VARIABLES AFFECTING INCIDENTAL LEARNING IN CHILDREN

Abstract

Three three-choice successive discrimination tasks were presented to 8- and 14-year-old children. For two groups, Task 1 (original learning) was followed by a series of 12 (Group 4-C) or 36 (Group 12-C) trials in which each SD from Task 1 was presented in a stimulus complex with three additional objects (the incidental stimuli). For the third Group (4-SP), Task 1 was followed by a series of 36 trials in which each of three different incidental objects were paired, one at a time, with each of the three original S's. The measure of incidental learning (IL) was the number of incidental objects to which the S responded correctly during Task 3, when the objects were presented individually. For both age groups, Ss in Group 4-SP demonstrated significantly higher IL than did Ss in Groups 4-C and 12-C; Groups 4-C and 12-C did not differ significantly from each other. Only the 14-yearolds showed a marked increase in successful performance during Task 3. The results partially supported a hypothesis concerning developmental changes in attention to irrelevant stimuli.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.