Research based upon a Ph.D. dissertation submitted to the Graduate School, University of Pittsburgh, and supported in part by U.S. Public Health Service grant MH-1290 and by the New York State Research Foundation.

BECAUSE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF COLOR IN PICTORIAL INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS WAS INDETERMINATE, 5 EXPERIMENTS WERE DESIGNED TO INVESTIGATE EFFECTS OF COLOR CUE RELEVANCE (DEFINED AS A CORRELATION OVER TRIALS BETWEEN PRESENTATION OF A GIVEN STIMULUS CUE AND REINFORCEMENT OF A PARTICULAR RESPONSE) ON PAIRED-ASSOCIATE LEARNING. OTHER INDEPENDENT VARIABLES…

A STUDY WAS CONDUCTED TO DETERMINE WHETHER PEOPLE CAN CHANGE THEIR PERCEPTUAL PROCESSING STRATEGIES TO INCLUDE TESTS FOR THE PRESENCE OF ONLY THOSE STIMULUS FEATURES NECESSARY FOR THE TASK AT HAND. LEARNING DURING PRACTICE AND THE EFFECT OF AGE ON THE ABILITY TO USE OPTIMAL STRATEGIES WERE INVESTIGATED. A DISJUNCTIVE REACTION TIME PROCEDURE WAS…

In an experiment to test the effectiveness of discrimination training--contrasting good and poor teacher behaviors and demonstrating the stimulus occasions for these behaviors--as compared with feedback from an instructor in microteaching, a discrimination model for a limited class of teaching behaviors was devised and subjects were divided into…

Ten kindergarten and 46 first grade children were given two-choice object discrimination problems, during which a prompt indicated the positive (rewarded) object, P. Guided by the prompt, all Ss subjects displaced P and therefore observed only its reward value; no direct observation was made of the reward value of the negative (nonrewarded)…

Sixty-four 8-year-old children were divided into fast and slow learner groups and trained on a tactile simultaneous discrimination task. Selective attention was measured in terms of percentage contact time per trial to the relevant dimension. Inter- and intracouplings per trial were also recorded. A multivariate analysis was carried out to examine…

Sixteen kindergarten and 28 first-grade children were tested on two-choice discrimination problems. A prompt light indicated the positive (rewarded) object P on all training trials, and these were followed by a single nonprompted test trial during which a new object (X) replaced either P (X-N problems) or N (P-X problems) or neither (P-N control…

This study examined children's use of category information as a discrimination cue to avoid intrusions in recall and false alarms in recognition of items outside given categories. Forty-eight children in grades 1 and 4 were administered one of three conditions of a recognition task in which all study words were members of one of two familiar…

The relative effectiveness of two types of verbal reinforcement and one type of tangible reinforcement on a two-choice discrimination task was determined for middle and lower class male and female preschool children. It is suggested that consideration of baseline and IQ might have reconciled disparate findings of previous studies. (GO)

The present investigation was conducted to determine if stimulus overselectivity in 19 autistic children (5 to 12 years old) is changed as a function of repeated exposure to testing. (Author/SBH)

A study of eighty Canadian kindergarten children showed that discrimination of similar letters was more difficult than distinctive letter discrimination, irrespective of training format or mode of testing. (MJB)