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…

Found that preschool children can form abstract concepts of left and right which are not bound to the specific training context: children were able to generalize to new figures and to new spatial locations. The nature of the preschool child's left-right judgments is discussed. (Author/RH)

The effectiveness of a preschool peer-tutor to facilitate generalization of two preschoolers' performance on two academic tasks was evaluated. The peer-tutor apparently acted as a distracter rather than a facilitator; on some occasions time to complete a discrimination task was greatly lengthened by the presence of the peer-tutor. (SLD)

Analyses indicated that varying the range of test stimuli changes the discriminability of the stimuli within that range, even though the physical differences among these stimuli remain constant. (Author)

Three preschoolers performed four sorts with stimulus cards--an untaught target sort and three directly taught alternating sorts considered to self-instruct the target performance. Accuracy increased first in the skill sorts and then in the untaught target sorts. All subjects generalized to new target sorts. Correct spontaneous self-instructions…

An evaluation of selective generalization of habituation on the basis of meaningful categories of stimuli. Also explored are the sex differences in conceptual generalization of habituation. Subjects were 36 toddlers with a mean age of 40 months. (SDH)

This study, which indicates that both age and variation in training affect children's concept formation, provides a basis for explaining the effect of age. Sixty-four 4- and 5-year-olds learned three novel concepts (animal-like, plant-like, and machine-like). Subjects were presented with either four different examples of each concept (multiple…

Looking times of 36 children were recorded during subject-controlled presentation of slides in order to determine whether the existence of simple categories in 3-year-olds can be inferred from habituation data, and to determine any sex differences in conceptual generalization of habituation. Habituation was demonstrated over repeated presentation…

This study investigated the spontaneous use of verbal mediators in discrimination learning, the transfer of mediators to a free recall task, and the effects of a pretraining task on performance. The discrimination tasks required nursery school children (80) to: (1) sort three instances each of two different concepts in a conceptually consistent…

One hundred twenty-eight preschool boys were subjects in a 4x2x2 factorial design to investigate the change in reinforcer efficacy as a function of prior stimulus exposure. The factors were: (1) amount of repetition, 5, 25, 45, or 65; (2) reinforcer, good or bell; and (3) satiator, good or bell. Two additional groups were run as control groups to…