Developmental Invariance in a Mathematical Model of Associative Learning.

BRAINERD, CHARLES J., and HowE, MARK L. Developmental Invariance in a Mathematical Model of Associative Learning. Cmu DEVELOPMENT, 1980, 51, 349-363. The question of whether or not a certain mathematical model is applicable to the paired-associate data of preschool children as well as adults was examined in 5 experiments. Although the model (a 2-state Markov process) is known to give a tolerably good account of adult data, 2 baseline studies (experiments 1 and 2) were conducted with adults to obtain evidence about the internal behavior of the model's free parameters. In experiments 3 and 4, lists analogous to those used in the baseline studies were administered to 3and 4-year-olds. The model gave as good an account of the preschool data as it did of the adult data. However, the internal behavior of the free parameters was different for preschool children. Adults only seemed to learn items following errors, whereas preschool children learned items after both errors and successes. These findings were replicated in a fifth experiment under new list conditions. The results of these experiments suggest that it may be possible to use a 2-state Markov model to generate parametric descriptions of age changes in performance on simple paired-associate tasks.

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