Establishing a Continuous Repertoire.

Investigators in this study looked for conditions that can rapidly establish continuous stimulus control of continuous response variations, or "response mapping." Unlike previous research in stimulus control, where a single stimulus comes to control a single response, 36 5-year-old children received errorless discrimination training at three points along a circle-to-ellipse continuum following one of two different pretraining conditions which showed no difference in later acquisition. They were then tested on two stimuli intermediate between two of the training stimuli. Subjects were divided into two test groups and tested under conditions in which (1) the correct response bore a spatial relationship to the ordering along the continuum, or (2) the spatial location of the correct response key bore a constant but unordered relation to the stimuli. Subjects learning the ordered test acquired the new test responses faster than those in the unordered condition. Discussion of the results considered the effect of discrimination training, the errorless procedure, and response-produced feedback. (Author/SB)