The aim of this study was to model a situation that induced choice between following two incompatible rules, each associated with a different rate of reinforcement. In Experiment 1, eight undergraduate students were exposed to a two-component multiple schedule (training). In each component, there was a concurrent variable interval (VI)-extinction…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may have difficulty acquiring intraverbal behavior. The present study compared manipulations of stimulus salience (i.e., volume increase, elongation) to teach intraverbals (e.g., "You drink [juice]" and "You drink from [cup]") to three participants diagnosed with ASD whose…

Accumulating evidence suggests that there is a spontaneous preference for numerical, compared to non-numerical (e.g., cumulative surface area), information. However, given a paucity of research on the perception of non-numerical magnitudes, it is unclear whether this preference reflects a specific bias towards number, or a general bias towards the…

In the field of stimulus generalization, an old yet unresolved discussion pertains to what extent stimulus misidentifications contribute to the pattern of conditioned responding. In this article, we perform cluster analysis on six datasets (four published datasets and two unpublished datasets, included N = 950) to examine the relationship between…

Perception is not an independent, in-the-moment event. Instead, perceiving involves integrating prior expectations with current observations. How does this ability develop from infancy through adulthood? We examined how prior visual experience shapes visual perception in infants, children, and adults. Using an identical task across age groups, we…

In the present study, two typically developing 4-year-old children, Pete and Joe, were trained six conditional discriminations and tested for the formation of three 3-member equivalence classes. Pete and Joe did not establish the AC relation within 600 trials and were given two conditions of preliminary training, including naming of stimuli with…

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build…

A portion of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulty acquiring conditional discrimination. However, previous researchers suggested that the discrimination of nonverbal auditory stimuli may be acquired more efficiently (Eikeseth & Hayward, 2009; Uwer, et al., 2002). For example, a child may learn to touch a…

Generalization of learning can arise from 2 distinct sources: failure to discriminate a novel test stimulus from the trained stimulus and active extrapolation from the trained stimulus to the test stimulus despite them being discriminable. We investigated these 2 processes in a predictive learning task by testing stimulus discriminability…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have limited spoken communication skills are commonly taught to mand by exchanging picture symbols. Competent manding via symbol exchange relies on conditional discrimination--that is, selecting the picture symbol that corresponds to the desired reinforcer. Picture Exchange Communication System…

Learning to categorize perceptually similar stimuli can result in people becoming more sensitive to differences along perceptual dimensions that are relevant to category membership and/or less sensitive to equivalent differences along irrelevant perceptual dimensions. These effects of acquired distinctiveness and acquired equivalence may be caused…

This study investigated the effects of tact prompts on the acquisition and retention of divergent intraverbal responding to categorical questions involving conditional discriminations. A 6-year-old boy with autism participated in the study. A multiple probe design across behaviors was used. A tact-prompt procedure was implemented. The results…

Receptive identification is usually taught in matching-to-sample format, which entails the presentation of an auditory sample stimulus and several visual comparison stimuli in each trial. Conflicting recommendations exist regarding the order of stimulus presentation in matching-to-sample trials. The purpose of this study was to compare acquisition…

Purpose: Published data indicate nearly adultlike frequency discrimination in infants but large child -adult differences for school-age children. This study evaluated the role that differences in measurement procedures and stimuli may have played in the apparent nonmonotonicity. Frequency discrimination was assessed in preschoolers, young…

The present study examined mnemonic discrimination in 5- and 6-yr-old children, 8- and 9-yr-old children, 11- and 12-yr-old children, and young adults. Participants incidentally encoded pictorial stimuli and subsequently judged whether targets (i.e., repeated stimuli), lures (i.e., mnemonically related stimuli), and foils (i.e., novel stimuli)…