Blocking of incidental information in young children

Methods of increasing learning efficiency through a blocking technique were examined in young children. An experimental group of children was trained on an initial task with one relevant dimension, followed by redundancy training in which an incidental dimension also became relevant. A control group given only redundancy training was compared to this group to test how much the experimental subjects blocked or screened out the incidental dimension. In order to increase blocking, three methods were used: a preset transfer problem, an overtraining on the initial task, and a delay following training. The most important finding was increased blocking through the Preset Condition. Overtraining and Delay Conditions had no effect. In addition, more slow learners on the initial task learned about the incidental dimension than fast or intermediate learners. Also, fewer subjects given form on the initial task learned about the incidental dimension than those given color. The Combined Blocking, Delay, and Overtraining group showed partial blocking, while the Preset group demonstrated complete blocking. No developmental differences occurred. The results were interpreted using a modification of Trabasso and Bower's attention model (Attention in learning: Theory and research. New York: Wiley, 1968).     

The effect of pretraining and feedback on the reasoning of young children

Three experiments are reported in which kindergarten and first-grade children were given one-trial multidimensional reasoning tasks that were modifications of those used by T. C. Toppino (1980, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 30, 496–512). In the first two experiments, the nature of the stimulus compounds (partitioned or unitary) was varied in a series of tasks of increasing complexity. First-grade children (Experiment 1) and kindergarten children (Experiment 2) performed extremely well on all of the tasks presented. Experiment 3 was designed to identify factors that contribute to these high levels of performance, relative to those obtained under the conditions used by Toppino (1980). The results indicated that a combination of feedback information and preliminary experience with simple forms of the tasks are sufficient to produce the high performance levels, and that the verbal labeling of stimulus components is not an essential constituent of the training.     

Recognition memory for objects in very young children: The effect of shape and label similarity on preference for novel stimuli

In two studies, 88 children 12 to 38 months of age were briefly shown 24 common objects on familiarization trials. On subsequent test trials, these objects reappeared paired with novel objects. On one-third of the test trials pairs were similar in shape, on another third of the test trials pairs shared a common label, and on the remaining test trials pairs were unrelated. Looking times for each of the two objects on test trials were measured. All but the youngest age group showed significantly longer looking times for novel than for familiar objects for all three kinds of test pairs. However, for 19- to 31-month-olds preference for novel stimuli in the common Label Condition, although significant, was less than preference for novel stimuli when shape was similar or when unrelated stimuli were paired. Recognition in the oldest group was unaffected by condition. The results suggest a developmental period during which label or conceptual similarity has a special significance for recognition, and are discussed within theoretical frameworks concerning the very young child's developing semantic and categorization skills.     

The effect of training and stimulus variables on the reversal-shift ontogeny

Linear functions fitted to the proportion of optional reversal-shifts as a function of log CA were used to assess the effect of stimulus and training variables on the reversal-shift ontogeny. The results were: (1) when the dimensional salience of the two sets of cues in the stimulus compound were similar, there was no significantly different effect of size, color, or form cues on the rate parameter, suggesting that the rates of mediational development for these cues are similar. Reversal-shifts were, however, more likely with the color-form compound than with the size-color compounds throughout the tested age span, indicating that some stimulus conditions are more likely than others to produce mediated processing at all age levels. (2) The facilitative effects of labelling on reversal-shifts were greatest at the younger ages and decreased systematically over age. (3) Overtraining increased reversal-shifts at most ages but whether the facilitative effect interacts with age remains moot. (4) Neither labelling nor overtraining eliminated ontogenetic differences.     

Social skills: A review of cognitive-behavioral training procedures with children

Thirty-one studies utilizing cognitive-behavioral procedures to train social skills were reviewed. The review was organized around six methodological issues: (a) age of subjects; (b) training procedures; (c) outcome measures; (d) research design; (e) evidence for generalization; and (f) social validation. Suggestions for future applied research are discussed, such as investigations regarding developmental changes in socially skilled behavior, increased use of multiple dependent measures, more intensive programming for generalization, and the establishment of the social importance of the effects of social skills training programs.     

The influence of incongruity and preexposure on the familiarity effect in visual selection of children

A consistent finding in the literature concerning visual selection is that Ss will spend more time viewing unfamiliar stimuli than stimuli with which they have been familiarized. In the present experiment, the relationship between the magnitude of this familiarity effect and the level of stimulus incongruity was examined and found to be monotonic and increasing. In addition, amount of stimulus preexposure had no significant effect on the magnitude of the familiarity effect. Furthermore, there was no overall difference in Ss' preference for familiar and unfamiliar stimuli. Results are interpreted as supporting a theory of visual selection based on information-conflict resolution.     

Generality of persistence: The role of stimulus and response factors in persistence to punishment

Previous research has shown that intermittent punishment of a response increases its persistence to continuous punishment and that intermittent punishment training in one situation produces persistence to continuous punishment in other situations. Experiment 1 showed that as long as the instrumental response and punishing stimulus were held constant from intermittent to continuous punishment marked differences between these situations had no decremental effect on persistence. Experiment 2 showed that intermittent punishment training of one response resulted in substantial persistence to continuous punishment of a different and apparently incompatible response and that such response change had no more than a marginal effect on persistence. The results were seen as requiring some revision to the traditional conditioning-model interpretation of persistence to punishment.     

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.     

A developmental study of choice reaction time: the effect of two forms of stimulus degradation on encoding.

To assess the effects of environmental enrichment, 156 normal, full-term institutionalized infants were randomly assigned to Group I (30 min per day of supplementary vestibular stimulation), Group II (30 min per day of supplementary vestibular-plus-verbal stimulation), or Group III (untreated controls). Stimulation began at about the age of 12 days and continued until the children were adopted, approximately 6 weeks later. Children were assessed at regular intervals on the Gesell Developmental Schedules, until the age of 27 months. Group comparisons revealed no significant treatment effects.     

Spatial perspective taking in young children.

Four- and five-year-old children were tested in a spatial perspective task employing a production format. They were shown a photograph of an aspect of a doll house and asked to generate the view on the photograph for a puppet that served as the observer. The house was mounted on a lazy Susan and could be rotated freely by the children. Puppet line of regard (to a corner, side, or rear of the house) and photograph type (fron, corner, side, or rear) constituted within-subject factors. Puppet position, photograph type, and age affected patterns of errors and proportion of correct responses. It was concluded that perspective taking is highly task dependent as well as dependent upon developmental status.     

Some attributes of adjectives used by young children

Analysis of 24 spontaneous speech samples from children at 24 and 30 months revealed a correlated progression in the form, function and meaning of modifiers used with increased language development. Predicate adjectives were used to comment on transitory states of objects and predominated in the early speech samples. Attributive adjectives were used to subdivide classes or to specify among particular instances within classes on the basis of physical characteristics such as size, by use of a conventional type name, or by use of a possessive. Attributives predominated in the later speech samples. Differential use of a particular form appears to be a function of its cognitive and communicational usefulness rather than its syntactic derivation.     

The effect of instruction with relational and item-specific elaborative strategies on young children's organization and free recall

One hundred and sixty second-grade children were assigned on the basis of a free recall pretest to four instruction conditions and were given a series of lists of pictures for free recall. For three groups, the instructions were directed at encoding either (a) list organizational information, (b) item-specific semantic information, or (c) organizational and individual item information, while the fourth group constituted a “No-training” control with standard free recall instructions. The subjects received either related or unrelated lists during the training phase and related or unrelated lists during two post-tests, immediately following and 1 week after training. For both types of lists, instructions emphasizing list organization were more effective than those emphasizing item-specific elaboration. Subjects given individual item elaborative instructions showed levels of recall which were comparable to those of the control subjects. While the combined effect of organizational and individual item processing did not exceed the performance produced by organizational instructions alone, the degree of generalization was greater for subjects processing both kinds of information, especially when subjects received related lists during training.     

Relationships between perceptual and conceptual mediational systems in young children

Children aged 48–77 months were afforded experience in either color oddity or nominal class sorting prior to a transfer task testing the ability to apply the oddity rule (“which one doesn't belong”) to three picture arrays where solution was based on nominal class membership. The youngest children in the sample did not benefit from either perceptual rule experience or nominal sorting experience. Subsequent age groups benefited first from the nominal sorting treatment, then from both perceptual rule and nominal sorting activities, and finally the older children did not require priming in either the perceptual or nominal domain for success on the transfer task.     

The patterns of silence: Performance structures in sentence production

The pauses produced by speakers while reading familiar material were used to obtain hierarchical sentence structures. Identical structures were obtained from parsing, indicating that the performance structures of sentences are not task specific. The linguistic surface structure of a sentence is a good predictor of the pause durations. However, speakers also revealed a tendency to place pauses between segments of equal length. A simple cyclical model combining, for each pause location, an index of linguistic complexity and a measure of the distance to the midpoint of the segment, accounts for 72% of the pause time variance as opposed to 56% for the linguistic index alone. The generality of the model is shown by its good prediction of the pause durations obtained in unrelated studies in English and American Sign Language.     

Quantifiers and question answering in young children

Two hypotheses were tested about how young children answer questions with the quantifiers all and some: (a) that children use syntactic cues in determining which noun phrase is quantified, and (b) that children evaluate a some-statement as part of evaluating an all-statement. To test these hypotheses, the same group of 60 4- to 7-year-olds were asked four contrasting types of quantitative questions. The results indicated that children can use syntactic cues under some presentation conditions. However, there was no evidence for an asymmetry between the all-and some-questions. A model of how young children might answer quantitative questions was then considered.     

The effect of strategy training and stimulus saliency on attention and recognition in preschoolers

Observing behavior and short-term recognition were studied in a training and test design. Preschoolers matched pictures from memory with training of a selective attending strategy or placebo practice. Both groups were then tested for retention of the strategies attained during training. For one-third of the subjects in each condition the relevant portions of the stimuli were made perceptually salient, for another third the irrelevant portions were salient, and for the rest no portions were salient. Strategy training enhanced relevant observing behavior and facilitated recognition accuracy in both training and test. The salient irrelevant cues interfered in training for the Placebo subjects. A second study examined the effect of three components of the strategy training procedure; verbal instructions, modeling, and fading. Verbal instructions, and to a lesser extent, modeling and fading, enhanced relevant observing behavior in both training and test but facilitated recognition accuracy only in training.