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VISUAL‐MANIPULATIVE RESPONSE STRATEGIES IN INFANT OPERANT CONDITIONING WITH SPATIALLY DISPLACED FEEDBACK
Author(s) -
MILLAR W. STUART,
SCHAFFER H. RUDOLPH
Publication year - 1973
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1973.tb01379.x
Subject(s) - psychology , operant conditioning , perception , audiology , developmental psychology , visual perception , stimulation , cognitive psychology , conditioning , reinforcement , neuroscience , social psychology , medicine , statistics , mathematics
Six‐ and 9‐month‐old infants were exposed to contingent or non‐contingent perceptual stimulation from a source which was spatially displaced at 60° from the infant's midline. Reliable operant acquisition was observed in the case of the 9‐month‐old infants, but not in the case of the 6‐month‐old infants, whose performance was similar to that of non‐contingent controls. Examination of visual fixations of the feedback source coincidental with touching the manipulandum revealed the emergence of a strategy in the older infants which appeared to be critical for response acquisition. The emergence of this strategy is interpreted in terms of the older infants' increased capacity to remain oriented to task‐relevant stimuli which are no longer immediately visually available and to regulate behaviour on the basis of information derived from these stimuli.