Absolute ratings on the Microcounseling Skill Discrimination Scale (MSDS) confound the individual's use of the rating scale and actual ability to discriminate effective and ineffective counselor behaviors. This note suggests methods of scoring the MSDS that will eliminate variability attributable to response language and improve the validity of…

Five adults with Prader-Willi syndrome (characterized by short stature, learning difficulties, incomplete sexual development, and uncontrollable eating) learned the conditional relations necessary for the formation of two equivalence classes under differential/nondifferential and edible/nonedible outcomes. Performance on test trials was better…

Three experiments examined 4- to 10-month-olds' perception of audio-visual (A-V) temporal synchrony cues in the presence or absence of rhythmic pattern cues. Results established that infants of all ages could discriminate between two different audio-visual rhythmic events. Only 10-month-olds detected a desynchronization of the auditory and visual…

Three experiments investigated discrimination and memory of 5.5-month-olds for videotapes of women performing different activities (blowing bubbles, brushing hair, brushing teeth) or static displays after a 1-minute and a 7-week delay. Findings demonstrate the attentional salience of actions over faces in dynamic events to 5.5-month-olds. Findings…

The study examined 2 procedures--the ABX Test and the Oddity Task--for assessing the perception of 25 elementary grade phonologically disordered children of their own speech error sounds. Findings indicated both measures were promising and aided in identifying children whose perceptual errors influenced their speech-sound production. (DB)

Delineates how the transition from one element to another facilitates the identification of individual form and function. Explains the process of bridging separate forms and functions to give meaning to what is seen. (KEH)

The effectiveness of training procedures which used visual-visual arbitrary matching, blocked-trial matching-to-sample, and successive discrimination training to teach visual-visual discrimination of two-dimensional forms was evaluated with two men having severe mental retardation. Results indicated that the procedures did establish conditional…

Noting that children who can easily categorize a picture in terms of what it depicts may have difficulty understanding the picture as a representation or thing in itself, four experiments with children around four years old examined their responses to pictures as things in themselves. Results showed that some children had difficulty understanding…

In a study of oddity performance, subjects were required to choose one distinct bimodal stimulus from a display that included other stimuli that did not differ from each other. Oddity performance was evaluated with both reversal assessments and assessments with new stimuli. The usefulness of bimodal training in oddity learning was demonstrated.…

Compared two procedures for establishing and reversing stimulus control transfer across simple discrimination in children. Results indicated that both procedures were more effective in establishing that, in reversing stimulus control transfer, stimulus contiguity was more effective than match-to-sample training; and both procedures were more…

A stimulus equivalence procedure for the acquisition of English and Spanish words was evaluated with two adolescents having head injuries. Following training on one task, subjects attained and maintained high scores on all matching-to-sample tasks. Results suggest the procedure is effective for teaching foreign language skills to head-injured…

Two experiments used phoneme counting tasks to investigate the foundations of phonemic awareness. Found that first graders and college students had some ability to distinguish between monophthongs (as in "he") and diphthongs (as in "how"), and they tended to count fewer "sounds" for syllables ending with the more…

Two studies compared performance on conditional and trial-unique delayed identity matching-to-sample procedures with five subjects having moderate to severe mental retardation and four subjects with mild mental retardation. Across the studies, six of nine subjects showed lower delayed-matching accuracy when fewer rather than more stimuli were…

Used shift-rate recovery method in three experiments to examine extent to which 6-month-olds find perceptual cues such as density and length useful in discrimination of linearly arranged sets of large numbers of objects. Found that infants can discriminate between large number sets by relying on absolute cues such as density and on relative cues…

Processing of a probe stimulus can be affected either positively or negatively by presenting a related stimulus immediately before it. According to structural accounts, such effects occur because processing of the prime activates or inhibits the mental representation of the probe before it is presented. In contrast, transfer-appropriate processing…