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This study was designed to assess the relative effectiveness of four components of pretraining on a subsequent simultaneous discrimination and reversal: (1) making same-different judgments about the two stimuli; (2) making a specific observing response to the critical feature of the stimuli; (3) simple familiarization with the stimuli; and (4) developing a set to compare stimuli. Seventy-two first-grade children served as Ss. Two sets of stimuli were used: line drawings of cats and line drawings of children's faces. Although none of the pretraining conditions had a facilitating effect for Ss seeing the faces, there were significant facilitative effects for Ss seeing cats. Specifically, the three pretraining conditions involving same-different judgments facilitated both learning and reversal, whereas the effect of "observing response alone" pretraining had no such facilitative effect. (Author)

Dimensional preference tasks in both visual and haptic modalities with three dimensional stimuli varying in form, size, color, or texture were presented to 64 children. There were 16 subjects at each of four grade levels: preschool, kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 3. On each trial, the subject was presented three stimuli and asked to tell the examiner which two were the same. The pattern of preference scores was essentially the same in both visual and haptic tasks. On both tasks, all age groups, except for the preschoolers, showed marked form dominance. Form was especially salient for the kindergarteners and seemed to decrease in salience after that point. Preschoolers showed no clear dimensional preference. However, color or texture preference was relatively low at all ages. The importance of type of stimuli and method of presentation used in assessing dimensional preference is discussed in an attempt to account for the discrepancies between the results of this and previous studies. Tables, charts, and references are included. (Author/WB)