A skill essential for successful inclusion in general education settings is the ability to learn by observing others. Research, however, has documented children with autism display significant deficits in the fundamental skills necessary for observational learning. This article outlines the skills essential for observational learning from an operant learning perspective, the research base on te...

One of the challenges to conditioning models of fear acquisition is to explain how different individuals can experience similar learning events and only some of them subsequently develop fear. Understanding factors moderating the impact of learning events on fear acquisition is key to understanding the etiology and prevention of fear in childhood. This study investigates these moderators in the...

A significant component of human observational learning is the ability to focus attention toward important or relevant input features. Amechanism with this capability can serve as an inductive bias to facilitate learning in both humans and machines. Past attempts to model attentional focus for human learning have postulated a single salience value for each feature, such that features with great...

Action-outcome contingencies can be learnt either by active trial-and-error, or vicariously, by observing the outcomes of actions performed by others. The extant literature is ambiguous as to which of these modes of learning is more effective, as controlled comparisons of operant and observational learning are rare. Here, we contrasted human operant and observational value learning, assessing i...

Infants learn about cause and effect through hands-on experience; however, they also can learn about causality simply from observation. Such observational causal learning is a central mechanism by which infants learn from and about other people. Across three experiments, we tested infants' observational causal learning of both social and physical causal events. Experiment 1 assessed infants' le...

Inspired by the evolution process of human intelligence and the social learning theory, a new swarm intelligence algorithm paradigm named the social learning optimization (SLO) algorithm is proposed. SLO consists of three co-evolution spaces: the bottom is the micro-space, where genetic evolution occurs; the middle layer is the learning space, where individuals enhance their intelligence throug...

Recent work suggests that classification training and observational learning may differ with regard to the benefits of different types of item presentation. In particular, there is evidence that between-category contrast is most helpful for traditional classification learning of feature-based categories, while a supervised observational mode promotes learning of relational categories via within...

This research explores the concept of vicarious observational learning as a component of an experiential learning sequence. We compare measures of task performance when participants observe a task before engaging in direct experience versus immediate direct experience without observation. Two experimental studies were conducted using different types of tasks and different levels of performance ...