We explored the circumstances in which rats engage either declarative memory (and the hippocampus) or habit memory (and the dorsal striatum). Rats with damage to the hippocampus or dorsal striatum were given three different two-choice discrimination tasks (odor, object, and pattern). These tasks differed in the number of trials required for…

Learning to discriminate between spatial locations defined by two adjacent arms of a radial maze in the conditioned cue preference paradigm requires two kinds of information: latent spatial learning when the rats explore the maze with no food available, and learning about food availability in two spatial locations when the rats are then confined…

Twelve moderately retarded children were trained on 2-choice visual discrimination problems with interpolation of another item between training and retention tests. Results indicated that well-learned items are rehearsed less. (SBT)

The effectiveness of three fading and two nonfading procedures were compared in training kindergarten children on an oddity problem in which shape was the relevant dimension. (SBT)

Four groups of well-functioning senior citizens (6 males and 18 females per group) over the age of 65 were presented with a series of discrimination-learning problems. All were provided four pretraining problems, appropriate to their individual condition, and encouraging self-pacing. Two levels of problem complexity (four-dimensional vs.…

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…

Three studies of elementary school children's problem-solving procedures in intentional discrimination tasks are reported. Subjects were children selected from kindergarten and grades 2, 3, and 6. (Author/MP)

Four experiments were conducted to assess the effects of certain stimulus variables on children's discrimination learning. In general, it was found that word frequency was negatively related to discrimination learning as long as the words were meaningful to the subjects. Moreover, the relationship between word and performance reversed in…

The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) published a new learning style instrument in 1986--the NASSP Learning Style Profile (LSP). The LSP yields independent scores on 24 discrete elements of learning style. Its purpose is to provide educators with a well-validated and easy to use instrument for diagnosing cognitive styles,…

A report on learning psychology and its relationship to the study of school learning emphasizes the increasing interaction between theorists and educational practitioners, particularly in attempting to learn which variables influence the instructional process and to find an appropriate methodology to measure and evaluate learning. "Learning…