DELAY OF REWARD AND DISCRIMINATION LEARNING IN CHILDREN.

Abstract

An experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that the detrimental effects of delayed reward are due to the association of inhibitory responses with the conditioned stimulus. Kindergarten children were given differential delayed reward pretraining followed by either simultaneous or successive discrimination learning involving the same stimuli used during pretraining. Response speeds during pretraining were found to be related to the reward condition on the immediately preceding trial rather than to the stimulus associated with immediate or delayed reward. Pretraining had no significant effect on subsequent discrimination learning. These findings are interpreted as evidence that initially, at least, the effects of delayed reward are a result of frustration induced avoidance responses that were not necessarily associated with the conditioned stimulus. Simultaneous presentation of the stimuli during discrimination training resulted in faster learning as well as faster response speeds. This was interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that the successive discrimination problem elicits a greater degree of response competition.