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A four-factor repeated measures design was established in order to determine (a) whether or not TMR children could acquire a novel rule-governed concept via modeling and (b) the effects of type of modeling demonstration, verbal rule provision, and observer gender on concept matching and transfer by TMR children. Twenty-four male and 24 female TMR children (mean IQ=44 and mean MA=5.67 years) were divided into four groups each equated by stratified assignment on IQ and MA. One male and one female group were randomly selected to observe a live female model present (a) massed-demonstration trials while verbalizing the concept, (b) massed trials without the concept being verbalized, (c) distributed-demonstration trials with the conceptual verbalization, and (d) distributed trials without conceptual verbalization. Subjects were then presented with three transfer tasks, each subsequently requiring a greater degree of generalization from the demonstration task. It was found that TMR children could acquire and transfer the complex concept via modeling. Distributed demonstrations yielded better initial response matching, while massed demonstrations led to better transfer. Rule provision facilitated transfer for massed-demonstration groups and facilitated matching for the male distributed-trials groups.

An attempt was made to expand the paradigm published by Spradlin, Cotter, and Baxley (1973). Spradlin et al. conditioned subjects to select a choice stimulus in response to two different sample stimuli and then conditioned them to select a new choice stimulus in response to one sample stimulus. The remaining sample stimulus then controlled the second choice stimulus. In the current investigation, two subjects were taught two classes of four symbols each through visual match-to-sample training. When auditory symbols were conditioned to control some members of these two classes, the reamining members came under auditory control without direct training.

Mentally retarded children were taught to discriminate the dimensions of a visual display using a matching-to-sample procedure that provided full verbal feedback of the reasons for successes and failures. A control group attempted the matching procedure but received no feedback. The trained subjects exhibited marked superiority in intradimensional transfer. Two years later, the trained subjects continued their advantage but to a lesser degree.

Discrimination learning, memory, and transfer capacity were assessed in representative samples of institutionalized retarded persons in order to provide information on trainability. The 56 subjects were selected from moderately, severely, and two levels of profoundly retarded adults. They learned and relearned three successive two-choice discrimination problems. Generally, the higher functioning subjects, defined by IQ and adaptive behavior learned more rapidly than did the lower functioning subjects. Forgetting was related to IQ/adaptive behavior level. Interproblem transfer was negligible at all levels of retardation, but ceiling effects may have obscured positive transfer in the higher functioning groups. Backward learning curves revealed large differences between lower and higher functioning persons in the presolution trials, but once learning began even profoundly retarded subjects solved these problems as rapidly as did the moderately retarded subjects. Ten of the 56 subjects failed to learn all three problems.

The effects of observing a model's overt display of a creative drawing response and hearing a description of these actions were assessed with 54 retarded and 68 nonretarded children. The modeled creative strategy was designed to be high in the dimension of elaboration. A multivariate research design was employed to assess the target dimension of elaboration, as well as to determine transfer to tasks of varying degrees of similarity to the model's task and to creative dimensions other than elaboration. The overt modeling of a creative strategy was most effective in improving elaboration, although verbal descriptions also aided performance. Retarded children were less able than nonretarded children to discriminate the essential elements of the model's elaboration strategy and displayed less acquisition of the elaboration strategy but showed comparable gradients of transfer.

Retarded persons, at two MA levels, were exposed to a list of paired-associates (PAs) in which the stimulus terms were picture compounds of one animate and one inanimate object. One-half of the subjects in each MA group learned the associations with the stimulus components presented in meaningful interaction, and half learned the associations with the components depicted in noninteraction. Stimulus interaction facilitated list acquisition by the higher MA but not by the lower MA subjects. Transfer tests following PA learning indicated that the interactive stimulus components had been processed as units by the higher MA subjects, suggesting that these individuals may have spontaneously elaborated the interactive-stimulus components.

A portion of the empirical literature on training mentally retarded people to use mnemonic strategies was reviewed. Specific topics examined included strategy maintenance, strategy generalization, and metamemory, with emphasis on the implications of this research for the education of retarded students. We concluded that although significant gains have resulted from the past two decades of research, many questions of educational significance remain unanswered. With the restrictions placed by recent research in mind, we suggested that this area can be of immediate benefit to special educators.

The effects of the nature of the relevant dimension, response mode, imagery, and age on discrimination learning and shift performance was examined. Three age groups were used, CA 8 years-MA 8 years, CA 5 years-MA 5 years. CA 8 years-MA 5 years. The latter group learned both intradimensional and extradimensional shifts slower than did the former two groups. Subsequent analyses suggested that the reason for the slower learning in the retarded group was their greater frequency of control by dominant dimensions and/or the initial control by novel stimuli. A second finding was related to the particular procedure employed. Children were required to either press a button to indicate which of two stimuli was correct or pick up the correct stimulus. Form-relevant but not color-relevant problems were facilitated by the pick-up procedure. These findings suggest that dimensional dominance may be a consequence of the procedures employed in previous reports where children were or were not permitted to manipulate the stimuli.

The effects of object training and photograph training on comprehension of category labels by severely mentally retarded children were explored. Relatively simple tasks (acquisition of trained examples and transfer between modes) and relatively difficult tasks (generalization to novel examples in the training mode and in the other mode) were both included. Results indicated that acquisition and transfer did not differ, yet generalization was significantly more accurate with objects than with photographs. Furthermore, generalization was significantly above chance for objects but not for photographs. Results were discussed in reference to discriminability between the two modes and possible constraints of decision-making demands on generalization performance.

Movement-sequencing deficits and possible manual-performance asymmetries in right-handed adolescents and adults with Down syndrome were examined. In Experiment 1, subjects with Down syndrome and retarded and nonretarded control subjects finger-tapped with both hands. Although both retarded groups finger-tapped more slowly than did nonretarded subjects, the two retarded groups did not differ. Subjects with Down syndrome, however, failed to show a manual performance asymmetry in favor of the right hand. In Experiment 2, a finger-tapping task and a cross-hand transfer of training paradigm were used to examine hemispheric dominance for movement sequencing. Although subjects with Down syndrome again showed no hand differences in tapping performance, they evidenced the same transfer of training asymmetries as did subjects without Down syndrome, suggesting that both the subjects with Down syndrome and the control subjects had a left-hemisphere dominance for movement sequencing.

The possibility that the familiarity value of stimuli might be a component of the rehearsal strategies mechanism in Ellis' (1970) multiprocess theory of short-term memory was investigated. Retarded and nonretarded subjects of equal CA were given either PA pretraining of nonsense pictures with colors or were presented with nonsense pictures alone. They were then compared in their performance on either an experimenter- or subject-paced serial memory task in which the nonsense pictures were employed as stimuli. It was expected that pretraining would increase the familiarity value of nonsense stimuli for nonretarded and, to a lesser extent, retarded subjects, facilitating transfer of information from primary to secondary memory in both groups. Although predictions about the effects of pretraining on retention were not substantiated, the results of the experiment did support the hypothesis that a production deficiency in active encoding can account for the poor secondary memory of mentally retarded subjects.

Twenty-one TMR students at two schools completed 2 years of reading instruction using a whole-word approach. Students were pretested and posttested both years on two word lists; one list was made up of words included in the reading program, the other of words not included. The former list was used to assess word acquisition and retention, the latter to assess transfer. A one-way repeated measures analysis of variance indicated a statistically significant increase in words recognized. By the close of the second year, the average student had completed 100 lessons and had learned 41 words. Students retained most of the words they had learned over the 3-month summer vacation. A separate one-way repeated measures analysis indicated statistically significant transfer to untaught words. The authors concluded that TMR students can profit from reading instruction.

The relative effectiveness of instructions to adopt an organizational strategy vs. exposure to category labels was investigated. Twenty-four retarded adolescents were assigned to each of three conditions (blocking plus instructions, blocking plus labels, and blocking) for pretraining and training. Immediately after training, all subjects received a transfer task consisting of a new randomly organized list containing words from the same (training) categories for one-half of the subjects and from different categories for the other half. When exposure to category labels accompanied blocking, results indicated increased clustering and recall during the training phase and a trend toward increased clustering during the transfer phase.

Mentally retarded children were asked to judge whether a series of visual stimuli matched a standard. With each judgment the investigator verbalized "right" or "wrong" and then provided full feedback of particulars, indicating with gesture and words the cue similarities and differences that supported each correct and each incorrect judgment. Control subjects were either given no training (test--retest only) or were asked to make the judgments but given no feedback. Attesting to the efficacy of the training procedure, the trained subjects exhibited total intradimensional transfer; the control subjects, none. The results were related to the attention-retention theory of discrimination learning developed by Fisher and Zeaman and to the "differentiation" methodology and theory presented by Gibson and Gibson.

The study was designed to determine whether retarded adolescents and nonretarded preschool children would generalize to other tasks involving printed number names if they were taught the number names in an auditory-receptive task. Four nonretarded preschool children and three retarded children participated. All children could count and use spoken and printed numerals. None of the children could adequately perform any task involving printed number words. After receiving training on an auditory-receptive task involving printed number words, all children improved their performance on tasks involving matching printed number words and numerals and printed number words and sets and improved in their ability to name printed number words.

One hundred and twenty low-IQ and average-IQ children (MA 5 to 7 years) were required to learn a 2-choice discrimination involving verbal and manual responses, with verbal correction of errors, before proceeding to an intradimensional shift with new color cues. One-half of each group also received 100 interpolated trials (overtraining) on the original task. Results disclosed a low-IQ deficit during original learning, which was absent during overtraining but recurred in the final phase, undiminished by either overtraining or verbal feedback conditions applied during the transfer phase. The findings oppose a theoretical explanation based on probability of attending to color, since the inference that this probability approximated 1 for all subjects was amply justified, thus emphasizing the need for alternative interpretations of the retarded subjects' difficulty.

The effects of extended training with meaningful stimuli on the free-recall performance of mildly and moderately mentally retarded adolescents were examined. Strategy training that involved sorting, categorizing, and labeling objects resulted in a significant increase in free-recall performance on training, maintenance, and near generalization.

Researchers have shown that a simple reading-vocabulary can be trained by repeatedly pairing picture and word and that fading the picture over trials increases the efficiency of training. An attention hypothesis attributes the effectiveness of fading to an increase in attention to the word caused by the fading out of the picture. In an alternative hypothesis, stimulus change, it is proposed that the mechanism of fading derives from the increased salience of the changing stimuli, so that fading in the word would be as effective as fading out the picture. These competing hypotheses were tested by training 48 nonreading retarded persons (in four equated groups) under the following conditions: fade picture out, fade word in, double fade (picture fades out and word fades in simultaneously), and standard (picture and word paired without fading). Tests of vocabulary-learning showed that the fade picture out and double-fade conditions were equally effective and superior to the standard and fade word in conditions, which were equally ineffective. These findings were inconsistent with the stimulus-change hypothesis, but consistent with a two-look attentional model, based on the Zeaman and House attention theory (1963).

Forty-four retarded adolescents varying in MA, IQ, and etiology were taught one of three active rehearsal strategies or assigned to a control condition. Immediate, short-term (1 day), and long-term (2 weeks) transfer of the strategy was assessed by presenting new 9-item serial lists on each day. Exposure durations, which indicated the rate of subject-pacing, showed that the two highest MA-IQ (mean IQ = 55) groups, one diagnosed as organically impaired and the other as cultural-familially retarded, successfully transferred their strategies over three sessions, while no transfer occurred in the lower MA-IQ group (mean IQ = 40). Greater consistency in the expected pattern of exposure durations of high MA-IQ subjects was found in the cumulative-rehearsal group than in the cumulative-clustering group across sessions. During immediate transfer, the best recall was found for the cumulative group, while on short-term transfer both the cumulative and the cumulative-clustering groups learned more rapidly than the clustering or control groups. No significant recall differences during long-term transfer were apparent for high MA-IQ subjects, probably due to a ceiling effect. For retarded individuals with IQs above 50, the cumulative-rehearsal strategy was the most efficient technique for inducing strategy transfer to a categorized serial list.

Whether operations training reduces time and errors in the acquisition of specific vocational tasks was investigated. An operation is a particular response class that occurs in the presence of a consistent stimulus. Subjects were mentally retarded vocational-rehabilitation clients in a sheltered workshop. Each subject was trained in either mechanical operations (ABC) or wood operations (DEF) and subsequently trained in two tasks involving ABC and two tasks involving DEF operations. Significant time and error savings occurred in task training when subjects had previously been trained on the generic operations involved in those tasks. Results suggest that component operations to facilitate lateral and vertical transfer to a variety of more specific job skills should be taught in vocational-training programs.

Thirty mildly retarded elementary-school children, 15 of whom had received perceptual/attentional training, were tested on four Piagetian conservation tasks (number, length, and continuous quantity solid/liquid) presented on 16 mm movie film with taped instructions. Eye movements were recorded during the response period for each task. Subsequent analyses of eye-movement patterns showed clear differences between the training and control groups. Trained conservers showed more visual exploratory activity and less perceptual centration than control group subjects. Moreover the eye-movement patterns of trained conservers closely approximated those shown by natural (i.e., untrained) retarded conservers in a previous study. The findings were discussed in terms of possible cognitive structural changes resulting from training and possible cognitive structural differences between mildly retarded and nonretarded children.

The effects of color on visual discrimination of symbols by severely and profoundly mentally retarded individuals were investigated. In Experiment 1, discriminative training with colors reliably associated with the backgrounds of symbols failed to transfer to those same symbols on black backgrounds. In Experiment 2, however, discriminative training with randomly colored symbols transferred to the same symbols in black. Transfer performance after training with randomly colored symbols was higher than was discriminative responding after identical training with black symbols. In Experiment 3, distinctive feature training with color randomly assigned only to distinctive features of symbols facilitated visual discriminations among symbols and transferred both to black whole symbols and black distinctive features at higher levels than did training with random coloration of entire symbols. These findings were discussed in terms of the attentional deficits of the subjects.

Moderately retarded children were instructed to produce prepositional mediatros by physically manipulating PA objects in learning three nine-term PA lists. Mediational training, distributed across days or weeks, consisted of one or three different prepositions supplied for two-thirds or for all of the items. It was found that mediation subjects performed significantly better than control subjects on an unaided test list administered 2 weeks after training, regardless of distribution of training, degree of aid or number of prepositions provided during training sessions. The degress of transfer, which was larger than in previously reported studies, was attributed to the instructional procedures requiring active production of prepositional mediators, coupled with an emphasis on their value. It was suggested that individual variability in mediational transfer should be considered in future research on mediational transfer.

Retarded adolescents were given constraining and nonconstraining retrieval cues on one of the four presentation and recall trials. Subjects were cued on either Trials 2 or 3, and one-half of each group received either blocked or random presentation over the first two trails. Lists for the last two trials were randomly arranged. On Trial 4, recall for all subjects was uncued. Subjects who received nonconstraining cues showed significantly more recall transfer than did those in the constraining condition; there were no significant differences on Trials 1 through 3. Blocking facilitated clustering but not recall. Improvement over trials was associated with increases in both the number of categories and the mean number of words per category recalled. Results suggested that the provision of constraining retrieval cues may have encouraged subjects to adopt a passive role in list learning, a tendency that proved to be detrimental to subsequent uncued list processing.

Attempts were made to eliminate the aerophagia (pathological air-swallowing) exhibited by two profoundly retarded clients in a state residential institution. In Experiment 1, a positive-practice overcorrection procedure (coactive mouth-covering) tripled the frequency of a female's air-swallowing and subsequent time-out failed to reduce it below free-operant levels. In Experiment 2, further unsuccessful attempts were made to reduce air-swallowing by the same subject using additional time-out procedures. For a second subject (Experiment 3), increased durations of positive-practice overcorrection produced corresponding reductions in air-swallowing. After physical opposition to treatment, overcorrection was withdrawn, resulting in near-baseline responding. Multiple baselines in each experiment showed no transfer effect. Findings were discussed with reference to investigators who reported negative side-effects of overcorrection and overcame them through continued experimental analysis.

Four mentally retarded and four nonretarded adolescents learned compound discriminations in the haptic (touch) modality using Ray's (1969) conflict-compound procedure. Reinforcement history was controlled so that prior reinforcement contingencies were unchanged for one element and reversed for the other element of a compound (two-element) stimulus during discrimination training. Consistent with Huguenin and Touchette's (1980) results in the visual modality, our retarded subjects evinced selective attention effects in posttraining tests conducted in the haptic modality. Results with nonretarded subjects similarly indicated that they had selectively attended to only one element of a conflict-compound stimulus during compound discrimination training. Visual transfer tests revealed that for most individuals the effects of conflict-compound discrimination training transferred from the haptic to visual sensory modalities. Results were discussed in terms of selectivity of attention to nonredundant stimulus elements as an effective strategy for discrimination learning rather than a perceptual deficit.

Twenty nonconserving retarded adults were assigned to equated training and control groups (n = 10 in each group). Training-group subjects were given multiple-strategy training for number conservation consisting of: demonstrating effects of addition-subtraction; negation of addition-subtraction by inverse operations; and addition-subtraction combined with perceptually induced cognitive conflict, reversibility, and verbal-rule instruction. Analyses of variance and critical difference multiple comparisons showed significant direct-training effects immediately after training and after 8 monhts. Significant short-term transfer was obtained on other types of conservation (discontinuous quantity, substance, liquid quantity, length, and weight), but long-term transfer was much weaker and less consistent. Transfer resulted primarily from gains in correct conservation judgements, with a majority of trained subjects failing to give any acceptable conservation explanations.

Likely sources of interference encountered in free-recall transfer word lists were investigated. Recall, but not recognition performance, was assumed to be sensitive to the relatively greater interference generated by old-categories transfer lists to those employing new categories. Eighty EMR subjects were assigned to the cells of a 2 (list novelty) X 2 (response mode) factorial arrangement. Since response mode was manipulated within subjects, a counterbalanced order of testing factor was also included. For the recognition task, one-half of the subjects received either same- or different-categories distractors. Results revealed that recognition performance was significantly influenced by the list novelty variation; performance was better on new- than on old-categories transfer lists. Additionally, the recognition task with same-categories distractors was associated with a greater response bias to call new items old than was the task with different-categories distractors. Results suggest that the recognition task may be more vulnerable to interference than has been previously supposed.

The effects of imagery instructions on paired-associate learning efficiency and on the retention of 16 picture pairs were investigated using two groups of EMR individuals with approximate mental ages of 8 and 11 years, respectively. While facilitated list mastery was obtained under imagery instructions, no facilitation was found for 1-week retention performance. However, in learning a new list immediately following the retention task, those individuals who had received imagery instructions during original learning continued to exhibit facilitated learning. These results extend previous work.

The training, maintenance, and transfer performance of mildly and moderately mentally retarded young adults on the Tower of Hanoi problem was measured in two separate experiments. Results indicated that the training method was effective to the extent that performance on trained problems was improved and these performance gains were maintained over periods of 9 and 13 weeks. Generalization to two transfer tasks was very limited, however.

This study was designed as an attempt to train EMR and intellectually average adolescents to achieve the stage of formal thought. The sample consisted of 120 white male subjects from secondary public schools. Sixty met the EMR criteria and 60 met the criteria for average intelligence. Thirty of each of these were of middle SES and 30 of low SES. Lister's (1970) training procedure was used. The results indicated that three was only negligible transfer. The results also indicated that the training was effective in helping the subjects' competence on the trained tasks. A significant interaction between SES and intelligence was also found. This finding was discussed in terms of the utility of the IQ test as a useful diagnostic tool with all SES levels.

Fifty EMR children and an equal number of nonretarded children were paired on the basis of WISC vocabulary scores. Pairs were then randomly assigned to one of two conditions (synthetic or analytic). Children in the analytic condition learned to read words printed in a contrived alphabet by a whole-word method, and children in the synthetic condition learned the same words by a parts-to-whole method. At the end of each of three learning sessions, children identified transfer words, including some which were consistent with those taught in phoneme-grapheme relationships and some that were inconsistent. The synthetic method promoted identification of both consistent and inconsistent transfer words for both retarded and nonretarded children.

Twenty-four sixth graders, 24 seventh graders, and 24 special-education students with MAs roughly equivalent to the sixth graders were randomly assigned to the cells of a 3 (grade level) X 2 (list novelty) X 2 (list organization) factorial design. In the list-novelty condition, subjects were immediately transferred to either a same-categories or a new-categories list on the third and fourth trials. In the list-organization condition, subjects received the lists on the first two trials in either a random or blocked format. For all subjects, the last two trials were presented randomly and contained new words. The results of the analyses revealed that there was significant negative transfer over trial blocks for the same-categories transfer condition. In addition, the new-categories group clustered significantly more on the second than the first trial block. There was no significant interaction between subject and treatment factors, suggesting that the processes involved in recall were similar for nonretarded and borderline retarded subjects.

The relationship between novelty-familiarity learning and oddity-matching learning by developmentally young (MA 3 to 6 years) mentally retarded children was investigated. Delayed oddity-matching was shown to be easier to learn than simultaneous oddity-matching. This difference was attributed to the influence of the novelty-familiarity dimension. In a transfer task simultaneous problem performance was higher for subjects initially trained on delayed problems than for subjects initially trained on the identical simultaneous task. Results showed that learning one type of relational problem increases attentional sensitivity to other types of relations, suggesting an efficient training strategy. Finally, data were presented to support the argument that novelty-familiarity and oddity-matching are not simply variants of a common underlying mechanism but differ in an important respect.