Small graphic changes made in normal letters of the alphabet changed the similarity relations among those letters. Children and adults classified letters of this distinctive font faster and with fewer errors than they did normal letters. Relations between letters in the stimulus set determined how difficult any particular letter was to classify.…

Two experiments were conducted to understand the processes through which 5th graders discriminate relevant from irrelevant information when solving mathematical story problems. Visual scanning was recorded and coded as directed toward relevant information, irrelevant information, the question, workspace, and elsewhere. Experiment 1 focused on the…

Experiments showed that in verbal discrimination learning imaging the referent of the correct item was more facilitative than vocalizing the correct item, as long as the imagery structure was executed in the company of relevant motor activity. No difference between the two strategies was found in pictorial discrimination learning. (Author/BJG)

High state-anxious subjects solved fewer problems than middle or low state-anxious subjects under no memory-aid conditions, and all anxiety groups performed comparably with memory aids. High state-anxious subjects tended to use less focusing strategy when memory aids were unavailable. (Author/CP)

Verbal self-instruction was employed in training impulsive first-grade children to perform visual discrimination matching tasks. Posttests, following the four training conditions, showed that while strategy training increased latency, self verbalization both increased latency and reduced errors. (Author/DEP)

Results confirm previous findings that the ability to integrate auditory-visual stimuli is significantly related to reading achievement. (AG)

Experimental conditions consisting of visual experience, visual plus motor training, visual plus verbal-orienting instruction, visual plus motor plus verbal, and a control group were used to study young children's concept development. Assessment was based on discriminating and remembering positive concept instances and classifying concept…

Purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that training the student to note the distinctive features of a stimulus during perceptual learning facilities the hook-up phase in a paired-associate task. (Author)

Children were individually administered the Matching Familiar Figures (MFF) Test and the Haptic Matching Task. Impulsives received either reflective scanning strategy training or control procedures and were retested. Visual training decreased errors only on the MFF and increased latency on both tasks. Haptic training decreased errors and increased…

Prekindergarten children were given a perceptual discrimination task using letterlike forms and their transformations. The magnitude of the relation to subsequent achievement in reading varied according to the difficulty of a transformation. More easily discriminated transformations were associated with higher correlations. Patterns were similar…

Reproduction training improved performance only on the reproduction test; discrimination training improved performance only on the discrimination test. The effects of discrimination were seen both on forms used in training and on other similar forms, while the effects of reproduction training were seen only on trained forms. (Author/BJG)

In two studies with 50 male and 50 female undergraduates, differences in learning highly interfering paired-associate discrimination tasks were compared with or without visual mediational cues and with aural cues only. Visual mediational instruction reduced interference between similar signals and facilitated their association with the correct…