Errorful Learning Research Articles

Errorless learning in the rehabilitation of memory impaired people

Abstract We report six experiments comparing errorful and errorless learning in the teaching of new information to neurologically impaired adults with severe memory problems. The first experiment is a group study in which amnesic subjects, young controls, and older controls were required to learn two lists of words under two conditions. One of these required subjects to generate guesses that produced incorrect responses, and the other prevented guessing—permitting only correct responses. Conditions and lists were counterbalanced across subjects. People with amnesia scored significantly higher under the errorless condition. We further explored the principle of errorless learning in five single case studies in which severely memory impaired people were required to learn information analogous to that needed in everyday life. Tasks included learning names of objects and people, learning how to programme an electronic aid, remembering orientation items, and learning new items of general knowledge. In each case...

Reversal following Errorless Discrimination Learning

Pigeons were trained on a successive red-green discrimination by either a Late-Constant or Early-Progressive procedure. Following training on the original discrimination, the stimuli were reversed after which there was a return to the original discrimination. All three of the Late-Constant pigeons learned the discrimination with errors and two of the three Early-Progressive pigeons learned the discrimination errorlessly. Responding to the reversed negative stimulus occurred at essentially the same rate for Late-Constant and Early-Progressive subjects, with the exception of one Early-Progressive subject that took substantially more exposure. These results indicate that negative stimulus after errorless learning retards development of responding more than the negative stimulus following errorful learning.