A conceptual framework is developed that is systematically applied to the published literature on the generalization of behavioral teacher training. Two variables were hypothesized to explain the occurrence or nonoccurrence of generalization: the type of training provided and the teachers' attitudes toward the training. (Author/RL)

The role of variation as a determinant of infant categorical responding was investigated in three studies of infants 7 to 7 1/2 months of age. Sixty-three infants, divided into groups of 21 each, were habituated to color slide poses of either one, two, or six different adult female faces. Their responses to a novel pose of a familiar face and a…

Research supported by Grants MH-11699-01 and NB-04268 from the U.S. Public Health Service.

TWO EXPERIMENTS WERE CONDUCTED IN ORDER TO OBTAIN A MATHEMATICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE PERCEPTUAL PROCESS BY WHICH NORMAL AND MENTALLY RETARDED SUBJECTS SYNTHESIZE STIMULUS CUES IN PERCEPTUAL IDENTIFICATION. THE INITIAL STUDY EMPLOYED 50 COLLEGE STUDENTS, 34 GRADE SCHOOL STUDENTS, AND 24 MENTALLY RETARDED CHILDREN (AGES 9-16) AS SUBJECTS. THE…

An analysis of variance model is recommended for data which display a peaked trend. These data are particularly common in psychological studies of stimulus generalization. A variety of hypotheses are suggested, and the testing of these hypotheses is illustrated. (Author/JKS)

Hearing-impaired 6- to 13-year-olds (N=24), trained to discriminate between two stimulus complexes differing in shape, direction, and number, were asked to discriminate between individual characteristics in all possible pair combinations. General failure to respond to all characteristics equally suggested that hearing-impaired children tend to be…

Purpose of the present research was to determine whether certain Pavlovian conditioning phenomena occur in a simple probability learning situation. (Authors)

Eight experiments are reported: the first four demonstrate the context effects in short-term-memory (that retrieval from STM improves as the context for learning is made more similar to the context for retrieval), and four more experiments examine the mechanism by which the context effect might operate. (Author/MB)

Children and adults were trained and tested on formation of novel simple discriminations and conditional stimulus relations. Subjects who formed these sets were trained and tested on formation of stimulus equivalence classes. A modest majority of children matched directly paired stimuli; a few matched indirectly paired stimuli. All normal adults…

Recent studies involving nonlinear discrimination problems suggest that stimuli in human associative learning are represented configurally with narrow generalization, such that presentation of stimuli that are even slightly dissimilar to stored configurations weakly activate these configurations. The authors note that another well-known set of…

We studied economic choice behavior in capuchin monkeys by offering them to choose between two different foods available in variable amounts. When monkeys selected between familiar foods, their choice patterns were well-described in terms of relative value of the two foods. A leading view in economics and biology is that such behavior results from…

Stimulus control is evident when a specific antecedent object or event (discriminative stimulus) increases the probability that a specific behavior will occur. A behavioral intervention is described whereby a teacher's stimulus control was successfully generalized to a paraprofessional playground aide. The generalization procedure increased the…

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)