency labels, or low-frequency labels in discrimination learning of young children. The subjects were 102 second-grade children randomly selected from several classrooms located in a semi-rural community in Wisconsin. The subjects were…

The purpose of the two experiments was to assess the effects of two levels of stimulus redundancy and three levels of irrelevant visual stimulation on performance in a successive discrimination task and a reproduction task. The results indicate that increases in redundancy facilitated performance in the reproduction task but had no appreciable…

Auditory sequencing problems were seen as contributing heavily to neurologically involved children's language impairment, and several procedures for training auditory sequencing were explored. Five of the procedures were found to contribute considerably to an efficient and effective training program. These procedures included (1) the immediate…

The present study affords an explanation for the consistent, but not always statistically significant, pattern showing superior verbal discrimination learning performance for low- as compared to high-frequency words. In a frequency judgment task it was found that relative to high-frequency words, low-frequency words for which subjects (sixth…

This paper develops a stimulus selection theory, based on an extensive review of previous research, which gives weight to context change or stimulus generalization decrement. The theory assumes no special compounding or configurational process, and accounts for the learning of successive discriminations without the addition of any special process.…

Compared were performances of 12 educable mentally retarded (EMR) and 12 normal children in grade 6 on a perceptual learning task to determine whether individuals with different intelligence levels have different learning abilities. A protable minicomputer was used to present "old letters" (usual lower case letters) and "new letters" (letter-like…

This document describes a project which was designed (1) to develop a program to teach concepts to young children, and (2) to pilot test the program using college students as teachers of Appalachian children. The instructional program was composed of a series of visual discrimination problems in which the child must discriminate the correct from…