THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY WAS TO DETERMINE THE RELATIVE INFLUENCE OF FIVE VARIABLES (INITIAL INSTRUCTIONS, REWARD, LETTER SIZE, TYPE OF WARM-UP, AND FEEDBACK) ON KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN'S PERFORMANCE OF A LETTER DISCRIMINATION TASK. IT HAS BEEN ARGUED THAT ATTENTION IS THE KEY FACTOR IN LETTER DISCRIMINATION. THE PRESENT STUDY PROPOSES THAT A…

Male school children of three age levels were tested on a 2-choice visual discrimination task that varied in spatial continguity of stimulus, response, and reward. Separation of stimulus from response and reward was found to retard learning. (WY)

Two normal and two mentally retarded children were trained to earn pennies by pressing a key according to a multiple variable-interval extinction schedule of reinforcement. Retarded children differed from normal children by producing more positive than negative discriminative stimuli. (Author/DB)

Simple discriminations are involved in many functional skills; additionally, they are components of conditional discriminations (identity and arbitrary matching-to-sample), which are involved in a wide array of other important performances. Many individuals with severe disabilities have difficulty acquiring simple discriminations with standard…

Findings were: it did not matter whether the seriation involved the hues used in subsequent tasks or other hues; the presence or absence of reinforcement during perceptual pretraining did not affect pretraining, training, or transposition behavior; and seriation pretraining produced increased transposition in the intermediate-hue problem.…

Experiment 1 supported in part by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Research Grant M2232. Experiment 2 submitted as the senior author's PhD dissertation at the University of Miami and supported by NIMH grant MH-14914.

This study measured the differential effects of simplified and typical verbal antecedents on acquisition of picture discriminations for four preschool children with autism. During baseline probes, participants emitted no correct selection responses to pictures of common stimuli during either simplified or typical verbal antecedent conditions.…

An experiement was conducted to test the hypothesis that interest inventory items would function as reinforcing stimuli in a visual discrimination task. When previously rated liked and disliked items from the Strong Vocational Interest Blank were differentially presented following one of two responses, subjects learned to respond to the stimulus…