Improving word learning in children using an errorless technique

The current experiment examined the relative advantage of an errorless learning technique over an errorful one in the acquisition of novel names for unfamiliar objects in typically developing children aged between 7 and 9 years. Errorless learning led to significantly better learning than did errorful learning. Processing speed and vocabulary predicted unique significant variance in errorful learning but not errorless learning, suggesting a possible locus for the errorless advantage. Errorless methods may provide a suitable basis not only for improving language learning but also for improving classroom learning and identifying children who will benefit from this technique.     

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.     

Failure to obtain a generation effect during naturalistic learning

Memory & Cognition - Many experiments have obtained a generation effect (GE)with various kinds of laboratory items. Six of the present seven experiments failed to find a GE when the responses...     

Frequency of reinforcement as a determinant of extinction-induced aggression during errorless discrimination learning.

Seven pigeons were trained to discriminate without errors between a green keylight 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 opportunity to attack a restrained target pigeon was present only during extinction. Both variable-interval 30-sec and fixed-ratio 1 schedules of reinforcement during the positive stimulus induced a higher rate of attack during extinction than a variable-interval 5-min schedule. The highest rate of attack during extinction occurred during the first 20 sec after the positive stimulus terminated. Hence, the withdrawal of the positive condition, rather than the consequences of the pecking response during extinction, appears to be one of the primary factors responsible for attack between pigeons during extinction. Behavioral contrast, defined as a decrease in the rate of responding when the positive stimulus was presented alone, was obtained from the four birds that displayed the lowest overall rates of attack while the three birds with the highest attack rates did not display behavioral contrast. For the birds without contrast, components of the attack response during the positive stimulus presumably competed with and reduced the rate of pecking the key, thereby recluding behavioral contrast.     

Affective learning increases sensitivity to graded emotional faces

How does the affective significance of emotional faces affect perceptual decisions? We manipulated affective significance by pairing 100% fearful faces with aversive electrical stimulation and hypothesized that increasing the significance of a stimulus via its prior history would lead to enhanced processing. After fear conditioning, participants viewed graded emotional faces that ranged from neutral to fearful. Faces were shown either in a color that was previously paired with shock or a color not paired with shock during conditioning. Increases in the frequency of "fearful" responses for faces shown in the shock-paired color were most robust for faces at intermediate intensity levels (40-60% fearful). Psychometric fits to the data revealed significant increased sensitivity for shock-paired relative to unpaired faces. Thus, despite identical physical features for shock-paired and unpaired stimuli (aside from the color, which was counterbalanced), more frequent (and faster) "fearful" responses were made when participants viewed affectively significant stimuli.     

From recurrent choice to skill learning: a reinforcement-learning model

The authors propose a reinforcement-learning mechanism as a model for recurrent choice and extend it to account for skill learning. The model was inspired by recent research in neurophysiological studies of the basal ganglia and provides an integrated explanation of recurrent choice behavior and skill learning. The behavior includes effects of differential probabilities, magnitudes, variabilities, and delay of reinforcement. The model can also produce the violation of independence, preference reversals, and the goal gradient of reinforcement in maze learning. An experiment was conducted to study learning of action sequences in a multistep task. The fit of the model to the data demonstrated its ability to account for complex skill learning. The advantages of incorporating the mechanism into a larger cognitive architecture are discussed.     

Perceptual learning with a sodium depletion procedure

Rats in a state of salt need prefer a flavor that has previously been paired with saline (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2 and 3, rats exposed to 2 saline concentrations, presented either concurrently or on separate trials, and each paired with a different flavor, showed a preference for the flavor that had been associated with the stronger saline. This effect was substantial, however, only in those rats that had experienced the concurrent exposure schedule. This effect cannot be attributed to a difference in the strength of within-compound associations produced by the 2 preexposure schedules (Experiment 4). It is suggested that concurrent preexposure can engage a learning process that enhances the discriminability of the preexposed stimuli.     

Application of a model to paired-associate learning

The proposal is made to consider a paired-associate item as becoming conditioned to its correct response in all-or-none fashion, and that prior to this conditioning event the subject guesses responses at random to an unlearned item. These simple assumptions enable the derivation of an extensive number of predictions about paired-associate learning. The predictions compare very favorably with the results of an experiment discussed below.This research was supported by a grant, M-3849, from the National Institutes of Mental Health, United States Public Health Service.     

Application of a cognitive-distance model to learning in a simulated travel task

A cognitive-distance model for choice, obtained by specializing a general class of models for categorization, was tested in a situation simulating the task of controlling speed of a vehicle in tasks defined by different relations between speed and probability of delay. Subjects exhibited significant learning whenever delay schedules permitted greater-than-chance performance, but on the average they did not approach optimal performance in the sense of choosing speeds so as to maximize distance attained in allowed time. Evidence was obtained that subjects encoded information about probabilities of delay and distributions of distance attained at different speeds quite accurately in memory and that suboptimal performance was due primarily to imperfect discrimination among representations of choice alternatives on a cognitive scale of expected distance.     

Self-generation amplifies the errorless learning effect in healthy older adults when transfer appropriate processing conditions are met

ABSTRACT Errorless learning improves memory for older adults by providing individuals with correct information from the onset, thereby minimizing the misleading influence of errors. Our previous research demonstrated that self-generation enhanced the errorless learning effect among older adults in cued recall when encoding encouraged processing of cue-target relationships, suggesting that transfer appropriate processing is necessary for this interactive effect ( Lubinsky, Rich, & Anderson, 2009 , Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 15, 704). The current study further tests this notion by investigating whether the interaction of errorless learning and self-generated learning is observed in free recall when study conditions foster encoding of inter-item associations. Healthy older adult participants studied related or unrelated words (manipulated between-subjects) under four within-subjects learning conditions representing the crossing of errorless/errorful learning and self-generated/experimenter-provided information. As predicted, self-generation enhanced the errorless learning advantage in free recall for related word lists but not unrelated word lists. The results are discussed in relation to the transfer appropriate processing view of generation effects.     

Evidence that judgments of learning are causally related to study choice

Three experiments investigated whether study choice was directly related to judgments of learning (JOLs) by examining people’s choices in cases in which JOLs were dissociated from recall. In Experiment 1, items were given either three repetitions or one repetition on Trial 1. Items given three repetitions received one on Trial 2, and those given one repetition received three on Trial 2—equating performance at the end of Trial 2, but yielding different immediate Trial 2 JOLs. Study choice followed the “illusory” JOLs. A delayed JOL condition in Experiment 2 did not show this JOL bias and neither did study choice. Finally, using a paradigm (Koriat & Bjork, 2005) in which similar JOLs are given to forward and backward associative pairs, despite much worse performance on the backward pairs, study choice again followed the mistaken JOLs. We concluded that JOLs—what people believe they know—directly influence people’s study choices.     

Effects of graded doses of alcohol on speed-accuracy tradeoff in choice reaction time

The inconsistency of previous results concerning the effects of alcohol on reaction time (RT) may be related to possible tradeoffs between speed and accuracy. In the present experiment, complete speed-accuracy tradeoff functions were generated for each of five doses of alcohol (0-1.33 ml/kg) in a choice RT task. Such functions permit RT differences resulting from changes in performance efficiency to be distinguished from those due to changes in subjects’ speed accuracy criteria. Increasing doses of alcohol produced a progressive decrease in the slope parameter of linear equations fit to the speed-accuracy data, but did not significantly alter the intercept of the functions with the RT axis. Thus, alcohol reduced performance efficiency by decreasing the rate of growth of accuracy per unit time. A change in speed-accuracy criterion was combined with the decrease in efficiency at the highest alcohol dose.     

Encouraging children to think counterfactually enhances blocking in a causal learning task

According to a higher order reasoning account, inferential reasoning processes underpin the widely observed cue competition effect of blocking in causal learning. The inference required for blocking has been described as modus tollens (if p then q, not q therefore not p). Young children are known to have difficulties with this type of inference, but research with adults suggests that this inference is easier if participants think counterfactually. In this study, 100 children (51 five-year-olds and 49 six- to seven-year-olds) were assigned to two types of pretraining groups. The counterfactual group observed demonstrations of cues paired with outcomes and answered questions about what the outcome would have been if the causal status of cues had been different, whereas the factual group answered factual questions about the same demonstrations. Children then completed a causal learning task. Counterfactual pretraining enhanced levels of blocking as well as modus tollens reasoning but only for the younger children. These findings provide new evidence for an important role for inferential reasoning in causal learning.     

Nonstationarity in paired-associate learning as indicated by a second guess procedure

Recent models for simple learning based on an all-or-none concept of the learning process have received extensive experimental support. Analyses of the results of tests of such models have centered upon stationarity considerations, and analyses of behavior prior to the last error have, under some circumstances, supported the stationarity implied by such models.In the following study a second guess method was employed in which subjects were asked, whenever they made an erroneous response, to make a second choice; under these conditions a simple all-or-none model implies stationarity. The results of the study are not consistent with a simple all-or-none model and alternative models are suggested which may go further in accounting for the results obtained.     

An associative model of geometry learning: a modified choice rule

In a recent article, the authors (Miller & Shettleworth, 2007) showed how the apparently exceptional features of behavior in geometry learning ("reorientation") experiments can be modeled by assuming that geometric and other features at given locations in an arena are learned competitively as in the Rescorla-Wagner model and that the probability of visiting a location is proportional to the total associative strength of cues at that location relative to that of all relevant locations. Reinforced or unreinforced visits to locations drive changes in associative strengths. Dawson, Kelly, Spetch, and Dupuis (2008) have correctly pointed out that at parameter values outside the ranges the authors used to simulate a body of real experiments, our equation for choice probabilities can give impossible and/or wildly fluctuating results. Here, the authors show that a simple modification of the choice rule eliminates this problem while retaining the transparent way in which the model relates spatial choice to competitive associative learning of cue values.     

The relationship of self-stimulation to learning in autistic children

The acquisition of discriminative behavior was studied in three autistic children with high-frequency self-stimulatory behavior. It was found that: (a) the children did not acquire the discrimination while engaged in self-stimulation; (b) suppression of self-stimulation produced an increase in correct responding, with eventual acquisition of the discrimination; (c) successful discrimination learning was always associated with a reduction in self-stimulatory behavior, even when aversive stimuli were not used for suppression.     

The effects of errorless learning and backward chaining on the acquisition of Internet skills in adults with developmental disabilities

An important area in the learning and development of individuals with disabilities is the acquisition of independent, age-appropriate leisure skills. Three adults with autism and mental retardation were taught to access specific Internet sites using backward chaining and most-to-least intrusive prompting. The number of independent steps completed in the task analysis increased following training.     

Regarding Roberts's reported failure to obtain visual discrimination learning with delayed reward

Roberts's (1976) results should not be considered a failure to replicate the experiment by Lett (1974) demonstrating visual discrimination learning with a 1-min delay of reward. Although performance in Roberts's experiment was poor, the rats subjected to Lett's exact procedure showed learning by Roberts's own criterion of a significant-blocks effect. Moreover, by another criterion, the rats subjected by Roberts to three variants of Lett's procedure also exhibited learning. Thus, Roberts's results are consistent with Lett's.