Sequence learning is fundamental to a wide range of cognitive functions. Explaining how sequences--and the relations between the elements they comprise--are learned is a fundamental challenge to cognitive science. However, although hundreds of articles addressing this question are published each year, the actual learning mechanisms involved in the…

Stimulus overselectivity is widely accepted as a stimulus control abnormality in autism spectrum disorders and subsets of other populations. Previous research has demonstrated a link between both chronological and mental age and overselectivity in typical development. However, the age at which children are developmentally ready to respond to…

Stimulus over-selectivity refers to behavior being controlled by one element of the environment at the expense of other equally salient aspects of the environment. This is a common problem for many individuals, including those with autism spectrum disorders, and learning difficulties, and presents a considerable problem for information processing…

The current study examined the impact of both the tendency to worry (trait worry) and the process of worry (state worry) on subsequent behavioral responding in a schedule discrimination learning task. High and low trait worriers were randomly assigned to a state worry or relaxation incubation condition and completed a test of executive functioning…

Learning styles in capuchin monkeys were assessed with a computerized reversal-learning task called the mediational paradigm. First, monkeys were trained to respond with 90% accuracy on a two-choice discrimination (A+B-). Then the authors examined differences in performance on three different types of reversal trials (A-B+, A-C+, B+C-), each of…

Three studies involving groups of four- to five-year-old children examined whether the discriminative properties of prompts are critical for establishing a difficult (septagon, octagon) discrimination through time delay. Results confirm superiority of multiple-stimulus, distinctive-feature prompts, implying that stimulus dimensions of prompts are…

This article proposes and tests a formal cognitive model for the go/no-go discrimination task. In this task, the performer chooses whether to respond to stimuli and receives rewards for responding to certain stimuli and punishments for responding to others. Three cognitive models were evaluated on the basis of data from a longitudinal study…

Investigates to what extent discrimination learning through time delay of multistimulus, distinctive-feature prompts is a function of the inclusion and configuration of the S-prompt. Results of two experiments with children aged four and five indicate that most subjects did not learn the task assigned unless two distinctive-feature prompts were…