A well established finding in the discrimination learning literature is that pictures are learned more rapidly than their associated verbal labels. It was hypothesized in this study that the usual superiority of pictures over words in a discrimination list containing same-instance repetitions would disappear in a discrimination list containing…

Experiment I was designed to demonstrate that young children fail to abstract the positive cue as the relevant stimulus event in a restricted concept-learning task. Sixteen kindergarten and 16 fourth grade subjects were trained to criterion on a Kendler-type task, whereupon each subject was presented a pair of new instances which contrasted only…

A laboratory and a classroom study were conducted to determine if verbal association learning would be facilitated by visual discrimination training. Kindergarten children who could not recognize the letters used were the subjects for both studies. In the laboratory study, 90 subjects were randomly assigned to the experimental group (E) which got…

Dimensional preference tasks in both visual and haptic modalities with three dimensional stimuli varying in form, size, color, or texture were presented to 64 children. There were 16 subjects at each of four grade levels: preschool, kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 3. On each trial, the subject was presented three stimuli and asked to tell the…

This experiment was a direct test of the hypothesis that picture-word differences in discrimination learning are a function of apparent frequency differences associated with two types of material. The subjects consisted of 80 sixth graders randomly selected from two elementary schools located in middle-class neighborhoods. Each subject was tested…

Errorless discrimination training is a technique in which the discriminative stimulus is supplemented with a salient cue which is gradually removed or faded during the course of training. In this study errorless discrimination training was used to teach preschool children the distinctive features of letters of the alphabet that are difficult to…

The effect of dimensional training on the mode of response of kindergarten children to two-dimensional stimulus materials was investigated by Kruskal-Shepard scaling and Procrustes rotation procedures. Twenty-two kindergarten children were used as Ss. The stimuli consisted of five cardboard rectangles varying on two dimensions of colour and size.…

Second and fifth graders were presented with a discrimination learning task in which each of four displays were to be paired with a response button. For one group two of the displays shared a common feature and were paired with the other response button. This common feature condition required a subject to learn only two associations if he…

The purposes of this study were to assess the effect of phoneme-grapheme consistency (PGC) and cue emphasis (CE) on the development of decoding skills in first graders and to determine the relationship of consistency of original lists to the recognition of new words. Subjects were 162 first graders, mean age 6.11 years and scoring above 30 on the…

Six groups of nursery schoolers, kindergarteners, and first graders balanced for sex were trained and tested on a series of discrimination learning and transposition problems. (Author)

This research explores training of development in discrimination and communication skills in counselor trainees. It is concluded that trainees may improve their communication skills; improvement of discrimination skills was not demonstrated. (MFD)

Preschool children between 3 and 5 1/2 years of age participated in a learning task in which a conditional relational problem was presented in either a blocked or random series. Prior training on the components of the task was also varied. (BD)

This study was designed to investigate the role of the social desirability response tendency in the discrimination learning of first and fifth grade children. (BD)

Six retarded young adults were trained to select grocery items using picture cards as cues and to reject either (1) maximally different negative examples or (2) minimally different negative examples. Training with minimally different negative examples was functionally related to improved rejection of nontrained negative items in a nontrained…

This discussion of how conditions of the recipient can affect effectiveness of feedback presents an overview of the topic (feedback functions and feedback about what, when, by whom, and types), and discusses factors affecting formative feedback, i.e., recipients' discrimination repertoires and self-monitoring behavior development in…