Effect of pretraining and instructions on avoidance conditioning in preschool children

Abstract

Seventy preschool Ss were employed in a discrete trial instrumental avoidance conditioning task. Omission of nursery rhymes for a maximum duration of 10 sec served as the aversive event. A light was presented 3 sec prior to the omission interval. Three experimental groups were established: ( a) no pretraining, minimal instructions; ( b) no pretraining, explicit instructions; and ( c) pretraining, minimal instructions. Two control groups in which the music was never omitted were established also. One group received explicit instructions and the second group received pretraining procedures. Using 10 consecutive avoidance responses as the criterion, the results indicated that either explicit instructions or pretraining significantly facilitated avoidance performance. The experimental group given explicit instructions required significantly fewer trials to reach criterion as compared with their control group. The experimental and control groups given pretraining did not differ significantly.