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THE USE OF ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE CODES IN CHILDREN'S DISCRIMINATION LEARNING
Author(s) -
PRYCE SUSAN D.,
SLATER A. M.
Publication year - 1981
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.2044-8279.1981.tb02485.x
Subject(s) - absolute (philosophy) , psychology , stimulus (psychology) , absolute threshold , discrimination learning , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , statistics , mathematics , epistemology , philosophy
S ummary . Four experiments are described in which children's and adults' abilities to detect and respond to the absolute and relative features of stimuli varying in size were investigated. The first two experiments confirmed and extended previous findings and indicated that young children depend primarily on relative codes and have difficulties in registering the absolute values of stimuli. In Experiment 3 this finding was reversed and four‐year‐old children ( a ) performed best in a learning task in which both the absolute and relative components of the stimuli were held constant, and ( b ) learned more quickly in a task requiring abstraction of the absolute components of the stimuli than in one where relative cues only were available. Differences in the methodologies of the two designs were explored in Experiment 4 in order to resolve the apparently contradictory nature of these findings. Overall, the results of the four experiments lead to the conclusion that relational responding to a stimulus that is of intermediate size is more difficult than responding to the absolute properties of a stimulus, which in turn is more difficult than responding to a simple relational cue such as smallest or largest. The results of the experiments show that children from an early age are able to abstract and respond both to the relative and absolute properties of stimuli, and that the features responded to in a particular experiment are determined primarily, not by age, but by the characteristics of the experimental design and by the nature of the absolute or relative response required.