One control group and eight experimental groups, each composed of 12 first grade children, participated in this experiment. It was designed to investigate the effects of frequency of reinforcement and repeated evaluation of stimuli on the conditioning of preferences. Each child participated in the experiment for seven consecutive school days. The…

This paper presents an integrative perspective on infant development (based on a consideration of developmental data) which focuses on the function of the smile. From the earliest spontaneous smiles of the newborn period to mature smiling and laughter, a central role was revealed for an excitation (tension)-relaxation process in producing smiles.…

This research focuses on the effect of verbal behavior on the conditioning and extinction of an autonomic response, namely, the galvanic skin response (GSR). The major assumption is that the experimentor's verbal behavior produces verbal behavior internal to the subject, and this, in turn has a modifying effect on the conditioning phenomena. The…

Six- and nine-month-old infants were exposed to contingent or non-contingent perceptual stimulation from a source which was spatially displaced at 60 from the infant's midline. Reliable operant acquisition was observed in the case of the nine-month-old infants, but not in the case of the six-month-old infants whose performance was similar to that…

Implications of the behaviorist and cognitive theories in language instruction are discussed in this article. Some contributions of Skinner, Politzer, Valette, Morton, Lane, and Mueller and Niedzielski clarify the behaviorists' view of language as a myriad of conditioned responses. In turn, the cognitive viewpoint, seen as the acquisiton and…