We compared the ability of auditory, visual, and audiovisual (bimodal) exogenous cues to capture visuo-spatial attention under conditions of no load versus high perceptual load. Participants had to discriminate the elevation (up vs. down) of visual targets preceded by either unimodal or bimodal cues under conditions of high perceptual load (in…

Ten autistic children and 10 normal nursery school children, matched for mean developmental age, were presented with figure stimuli and had variable irrelevant cues in two-choice simultaneous discrimination learning. Performance of the autistic group did not vary as a function of irrelevant variability, a result attributed to poor performance of…

In Experiment 1, the illumination of black stimuli on white backgrounds failed to facilitate discrimination learning. In Experiment 2, however, illumination of white stimuli on black backgrounds facilitated discrimination learning. Findings supported the use of changes in illumination as an attention-influencing feature of nonspeech communication…

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…

This report summarizes research concerning stimulus analyzing mechanisms, giving the main experimental findings and theoretical developments. Most of the data and the experimental findings are to be found in the 89 publications listed in the bibliography. The research is discussed under five main headings: (1) shape recognition, (2) selective…

Previous studies have shown that after being trained on A-B and A-C match-to-sample tasks, adults match not only same-class B and C stimuli (equivalence) but also BC compounds with same-class elements and with different-class elements (BC-BC). The assumption was that the BC-BC performances are based on matching equivalence and nonequivalence…

The purpose of the two experiments was to assess the effects of two levels of stimulus redundancy and three levels of irrelevant visual stimulation on performance in a successive discrimination task and a reproduction task. The results indicate that increases in redundancy facilitated performance in the reproduction task but had no appreciable…

Two time-delay conditions for teaching complex visual discriminations to 14 normal preschoolers, 12 with mild mental retardation, and 11 with moderate mental retardation were compared. Results indicated that for all populations and stimuli, time delay of multiple dynamic distinctive-feature prompts produced learning, while time delay of the single…

Reviews "Levels of Cognitive Development," which presents a theory of cognitive development integrating discrimination- learning research with understanding of higher cognitive processes. Argues that strengths include its presentation of systematic research and providing continuity between past and present models. Weaknesses include…

Infants in four age groups--three, six, nine and twelve months--were exposed to an experimental procedure designed to assess the extent to which such subjects were capable of discriminating between different orientations of the same form, and the extent to which they were capable of recognizing the identity between different orientations of the…

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…