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DISCRIMINATION LEARNING AND DISCRIMINATION LEARNING SETS IN SUBNORMAL CHILDREN *
Author(s) -
LUNZER E. A.,
HULME I.
Publication year - 1967
Publication title -
british journal of educational psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.557
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 2044-8279
pISSN - 0007-0998
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8279.1967.tb01926.x
Subject(s) - psychology , set (abstract data type) , developmental psychology , mental age , matching (statistics) , discrimination learning , cognitive psychology , audiology , cognition , statistics , psychiatry , medicine , mathematics , computer science , programming language
S ummary . The aim of the enquiry was to establish whether subnormal children have more difficulty than normals of comparable mental age in learning a visual discrimination and in forming a discrimination set. Twenty‐eight older sub‐normal children and twenty‐four normal pre‐school children were required to solve six visual discrimination problems. Owing to imperfect matching, the normal group had a somewhat higher mean M.A. Nevertheless, little difference appeared either in the number of trials to master the first problem or in subsequent improvement attributable to the learning set. It was found that children who were rated as lacking in self‐confidence fared badly in the experiment. Spontaneous naming of the discriminanda was as frequent in the subnormal group as it was among the normals. Indeed, questioning children at the end of a problem as to their mode of solution elicited significantly more such “discriminating verbalisation” from the subnormals than it did from the normals. Nevertheless, such language appeared to be unrelated to the speed of learning. A comparison of the present results with others reported in the literature suggests that specific deficit is more likely to be found at higher mental ages when the role of language may be more decisive.