Children’s discrimination learning as a function of intertrial interval duration

Abstract

Preschool children were trained on a successive discrimination in which four stimulus-response associations were learned concurrently, with different groups of Ss receiving ITI durations of 1, 6, 11, and 16 sec. Learning rate was slower with a 1-sec duration than with a 6-, 11-, or 16-sec duration; but there was no difference in learning rate among the latter three durations. The results are compatible with the hypothesis that in such a task children do not benefit from opportunities to rehearse beyond several seconds because they do not retain the stimulus information needed for rehearsal.