Individual Differences in Performance of a Discrimination Task

Abstract

Fifth-grade children performed a four-display discrimination task in which reinforcement depended on the positions of two stimulus alternatives and the identities of extra stimuli not offered for choice. There were 84 Ss, of whom only 33 solved the task. Results for solvers and nonsolvers were correlated separately with seven reference measures obtained from school records. A factor analysis was then performed on the data for solvers. The most important outcome was a factor determined principally by a vocabulary measure and the discrimination task of interest.