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Results for “GENERALIZATION LEARNING”

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PubMed1990

Generalized learning of receptive and expressive action-object responses by language-delayed preschoolers.

This study examined the effectiveness of matrix-training procedures in teaching action + object utterances in both the receptive and expressive language modalities. The subjects were 4 developmentally delayed preschool boys who failed to produce spontaneous, functional two-word utterances. A multiple baseline design across responses with a multiple probe technique was employed. Subjects were taught 4-6 of 48 receptive and 48 expressive responses. Acquisition of a word combination rule was facilitated by the use of familiar lexical items, whereas subsequent acquisition of new lexical knowledge was enhanced by couching training in a previously trained word combination pattern. Although receptive knowledge was not sufficient for the demonstration of corresponding expressive performance for most of the children, only minimal expressive training was required to achieve this objective. For most matrix items, subjects responded receptively before they did so expressively. For 2 subjects, when complete receptive recombinative generalization had not been achieved, expressive training facilitated receptive responding. The results of this study elucidate benefits to training one linguistic aspect (lexical item, word combination pattern) at a time to maximize generalization in developmentally delayed preschoolers.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Prenatal ethanol exposure, generalized learning impairment, and medial prefrontal cortical deficits in rats.

Prenatal ethanol exposure may cause neurological damage and subsequent mental retardation in humans, with learning deficits similar to those following damage to the prefrontal cortex. This study examined cognitive dysfunction and cortical damage after prenatal exposure to ethanol using a chronic administration model. Pregnant Sprague-Dawley rats received one of three diets during gestation: a liquid diet containing 35% ethanol-derived calories (ETOH), an isocaloric liquid diet (ISO), or standard chow (CHOW). Subjects were obtained from ETOH dams with blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) above 90 mg/dl and corresponding ISO and CHOW controls (one male pup/litter; n=6 pups/group). At approximately 90 days of age, subjects began training on a series of unique auditory discrimination problems using a successive go/no-go procedure. A criterion of 85% accuracy determined when a rat continued to the next problem. Subjects completed a varying number of problems within a 30-session limit, after which all rats were tested on a tone/click discrimination and reversal. Subjects were then sacrificed and neuronal number in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was estimated by the optical fractionator method. Prenatal ethanol exposure induced significant cell loss in the mPFC, which was associated with significantly impaired reversal learning. Poor performance by ETOH subjects on the tone/click reversal indicates a transfer of training deficit that may reflect failures of inhibitory control.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1995

Students' general learning approaches and performances in medical school: a longitudinal study.

PURPOSE: To examine the relationship between students' learning approaches and performances in a baccalaureate--MD degree program over six years, from orientation to the final year. METHOD: At the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, the short-form Lancaster Approaches to Studying Inventory was administered to the matriculating classes of 1988 (100 students) and 1989 (102 students) at the beginning of the first and second semesters of years 1 and 2 and during the first semester of years 3 through 6 for the class of 1988 and years 3 through 5 for the class of 1989. Seven learning-approaches dimensions from the inventory were regressed against 16 academic and clinical performance measures. RESULTS: As anticipated, a consistent predictive pattern emerged. Students who scored high on achievement motivation (efficient study habits and an extrinsic need to succeed) but who scored low on reproducing orientation (rote memory) and globetrotting (a fragmented approach to studying) achieved higher grade-point averages in years 1, 2, and 4 than did their counterparts who scored low on achievement motivation and high on reproducing orientation and globetrotting. The utility of the remaining learning-approaches dimensions for performances in specific courses and clinical rotations varied. The data also indicated that the initial level of students' learning approaches is an important qualifier of the predictive capability of the dimensions for students' performances. CONCLUSIONS: The results prompted a revised model of how learning approaches relate to performance. The model incorporates students' initial scores on learning approaches as an element that influences students' perceptions of the educational context. In turn these perceptions have an impact on students' selections of learning approaches that are associated with performance.

Achievement↗
PubMed2002

Spatial generalization of learning in smooth pursuit eye movements: implications for the coordinate frame and sites of learning.

We have examined the underlying coordinate frame for pursuit learning by testing how broadly learning generalizes to different retinal loci and directions of target motion. Learned changes in pursuit were induced using double steps of target speed. Monkeys tracked a target that stepped obliquely away from the point of fixation, then moved smoothly either leftward or rightward. In each experimental session, we adapted the response to targets moving in one direction across one locus of the visual field by changing target speed during the initial catch-up saccade. Learning occurred in both presaccadic and postsaccadic eye velocity. The changes were specific to the adapted direction and did not generalize to the opposite direction of pursuit. To test the spatial scale of learning, we examined the responses to targets that moved across different parts of the visual field at the same velocity as the learning targets. Learning generalized partially to motion presented at untrained locations in the visual field, even those across the vertical meridian. Experiments with two sets of learning trials showed interference between learning at different sites in the visual field, suggesting that pursuit learning is not capable of spatial specificity. Our findings are consistent with the previous suggestions that pursuit learning is encoded in an intermediate representation that is neither strictly sensory nor strictly motor. Our data add the constraint that the site or sites of pursuit learning must process visual information on a fairly large spatial scale that extends across the horizontal and vertical meridians.

Animals↗
PubMed2003

Infants' learning, memory, and generalization of learning for bimodal events.

Study 1 investigated whether infants 3 and 7 months of age show differential learning of and memory for sight-sound pairs depending on whether or not temporal synchrony was present; memory was assessed after a 10-min and 1-week interval. Study 2 examined whether 7-month-olds show generalization of learning when they encounter novel bimodal events that are similar (changes in size, orientation, or color, and spectral sound properties) to the sight-sound pairs learned 1 week earlier based on temporal synchrony. For Study 1, infants received a familiarization phase followed by a paired-comparison preference procedure to assess for learning of the sight-sound pairs. One week later a memory test was given. Results confirmed that 7-month-olds had no difficulty learning auditory-visual pairings regardless of whether or not events were temporally synchronous, and they remembered these 10 min and 1 week later. In contrast, 3-month-olds showed poorer learning of sight-sound associations in the no-synchrony than synchrony conditions, and memory for sight-sound pairs 1 week later was shown only for the synchrony conditions. Results for Study 2 revealed generalization of learning of bimodal pairings under all stimulus conditions after a 1-week interval at 7 months of age. Implications of these findings for development of intersensory knowledge are discussed.

Discrimination Learning↗
PubMed1997

Perceptual learning in olfaction: professional wine tasters versus controls.

By having professional wine tasters and controls perform olfactory tasks of absolute detection (1-butanol), discrimination (lemon and cloves), and identification (common household odors), the present two experiments studied (a) if perceptual odor learning takes place from odor experience acquired under nonlaboratory conditions, (b) if this learning generalizes to odors for which experience is limited, and (c) if generalized learning can be referred to increased general interest for odors that increases attention to odorous features. The results showed that whereas wine tasters were not better than controls on detection, they were superior to controls on discrimination and identification, the latter due to only a few odors. Ratings of experience with certain odors during professional evaluation suggest that generalized perceptual learning may take place in discrimination but not in identification. Wine tasters did not show more general interest for odorous features than did controls. The nonsuperiority in detection may be explained by the fact wine tasters have no professional experience of a detection task per se, implying that perceptual odor learning does not generalize from the olfactory tasks of discrimination and identification to detection.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

What do medical students seek to learn from general practice? A study of personal learning objectives.

With the aim of stimulating learning which is more self directed, fourth year medical students in Liverpool are encouraged to set personal learning objectives for the general practice attachment. On average, a student defines seven objectives for the three week attachment. A classification of objectives derived from the 1989 cohort of students is presented and the objectives could be seen as focusing on the practice population and its health problems, the role of the general practitioner, the work of general practice, the management of general practice, general practice as a career, and general learning. The validity and reliability of the classification are considered. Along with the advantages of this approach in motivating students to learn, the findings are considered in relation to impending changes in undergraduate medical education and the future role of general practice teaching by departments and by practice based colleagues.

Curriculum↗
PubMed1989

Generalized language learning by children with severe mental retardation: effects of peers' expressive modeling.

In this study, we investigated the conditions that contribute to observational learning of generalized language in children with severe mental retardation. Matrix-training strategies were used to teach 6 children with mental retardation to combine known words into two- or three-word utterances consistent with syntactic rules. Subsequently, the children learned two or more unknown words concurrently, inducing word-referent relations consistent with these word order rules. Generalized learning of responses not taught directly was shown to be under experimental control using a multiple baseline design across submatrices. Expressive modeling of only four or five responses was sufficient to promote recombinative generalization in the expressive and receptive modalities. Thus, 95% to 98% of subjects' learning was attributed to generalization processes. This study demonstrates how the efficiency of language training with children with mental retardation might be enhanced by coupling observational learning and matrix-training strategies.

Behavior Therapy↗
PubMed1993

Principles for learning single-joint movements. II. Generalizing a learned behavior.

The previous paper in this series showed that changes both within and between experimental sessions can be understood in the framework of the dual-strategy hypothesis of motor control, with a modification sometimes required for the timing of the antagonist muscle. The present paper extends these findings by determining how practicing movements at one distance generalizes to changes in performance at other distances. Five subjects made elbow flexion movements over five different distances (pretest). They then performed 1400 movements (seven sessions of ten blocks of 20 trials) at only one of those distances. The subjects then repeated the flexion movements over the five different distances (posttest). On the posttest, subjects decreased their average movement time by 20 ms. In addition, their movements became less variable. The electromyographic pattern of the faster movements was characterized by a more rapidly rising electromyogram, for three of the subjects, and an antagonist latency that decreased.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Generalization of frequency discrimination learning across frequencies and ears: implications for underlying neural mechanisms in humans.

Frequency discrimination thresholds (FDTs) at 750, 1500, 3000, and 6000 Hz were measured in 32 normal-hearing listeners before and after each listener practiced the task for 12 h at one of the above frequencies using a single ear. Marked improvements in thresholds taking place over several hours were observed during the frequency- and ear-specific training period. Comparisons between pre- and posttraining thresholds showed large improvements at the trained frequency, but also at other frequencies. The improvements were initially slightly-but significantly-larger at the trained frequency than at untrained frequencies. However, this trained-frequency advantage disappeared rapidly during the course of the two-hour multifrequency posttraining session, suggesting rapid relearning or learning generalization across frequencies. In contrast, no significant ear specificity was found, not even at early stages of the posttraining session. These findings add to earlier results suggesting that, in humans, frequency discrimination learning is only weakly frequency-specific, and they reveal that a complete generalization across frequencies can occur rapidly with little retraining at the initially untrained frequencies. Implications regarding underlying mechanisms are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Perceptual learning: specificity versus generalization.

Perceptual learning improves performance on many tasks, from orientation discrimination to the identification of faces. Although conventional wisdom considered sensory cortices as hard-wired, the specificity of improvement achieved through perceptual learning indicates an involvement of early sensory cortices. These cortices might be more plastic than previously assumed, and both sum-potential and single cell recordings indeed demonstrate plasticity of neuronal responses of these sensory cortices. However, for learning to be optimally useful, it must generalize to other tasks. Further research on perceptual learning should therefore, in my opinion, investigate first, the conditions for generalization of training-induced improvement, second, its use for teaching and rehabilitation, and third, its dependence on pharmacological agents.

Animals↗