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VISUAL DISCRIMINATION LEARNING IN MENTALLY HANDICAPPED ADULTS: COMPARATIVE EFFECTS OF TWO‐CHOICE AND MULTIPLE‐CHOICE TRAINING. METHODS ON STIMULUS GENERALIZATION PERFORMANCE
Author(s) -
Griffiths P.,
Boggan Joanne,
Tutt Gillian,
Dickens P.
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
journal of intellectual disability research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.941
H-Index - 104
eISSN - 1365-2788
pISSN - 0964-2633
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2788.1985.tb00361.x
Subject(s) - psychology , discriminative model , stimulus generalization , distraction , generalization , reinforcement , discrimination learning , audiology , stimulus (psychology) , stimulus control , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , social psychology , medicine , computer science , mathematics , mathematical analysis , perception , nicotine
The hypothesis that in mentally handicapped subjects a multi-choice discrimination learning method would result in superior generalization performance to the traditional two-choice method was investigated experimentally. Twenty-four mentally handicapped adults matched for age, intelligence and duration of institutionalization were divided into two equal groups and given visual discrimination training using a differential reinforcement, prompt-fading procedure. The groups were allocated separately to a two-choice and four-choice training condition in which the discriminative stimulus was associated with one and three non-discriminative stimuli respectively. Following training, stimulus discrimination performance was compared on a generalization test comprising increasing levels of distraction. The results showed a clear advantage for multi-choice training over two-choice. However, it was found that during generalization testing discriminative performance deteriorated as a function of increasing distraction in both groups, suggesting an underlying selective attention defect. Such a defect may be characteristic of stimulus generalization performance in the mentally retarded. Multi-choice discrimination learning appeared partly to counteract major generalization failure when the ratio of non-discriminative to discriminative stimuli was high.