Contextual fear conditioning was maintained over a 15-day retention interval suggesting no forgetting of the conditioning experience. However, a more subtle generalization test revealed that, as the retention interval increased, rats showed enhanced generalized fear to an altered context. Preexposure to the training context prior to conditioning,…

The article deals with issues concerning the abductive-inductive reasoning of 42 preservice elementary majors on patterns that consist of figural and numerical cues. We discuss: ways in which the participants develop generalizations about classes of abstract objects; abductive processes they exhibit which support their induction leading to a…

A number of recent models and experiments have suggested that evidence of early category-based induction is an artifact of perceptual cues provided by experimenters. We tested these accounts against the prediction that different relations (causal versus non-causal) determine the types of perceptual similarity by which children generalize. Young…

In this study we examined how two students viewed the general nature of their proportional reasoning errors as they attempted to generalize numeric situations. Using a teaching experiment methodology we studied the reasoning of two students over 18 instructional sessions. One student, Dallas, appeared to recognize that the proportional reasoning…

Autism is characterized by deficits in pretend play, perspective taking, initiating and responding to others, and other profound social impairments. As the incidence of children being identified with autism increases, so does the need for effective interventions that target social skills development. Over the last decade, social skills…

The authors review research showing that when recalling autobiographical events, many emotionally disturbed patients summarize categories of events rather than retrieving a single episode. The mechanisms underlying such overgeneral memory are examined, with a focus on M. A. Conway and C. W. Pleydell-Pearce's (2000) hierarchical search model of…

Describes the establishment of a psychological space for any set of stimuli by determining metric distances between the stimuli with the probability that a response learned for a stimulus will generalize to the other. (Author/TW)

Correlation is one of the most widely used analytic procedures in the behavioral sciences. The bivariate correlation is implicit in all classical analyses ranging from t-tests to canonical correlation analysis. The most common correlation coefficient used in statistics is the Pearson product-moment coefficient of correlation, which is represented…

Two pilot efforts were undertaken to teach moderately and severely handicapped children music. In the first, moderately and severely handicapped children were found capable of making gains in rhythm, melody, and keyboard after 3 months of weekly half hour group music instruction sessions and three weekly half hour practice sessions. Ss did not…

Compares a successful job classification procedure used to make use of validity generalization findings in new settings with a much simpler holistic judgement approach for accomplishing the same purpose. Results showed that the latter approach was just as effective, but was much less time consuming and costly. (LLL)

The article reviews social skills interventions that have been attempted with mentally retarded persons beginning with the less complex skills and moving to multifaceted ones. Summary tables are presented which list the skill(s) taught, the instructional methods used, the effectiveness of the intervention and the generalization effects for 22…

Conducted a reliability generalization study for the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (C. Spielberger, 1983) by reviewing and classifying 816 research articles. Average reliability coefficients were acceptable for both internal consistency and test-retest reliability, but variation was present among the estimates. Other differences are discussed.…