Time-delay discrimination training with impulsive children: Self-monitoring nonwait responses and the dimensions of prompts

This study investigated whether in time-delay discrimination training, the performance of impulsive children can be improved by requiring self-monitoring of the correctness of non wait responses, and to what extent these improvements are a function of the dimensions of the prompts. Four experiments, in each of which multiple prompts were used, one for each stimulus (S+, S–), were done. Comparisons between time delay of distinctive- and nondistinctive-feature prompts, with and without self-monitoring, were made across and within subjects. Time delay of distinctivefeature prompts without self-monitoring did not produce learning. The added requirement of self-monitoring nonwait responses led to a dramatic improvement in performance, but only when distinctivefeature cues were used for prompting and self-monitoring.