One mildly and two borderline mentally retarded children (10 to 12 years old) were treated for spelling deficits using either overcorrection or overcorrection plus reinforcement. Overcorrection with reinforcement proved to be more effective than overcorrection alone for two of the three children. (Author)

Both the directions and the directions plus reinforcement groups increased subjects' time on the task during the experimental phases. When extrinsic reinforcement and directions were removed, they maintained intrinsically motivated behaviors at levels significantly above levels observed during the baseline phase and significantly higher than the…

It is through the selection of responses that are to serve as the organism's guests that many of the organism's characteristics and outcomes are determined. (MS)

This study assessed the adequacy of Gewirtz's interpretation of vicarious reinforcement and examined the development of responsiveness to vicarious reinforcement in an experiment in which 98 children (21/2-5 years) performed a discrimination problem while being exposed to a model who was either rewarded or punished on each trial. (SB)

Describes installation of a hybrid chilled water/ice thermal storage plant for the Lucile Erwin Middle School in Loveland, Colorado, which has saved more than $18,000 in energy costs annually. (EV)

Describes how the Brevard County School District in Florida teamed with companies EPRI and Florida Power and Light to implement a dual-path, low temperature air-distribution system used in conjunction with thermal energy storage. (EV)

Five male preschool children were studied to determine the extent to which the generalized motor imitation model applies to vocal imitation. The use of a reinforced-imitation condition produced a systematic increase in verbal matching responses among three of the five children, which is consistent with previous studies. (SW)

In Experiment 1, 12 senior citizens from the community were trained with 18 sets of conditional discriminations. Training included 2-, 3-, and 4-choice matching-to-sample (MTS) configurations in linear series (LS), many-to-one (MTO), and one-to-many (OTM) training structures. Training structure order was counterbalanced across participants. The…

In two conditioned lick suppression experiments using water-deprived rats, we examined the effects of following Pavlovian conditioned inhibition training (i.e., A-US/AX-NoUS) with pairings of the training excitor (A) and the unconditioned stimulus (US). Experiments 1 and 2 assessed the effects of this posttraining inflation treatment on Pavlovian…

In four experiments using albino rats in an ABA fear renewal paradigm, we studied conditioned fear in the A test context following extinction in Context B. Conditioned suppression of operant responding was the index of fear. In Experiments 1-3, we found that extinguishing a feared cue in compound with a putative conditioned inhibitor of fear led…

Three mechanisms can explain second-order conditioning: (1) The second-order conditioned stimulus (CS2) could activate a representation of the first-order conditioned stimulus (CS1), thereby provoking the conditioned response (CR); The CS2 could enter into an excitatory association with either (2) the representation governing the CR, or (3) with a…

The present study explored whether a similar phenomenon to stimulus over-selectivity occurred in rats, in the hope of establishing a non-human model for the autism. Rats were serially presented with two-15 seconds, two-element compound stimuli prior to the delivery of food, in an appetitive classical conditioning procedure. Each compound stimulus…

In this article, the author shares an anecdote demonstrating one-trial learning which is commonplace in human behavior. The demonstration suggests that under some conditions, when people hear someone speak, their behavior changes, even in the absence of an apparent contingency of reinforcement, but only if they have in their repertoire verbal…

Previous work has demonstrated that drugs increasing brain concentrations of acetylcholine can enhance cognition in aging and brain-damaged organisms. The present study assessed whether galantamine (GAL), an allosteric modulator of nicotinic cholinergic receptors and weak acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, could improve acquisition and retention of…

Having recently shown that extinction of conditioned fear depends on L-type voltage-gated calcium channels (LVGCCs), we have been seeking other protocols that require this unusual induction mechanism. We tested latent inhibition (LI) of fear, because LI resembles extinction except that cue exposures precede, rather than follow, cue-shock pairing.…