The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of skill level and age on golfers’ (n = 188) use of observational learning for skill, strategy, and performance functions, as assessed by the Functions of Observational Learning Questionnaire. Golf handicap was used as an objective measure of golf skill level, with a lower handicap reflecting a higher skill level. It was hypothesized that b...

Computer skills are key to organizational performance, and past research indicates that behavior modeling is a highly effective form of computer skill training. The present research develops and tests a new theoretical model of the underlying observational learning processes by which modeling-based training interventions influence computer task performance. Observational learning processes are ...

We develop a general neural network-based architecture for the process of mental simulation, initially treated at a somewhat abstract level. To develop the theory further it is shown how the theory can handle observational learning as a specific form of mental simulation: simulations are presented of simple paradigms and results obtained on children undergoing tests on observational learning. Q...

Social fear learning offers an efficient way to transmit information about potential threats; little is known, however, about the learning processes that counteract the social transmission of fear. In three separate experiments, we found that safety information transmitted from another individual (i.e., demonstrator) during preexposure prevented subsequent observational fear learning (Experimen...

Models and theories of category learning may exaggerate the extent to which people adopt discriminative strategies because of a reliance on the traditional supervised classification task. In the present experiment, this task is contrasted with supervised observational learning as a way of exploring differences between discriminative and generative learning. Categories were defined by a simple u...

Observational learning is presumed to have occurred when an organism copies an improbable action or action outcome that it has observed and the matching behavior cannot be explained by an alternative mechanism. Psychologists have been particularly interested in the form of observational learning known as imitation and in how to distinguish imitation from other processes. To successfully make th...