THE HYPOTHESIS THAT ENVIRONMENTAL CIRCUMSTANCES INFLUENCE THE PROCESS OF KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION IS DISCUSSED. THE ROLE OF PARTIAL AND FULL SENSORY ISOLATION AND DEPRIVATION AND ITS NEGATIVE EFFECT ON LEARNING IS SHOWN TO BE SUPPORTED BY RESEARCH. THE INSTITUTE FOR DEVELOPMENTAL STUDIES AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY IS ENGAGED IN RESEARCH DEALING WITH THE…

THE EXTENT TO WHICH INCENTIVES INFLUENCE CHILDREN'S LEARNING WAS STUDIED BY INVESTIGATORS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT. BOTH VERBAL AND MATERIAL REWARDS WERE OFFERED TO SELECTED GROUPS OF CHILDREN WHICH VARIED IN NUMBER FROM 48 TO 80 CHILDREN. A DIFFERENTIAL METHOD PERMITTED THE CHILDREN TO EXPLORE THE RANGE OF REWARDS SO THAT THE COMPARATIVE…

THEORIES BEHIND PROGRAMED INSTRUCTION, STEPS REQUIRED FOR PROGRAMING, AND THE MAJOR PROGRAMING TECHNIQUES OF EDITING, TESTING, AND ANALYSIS ARE DISCUSSED. TOPICS INCLUDE--HOW TO ANALYZE MATERIAL TO BE PROGRAMED, HOW TO DIAGRAM MATERIAL, AND HOW TO USE VARIOUS CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUES--DISCRIMINATION, CONSTRUCTED RESPONSE, BRANCHING, BABOON…

Four groups of well-functioning senior citizens (6 males and 18 females per group) over the age of 65 were presented with a series of discrimination-learning problems. All were provided four pretraining problems, appropriate to their individual condition, and encouraging self-pacing. Two levels of problem complexity (four-dimensional vs.…

Several 3- to 5-year-old children participated in this study designed to discover the necessary procedures to establish nonresponding in preschool children during delay of reinforcement. The children were divided into two groups: (1) the programed group (PG), to which a 60-second delay period was introduced gradually and (2) the baseline group…

Two 4-year-old children were shown the use of an apparatus whereby they could obtain toys and candy by making certain responses. The apparatus was a matching-to-sample device on which were arranged five response buttons in a circle and one in the middle. Each response button had a display window for the stimulus. Four of the five windows on the…

This study investigated the relationship between perception and production in children's phonological learning to determine whether perceptual confusions could account for the patterns of substitution and deletion found in 2-year-olds' speech. A total of 14 children were presented pairs of toy stimuli, with each pair composed of a familiar item…

In an absolute frequency judgment task, 130 sixth graders received either high-frequency (Hi-F), low-frequency, high-meaningfulness (Lo-F/Hi-M), or low-frequency, low-meaningfulness (Lo-F/Lo-M) words selected from the 1944 Thorndike-Lorge list. Subjects were asked to either pronounce the words aloud, listen to the examiner prounounce the written…

Two experiments investigated the role of children's spontaneous conceptual "biases" in pictorial discrimination learning. The results suggested that such biases may serve either to facilitate or to interfere with discrimination learning. Moreover, in each experiment, age by treatment interactions revealed that in comparison to the behavior of…

A sequence of studies compared two types of discrimination formation: errorless learning and trial-and-error procedures. The subjects were three boys and five girls from a university preschool. The children performed the experimental tasks at a typical match-to-sample apparatus with one sample window above and four match (response) windows below.…

It was the purpose of this study to ascertain whether the culturally disadvantaged child, who appeared to adhere to the principle of immediate gratification, had learned, as a function of his participation in Head Start, a more future-related orientation when compared to his non-Head Start counterparts. One hundred and eighty-seven 4- and…

This study was designed to determine whether subjects who received one of three treatments of color cues in an instructional program differed significantly on three learning tasks. Subjects were randomly selected from the kindergarten populations of two Michigan public schools and were assigned to one of three treatment groups. Eight letter-like…

The present experiments investigated the effects of several classical conditioning manipulations on the performance of young children in an instrumental discrimination learning situation. Two predictions from general conditioning-extinction theory were tested: (1) acquisition of an instrumental response to a stimulus for a positive reinforcer in a…

The purpose of this study was to determine if children given spatial relationship training had learned a definition and/or conceptualization of "in front" which was limited to two distinctly different classes of objects functioning in a specific relationship. Twenty-one children who had completed the "in front" training were given three sets of…

This paper describes three experiments related to differences in discrimination learning. In Experiment 1, sixth-grade subjects were required to judge the situational frequency of items which had occurred from 0 to 4 times on a study list. For one group the study list consisted of high-frequency words. Another group judged low-frequency words…