Enhancing the learning of new words using an errorless learning procedure: Evidence from typical adults

Two experiments compared the efficacy of errorless and errorful training procedures in the acquisition of novel words in typical adults. One experiment involved learning novel names for novel objects, while a second involved learning obscure English words and their definitions. In both studies the errorless method led to significantly better learning as assessed by an immediate cued recall test. The errorless advantage was characterised by a reduction in extra-experimental intrusion errors and was still present when learning was re-tested 3–4 days after training. In contrast there was no errorless advantage in recognition of word-to-object pairings. Taken together, these results suggest that errorless learning procedures improve retrieval by leading to the creation of better-specified, retrievable representations in long-term memory.     

Application of a graded choice procedure to obtain errorless learning in children

A simultaneous, two-choice color discrimination was carried out with three groups of four- to seven-year-old children. For Groups I and II, the opportunity to respond to the incorrect stimulus was controlled (graded) over three different conditions. First, only a red light (S+) and its retractable bar were presented (16 trials for Group I and 316 trials for Group II). Second, a green light (S−) was added with its correlated bar retracted for 14 trials. Third, 40 trials were given with both stimuli on and their correlated retractable bars extended. The opportunity to respond to S− was not graded for Group III children. They experienced only the third condition applied to Groups I and II. Responses to S+ were reinforced for all three groups, while responses to S− were not. Children in the first two groups made from zero to three responses to S−, while the control children emitted 11 to 46 errors. The results demonstrate that fading in S− or presenting S− early in the training procedure are sufficient, but not necessary conditions for errorless learning.     

Inhibitory control and errorless discrimination learning

Pigeons learned to discriminate between a positive stimulus (white key) and a negative stimulus (red or green key, depending on the subject) via Terrace's fading procedure. Generalization tests, conducted with intermittent reinforcement for key pecking at various wavelengths, yielded minima at the value of the negative stimulus in most “errorless” birds. Terrace's contrary finding of flat gradients in errorless subjects probably resulted from a floor-effect (i.e., virtually zero responding) produced by his extinction-test procedure. The present and other findings do not support Terrace's conclusions that the negative stimulus of an errorless discrimination is behaviorally neutral; inhibition apparently develops to the nonreinforced stimulus even during errorless discrimination learning. A negative correlation between stimulus and reinforcer seems the crucial factor in producing an inhibitory stimulus.     

Extinction-induced aggression during errorless discrimination learning

Pigeons were trained to discriminate without errors between a green light and a dark key. The key-pecking response was reinforced in the presence of green, and extinction was in effect in the presence of the dark key. The duration of the dark key was gradually increased during the first few sessions of conditioning. The opportunity to attack a restrained target pigeon was also present. During discrimination training, the rate of attack in the presence of the dark key was higher for each animal than the operant level, even though most of the animals acquired the discrimination without errors. Furthermore, the rate of attack did not decrease during 45 sessions of discrimination training. Attack also occurred in the presence of the green stimulus, although to a lesser extent than during extinction. Reinforcement during green is a determinant of attack during extinction because removal of reinforcement virtually eliminated attack during extinction.     

Inhibitory stimulus control following errorless discrimination learning

Three generalization procedures were used to investigate inhibitory stimulus control following discrimination learning with few errors. Three groups of pigeons acquired a discrimination between a green stimulus (the positive stimulus) and a vertical or horizontal line (the negative stimulus) through differential autoshaping followed by multiple schedule presentation of the two stimuli with gradually increasing stimulus durations. Genereralization testing was along a line-tilt continuum. For one group, the test involved a resistance-to-reinforcement procedure in which responses to all line tilts were reinforced on a variable-interval schedule. For a second group, also tested with the resistance-to-reinforcement procedure, the lines were superimposed on the green field that formerly served as the positive stimulus. A third group was tested in extinction with the combined stimuli. Control groups had no discrimination training but responding to green was nondifferentially reinforced. The control subjects responded more to all line tilts during testing than did the comparable experimental subjects, indicating that the negative stimulus had become an inhibitory stimulus. Both resistance-to-reinforcement groups revealed inhibitory gradients around the negative stimulus, but the gradient for the extinction group was relatively flat. These data are consistent with others that modify Terrace's early conclusion concerning the failure of inhibition to develop during errorless training.     

Semantic richness and word learning in children with autism spectrum disorder

Semantically rich learning contexts facilitate semantic, phonological, and articulatory aspects of word learning in children with typical development (TD). However, because children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show differences at each of these processing levels, it is unclear whether they will benefit from semantic cues in the same manner as their typical peers. The goal of this study was to track how the inclusion of rich, sparse, or no semantic cues influences semantic, phonological, and articulatory aspects of word learning in children with ASD and TD over time. Twenty‐four school‐aged children (12 in each group), matched on expressive vocabulary, participated in an extended word learning paradigm. Performance on five measures of learning (referent identification, confrontation naming, defining, phonetic accuracy, and speech motor stability) were tracked across three sessions approximately one week apart to assess the influence of semantic richness on extended learning. Results indicate that children with ASD benefit from semantically rich learning contexts similarly to their peers with TD; however, one key difference between the two groups emerged – the children with ASD showed heightened shifts in speech motor stability. These findings offer insights into common learning mechanisms in children with ASD and TD, as well as pointing to a potentially distinct speech motor learning trajectory in children with ASD, providing a window into the emergence of stereotypic vocalizations in these children.     

The relationship between initial errorless learning conditions and subsequent performance

This experiment explores a suggestion by [Maxwell, J.P., Masters, R.S.W., Kerr, E., Weedon, E. (2001). The implicit benefit of learning without errors. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A 54, 1049-1068] that an initial bout of implicit motor learning confers beneficial performance characteristics, such as robustness under secondary task loading, despite subsequent explicit learning. Participants acquired a complex motor skill (golf putting) over 400 trials. The environment was constrained early in learning to minimize performance error. It was predicted that in the absence of explicit instruction, reducing error would prevent hypothesis testing strategies and the concomitant accrual of declarative (explicit) knowledge, thereby reducing dependence on working memory resources. The effect of an additional cognitive task on putting performance was used to assess reliance on working memory. Putting performance of participants in the Implicit-Explicit condition was unaffected by the additional cognitive load, whereas the performance of Explicit participants deteriorated. The relationship between error correction and episodic verbal reports suggested that the explicit group were involved in more hypothesis testing behaviours than the Implicit-Explicit group early in learning. It was concluded that a constrained, uninstructed, environment early in learning, results in procedurally based motor output unencumbered by disadvantages associated with working memory control.     

Retrieval practice improves learning in children with diverse visual word recognition skills

ABSTRACT

A large body of research shows that performing tests is more beneficial for the retention of studied materials than restudying those materials, a phenomenon termed “testing-effect”. A contemporary debate on the testing effect literature concerns whether the benefits of tests are equivalent for individuals with different cognitive skills, as the capacity to decode written words, for example. In the current study, we approached this issue in two experiments by examining whether testing is equally beneficial for children with diverse visual word decoding skills. To achieve this goal, we recruited sixth and fourth grade children (experiments 1 and 2, respectively) and administered a reading aloud task to assess their visual word recognition skills, and administered a memory task about an encyclopedic text to promote the testing effect. Memory for the restudied/tested contents of the encyclopedic text were probed after a seven-day interval, and although children from both experiments showed robust testing effects, such effects were not associated with their visual word decoding skills. These findings suggest that children with diverse word decoding skills can be benefited by retrieval practice.     

Pragmatics aid referent disambiguation and word learning in young children and adults

How do children succeed in learning a word? Research has shown robustly that, in ambiguous labeling situations, young children assume novel labels to refer to unfamiliar rather than familiar objects. However, ongoing debates center on the underlying mechanism: Is this behavior based on lexical constraints, guided by pragmatic reasoning, or simply driven by children's attraction to novelty? Additionally, recent research has questioned whether children's disambiguation leads to long-term learning or rather indicates an attentional shift in the moment of the conversation. Thus, we conducted a pre-registered online study with 2- and 3-year-olds and adults. Participants were presented with unknown objects as potential referents for a novel word. Across conditions, we manipulated whether the only difference between both objects was their relative novelty to the participant or whether, in addition, participants were provided with pragmatic information that indicated which object the speaker referred to. We tested participants’ immediate referent selection and their retention after 5 min. Results revealed that when given common ground information both age groups inferred the correct referent with high success and enhanced behavioral certainty. Without this information, object novelty alone did not guide their selection. After 5 min, adults remembered their previous selections above chance in both conditions, while children only showed reliable learning in the pragmatic condition. The pattern of results indicates how pragmatics may aid referent disambiguation and learning in both adults and young children. From early ontogeny on, children's social-cognitive understanding may guide their communicative interactions and support their language acquisition.

Research Highlights

• We tested how 2-3-year-olds and adults resolve referential ambiguity without any lexical cues.
• In the pragmatic context both age groups disambiguated novel word-object-mappings, while object novelty alone did not guide their referent selection.
• In the pragmatic context, children also showed increased certainty in disambiguation and retained new word-object-mappings over time.
• These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on whether children learn words on the basis of domain-specific constraints, lower-level associative mechanisms, or pragmatic inferences.

     

Effects of error and errorless discrimination acquisition on reversal learning

The effectiveness of trial-and-error, graded-choice, and verbal-instruction procedures on the acquisition and maintenance of a two-choice simultaneous color discrimination in an intradimensional double-reversal learning situation was studied using 18 first-grade children. After acquiring a red-green discrimination during one 70-trial session, the discriminative roles of the stimuli were reversed for 30 trials, followed by a second reversal for 30 trials. Children in the graded-choice and verbal-instruction groups acquired and maintained the discriminations with fewer errors than children who learned by trial and error. The importance of the results in terms of two-stage discrimination learning theories is pointed out and similarities between errorless learning and overtraining are discussed.     

The impact of error frequency on errorless and errorful learning of object locations using a novel paradigm

ABSTRACT

Errorless learning (EL) is an approach in which errors are eliminated or reduced as much as possible while learning of new information or skills. In contrast, during trial-and-error???or errorful???learning (TEL) errors are not reduced and are often even promoted. There is a complex and conflicting pattern of evidence whether EL or TEL may result in better memory performance. One major confound in the extant literature is that most EL studies have not controlled for the number of errors made during TEL, resulting in a large variability in the amount of errors committed. This variability likely explains why studies on the cognitive underpinnings of EL and TEL have produced mixed findings. In this study, a novel object-location learning task was employed to examine EL and TEL in 30 healthy young adults. The number of errors was systematically manipulated, allowing us to investigate the impact of frequency of errors on learning outcome. The results showed that recall from memory was significantly better during EL. However, the number of errors made during TEL did not influence the performance in young adults. Altogether, our novel paradigm is promising for measuring EL and TEL, allowing for more accurate analyses to understand the impact of error frequency on a person’s learning ability and style.     

Procedural antecedents of behavioral contrast: a re-examination of errorless learning

Behavioral contrast reliably occurred in pigeons following errorless discrimination training, contrary to Terrace's (1963) observations. In the main experiment, a 60-sec green keylight, associated with a variable-interval 30-sec schedule of reinforcement alternated with a 60-sec period of extinction when the key was dark. Such aspects of the discrimination training procedure as: (1) the amount of prior nondifferential exposure to the positive stimulus before the discrimination was instituted, and (2) the rapidity with which the negative stimulus was introduced (whether progressively or abruptly) directly influenced the amount of behavioral contrast produced. This occurred independently of the number of errors made by a pigeon during acquisition of the discrimination. In a series of control experiments, substitution of a red keylight for the dark key during extinction resulted in greater behavioral contrast, while an increase to 3 min in the duration of the green keylight associated with reinforcement attenuated the behavioral contrast effect.     

Intentionality and word learning

Humans intuitively think about the actions of others in terms of mental states eliefs, desires, emotions and intentions. This 'theory of mind' plays a central role in how children learn the meanings of certain words. First, it underlies how they determine the reference of a novel word. When children hear a new object name (e.g. 'Look at the fendle'), they do not use spatio-temporal contiguity to determine what the word describes; instead they focus on cues to the referential intention of the speaker, such as direction of gaze. Second, an understanding of purpose and design is sometimes necessary to enable the child to understand the entities and actions that nouns and verbs refer to. This is particularly relevant for nouns that refer to collections of objects such as 'family' and 'game', and for verbs that refer to actions defined in terms of an actor's goals, such as 'give' and 'make'. Finally, intentional considerations partially underlie the generalization of names for artifact categories, such as 'chair' and 'clock', which can refer to entities of highly dissimilar appearance.     

Capacities underlying word learning

Children are strikingly good at learning the meanings of words. Current controversy focuses on the relative importance of different capacities in this learning process including principles of association, low-level attentional mechanisms, special word learning constraints, syntactic cues and theory of mind. We argue that children succeed at word learning because they possess certain conceptual biases about the external world, the ability to infer the referential intentions of others and an appreciation of syntactic cues to word meaning. Support for this view comes from studies exploring the phenomena of fast mapping, the whole object bias, the acquisition of names for entities belonging to different ontological kinds and the effect of lexical contrast. Word learning is not the result of a general associative learning process, nor does it involve specialized constraints. The ability to learn the meanings of words depends on a number of capacities, some of which are specific to language and unique to humans, others of which are potentially shared with other species.     

Gender differences in adult word learning

In prior work, women were found to outperform men on short-term verbal memory tasks. The goal of the present work was to examine whether gender differences on short-term memory tasks are tied to the involvement of long-term memory in the learning process. In Experiment 1, men and women were compared on their ability to remember phonologically-familiar novel words and phonologically-unfamiliar novel words. Learning of phonologically-familiar novel words (but not of phonologically-unfamiliar novel words) can be supported by long-term phonological knowledge. Results revealed that women outperformed men on phonologically-familiar novel words, but not on phonologically-unfamiliar novel words. In Experiment 2, we replicated Experiment 1 using a within-subjects design, and confirmed gender differences on phonologically-familiar, but not on phonologically-unfamiliar stimuli. These findings are interpreted to suggest that women are more likely than men to recruit native-language phonological knowledge during novel word-learning.     

Printed word learning in beginning readers

Three experiments using beginning Dutch readers (7 and 8 years of age) as subjects provide evidence that visually recognizing the unique graphemic structure of words is an important component in word identification, even at rather early stages in learning to read. Only a moderate amount of practice in reading strings of letters was necessary for young children to read the regular spelling faster than an altered spelling that preserved the word sound. In normal beginners this effect appeared regardless of their ability to identify the words the first time; in learning-disabled children, matched in overall reading speed, learning about the graphemic compositions of words seems to proceed at a much slower rate. The results are discussed with regard to the importance of building accurate graphemic entries in the mental lexicon for acquiring fluency in reading.