Conservation training in four-year-old children

In Experiment 1 two training procedures were used to teach four-year-olds to conserve. Verbal rule instruction consisted of providing verbal rules and demonstrations of the operations referred to by the rules. Feedback consisted of providing verbal feedback contingent upon the children's responses. One week after training on conservation of number and length the children were given a posttest which included tests of conservation of number, length, and mass. Children who were given verbal rule instruction conserved significantly more on the number and length posttest problems than children who were not. However, this learning did not transfer to the mass problems, possibly because mass is not naturally acquired until some time after conservation of number and length. The feedback training procedure had no effect on conservation performance. In Experiment 2, the verbal rule instruction procedure was used to train four-year-olds on conservation of length and mass. One week after training the children were tested on both conservation of number, which is typically acquired before length and mass, and conservation of weight, which is typically acquired after length and mass, as well as on conservation of length and mass. Children who were given training conserved more on all four types of problems than children in the control group.     

The effects of induced affective states on letter discrimination in disadvantaged preschool children

The relationship between affective state and academic performance was examined using 30 4- to 6- year old economically disadvantaged black children. Children were assigned to one of three affective induction groups: positive, negative, or neutral affect. Changes from pre- to posttest administrations of a letter discrimination task suggest that negative and positive affect inductions produce different changes in both errors and response latency. These findings suggest that further research on the possibility that negative affect may be responsible in part for the academic difficulties of disadvantaged children and other children under stress is warranted.     

Gender comparisons in the perception of self-competence among four-year-old children

The purpose of this study was to determine the presence of gender differences in the perception of self-competence among 4-year-old children. Sixty-one-4-year-olds (27 girls and 34 boys) from predominantly European American backgrounds participated in the study. The children's self-competence was measured using the Pictorial Scale of Perceived Competence and Social Acceptance for Young Children (Preschool version; S. Harter & R. Pike, 1984), which has 4 separate subscales: (a) cognitive competence, (b) physical competence, (c) peer acceptance, and (d) maternal acceptance. A within-subject 2-way analysis of variance with repeated measures of 4 (subscales of perception of self-competence) x 2 (gender) was performed to determine if gender differences existed in the children's perception of self-competence. Analyses of the data showed no significant gender differences in the scores on the 4 subscales for the perception of self-competence among the children. These results could be interpreted as being due to a less gender-stereotyped society and androgynous environment for these preschoolers.     

Mental time travel for self and other in three- and four-year-old children

Humans possess the unique ability to mentally travel backward in time to re-experience past events (i.e., episodic memory) and forward in time to pre-experience future events (i.e., episodic foresight). Although originally viewed as different cognitive skills, they are now both viewed as components of the episodic memory system. Recently, it has been suggested that the episodic system may allow us to not only pre-experience and predict our own future but also that of another person. In the current study, we investigate this possibility by examining the ability of three- and four-year-old children to plan for their own future and for that of another person. We found that both three- and four-year-old children performed equally, when planning for their own future or when planning for the experimenter's future. These data are consistent with the finding that planning for someone else's future recruits the same neural structures that are used when planning for one's own future.     

A diffusion model analysis of the effects of aging on letter discrimination

The effects of aging on accuracy and response time were examined in a letter discrimination experiment with young and older subjects. Results showed that older subjects (ages 60-75) were generally slower and less accurate than young subjects. R. Ratcliff's (1978) diffusion model was fit to the data, and it provided a good account of response times, their distributions, and response accuracy. The results produce similar age effects on the nondecision components of response time (about 50 ms slowing) and the response criteria (more conservative settings) to those from R. Ratcliff, A. Thapar, and G. McKoon (2001), but also show a reduced rate of accumulation of evidence for older subjects. The model-based approach has the advantage of allowing the separation of aging effects on different components of processing.     

Fading procedures and conditional discrimination in children

A discrimination reversal task followed by a conditional discrimination problem was administered to children (age range 36 to 107 months). A fading procedure was used during the discrimination reversal training of some subjects and other subjects were trained by a traditional procedure. More subjects trained by the fading procedure performed without errors during training and more subjects in the traditional group solved the conditional discrimination problem.     

An analysis of emergent simple discrimination in children

In Experiment 1 eight five-year-old children received an arbitrary matching-to-sample task with sample stimuli A1 and A2 and comparison stimuli B1 and B2. This task was mixed with a simple, two-choice discrimination task with stimuli A1 and A2. In subsequent tests with B1 and B2 presented alone, the number of responses to B1 was greater when it had been paired with the correct stimulus of the simple discrimination task than when it had been paired with the incorrect stimulus. In Experiment 2 incorrect comparisons were omitted during the matching-to-sample task. Eight children were taught to point to either A1 or A2 first, and to either B1 or B2 second. Eight other children were taught to point to either B1 or B2 first, and to either A1 or A2 second. The effect of Experiment 1 was replicated with the first but not with the second group. The results of both experiments suggest that the functions of S+ and S- in a simple discrimination task can transfer to test stimuli if the training stimuli precede the test stimuli during paired presentations.     

Prenominal adjective order and visual discrimination in children

Preschool and third-grade children heard prenominal adjective phrases describing an object. Each phrase contained an article, two adjectives and a head noun. The phrases were constructed with either normal or inverted adjective order. Either after a one second delay or immediately following phrase presentation, Subjects were shown pictures of two objects. One of the objects (target) depicted the object described in the noun phrase. The other object differed from the target along the dimensions of color, size, or both color and size. The Subject's task was to select the target object. It was predicted that adjective order would influence perceptual strategies used by the Subjects in the visual discrimination task. Analysis of response time scores showed that adjective order interacted with the relevant discriminative stimuli in the discrimination task. These results were interpreted as support for hypotheses that suggest that linguistic organization can constrain conceptual processing involving nonlinguistic information. The effects of the delay condition provided additional evidence for these hypotheses plus support for an arousal hypothesis.     

Stimulus interaction and transfer of discrimination in children

Two discrimination learning experiments on third- and fourth-grade children are reported. In Expt I, Ss received either simultaneous or successive pretraining followed by simultaneous or successive transfer tasks in which an irrelevant dimension was varied either between or within settings. With the incorporation of a response-produced cues proposal, a modified version of the Hull-Spence theory (C. C. Spiker, Psychological Review, 1970, 77, 496–515) accounted for 81.2% of the variance of the group means and provided a satisfactory method of both quantifying and manipulating the mechanisms of associative transfer, even when the dimensions of pretraining and transfer differed. Because simultaneously pretrained Ss performed more as was expected than did successively pretrained Ss, it was hypothesized that Ss have an extraexperimental tendency to respond to dimensions varying within settings. This hypothesis was supported by the results of Expt II, in which an extensive shaping procedure was used for simultaneous, successive or control pretraining tasks followed by a successive transfer task in which the arrangement of two irrelevant dimensions was manipulated.