Information theory was used to qualify the difficulty of verbal discrimination (VD) learning tasks and to measure VD performance. Words for VD items were selected with high background frequency and equal a priori probabilities of being selected as a first response. Three VD lists containing only 2-, 3-, or 4-word items were created and equated for…

The age effect in this study was such that younger children required proportionately more experience with reward than nonreward before they were able to improve their performance on reward problems over six sessions. (Author)

Purpose of this experiment was to explore the effects of pre- and postshift stimulus similarity, type of shift, and difficulty of discrimination in the standard solution shift - concept identification paradigm. (Authors/CB)

Major finding was that punishment presented in the same sensory modality as the reinforcement was superior to punishment presented in a different sensory modality from the reinforcement. (Author)

Data were interpreted as suggesting that incidental learning may not be cumulative over trials, but rather, may be due to memory of the last trial. (Author)

Results of these experiments are evaluated in conjunction with the hypothesis that frequency information is a dominant attribute in recognition decisions. (Author/MB)

The prediction was confirmed that young children would experience more difficulty in learning to discriminate faces of another race than those of their own. Additional findings revealed that discrimination-learning performance with racial stimuli is related to a number of factors including developmental level, race of the subject, and race of the…

Experiments reported here confirm the finding that performance can actually improve as intradimensional variability increases. (Authors/MB)

Experiment was concerned with the validity of the assumptions involved in the proposal of some minor modifications in the frequency theory of verbal-discrimination learning. (Author/CB)

Aim of the present study was to clarify the processes involved in the apparent lag in copying a diamond by reducing the lag experimentally with perceptual training of discrimination of orientation. (Authors)

Results indicated that the normal achievers learned more effectively under person and performance reinforcement than under tangible reinforcement, whereas the reverse was true for low achievers. (Author)

Results imply that sets of instructions may form a response class, with characteristics similar to those found in studies of generalized imitation. (Author)

Two major implications of this study are that repeated testing is a necessity for young children, and that repeated contrasts may provide a more accurate assessment of phonological discrimination ability in children. (Authors/MB)