In many mathematics classrooms, the teacher provides "worked examples" to demonstrate how students should perform certain algorithms or processes. Some students find it difficult to generalize from the examples that teachers provide and cannot apply what they have learned in new situations (Watson and Mason 2002). Instead, teachers might…

Trained preschoolers and adults on three sets of successive discriminations with stimuli labeled A, B, and R. Tested for derived stimulus-response relations and stimulus-stimulus relations. Adults displayed class-consistent B-R and A-B performances over all conditions. Children's display of class-consistent B-R performance varied by training…

Four-year-old boys and girls initially named and matched by form more often than by color. Also, agreements involving form names and matches occurred more often than agreements involving color names and matches. (Authors)

Proposes explanations and further research considerations for the apparent psychological equivalence of the terms "complexity" and "novelty" as they refer to information theory, stimulus generalization, and subject expectancy effects. (RL)

A model for the analysis of simple human conceptual behavior, based on the apparent similarities of human conceptual behavior and that of infrahuman subjects, is developed. A minimum definition of conceptual behavior is given: A single response, verbal or nonverbal, under the discriminative control of a group of stimuli whose parameters are…

This investigation compares overt judgments about tenable hypotheses to choices in a concept identification task, as a function of stimulus similarity on successive trials. Two mathematical models are tested: (a) A 1-element local consistency version of Restle's concept identification model and (b) the same model with two additional passive states…

Two experiments examined pigeons' generalization to intermediate forms following training of concept discriminations. In Experiment 1, the training stimuli were sets of images of dogs and cats, and the transfer stimuli were head/body chimeras, which humans tend to categorize more readily in terms of the head part rather than the body part. In…

This study assesses the effects of visual and verbal rehearsal on the problem solving efficiency of preschool children. The study examines the use of stimulus pretraining designed to induce verbal rehearsal and compares the effectiveness of induced verbal rehearsal with the effectiveness of induced visual rehearsal. Fifty-four middle class…