A NOTE ON STIMULUS-CONTROL SHAPING AND ONE-TRIAL LEARNING IN 2-YEAR-OLD AND 3-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN

Fifty-nine children were exposed to one of three discrimination traini ng procedures that might teach them to discriminate a circle from an e llipse. One procedure was an extensively studied, well-validated stimu lus control shaping program that used intensity fading procedures. The other two procedures used no fading and relied primarily on simple di fferential reinforcement of the final performance. The stimulus contro l shaping program established the circle-ellipse discrimination in 18 of 19 subjects with few or no errors, thus replicating previous resear ch. An unexpected finding was the high success rate of the other two p rocedures. The circle-ellipse discrimination was established in 36 of 40 subjects. Many of these subjects also learned with few or no errors . In general, the findings demonstrate that extremely rapid (even one- trial) discrimination learning is achievable with very young children without stimulus control shaping. The findings also point to variables that may be important in analysis of learning that occurs in the cour se of the circle-ellipse stimulus control shaping program.