Discriminação simples com mudanças sucessivas na função dos estímulos em bebês

Abstract

This study investigated with three infants, 10 to 14 months-old at the beginning of the experiment, the acquisition of successive shifts of simple discrimination (SSSD), considering that this repertoire can facilitate the identity matching-to-sample (IDMTS) learning, a potential prerequisite for the development of more complex symbolic repertoires. The task consisted of presenting GIFs figures on a touchscreen with a display simulating an IDMTS training: in a simple discrimination trial, first one stimulus alone (SA) was showed and responses to it produced its disappearance, reinforcement and simultaneous presentation of two or three stimuli, one of them the SA, the correct stimulus (S+). Eight trials were programmed by session. The training was intended to initiate by simple discrimination with two stimuli with successive shifts until three different stimuli had functioned once as S+ and once as S- once. Afterwards, simple discrimination training with three stimuli was carried out, until each stimulus had functioned as S+ and S- (one SSSD training cycle). Later, the same procedure would be repeated with a decrease of 50% in reinforcement of the SA presentations for each training cycle, until its total withdraw. Infants reached only the first stage of SSSD training: two participants have learned SSSD with two stimuli and one simple discrimination with two stimuli. The replacement of the stimulus sets throughout the training seems to have generated the best results between the several manipulations intended to favor infants engagement in the task as well as the acquisition of the discriminations. That manipulation, characterized as multiple-exemplar training of certain discriminative repertoire, could be used to teach IDMTS to infants.