GRADIENTS OF AUDITORY GENERALIZATION FOR BLIND, RETARDED CHILDREN.

Researchers worked with blind children who had severe intellectual disabilities.

They taught the kids to press one button when they heard a loud tone and a different button when they heard a soft tone.

After the children learned the game, the team played many in-between tones to see how the kids would respond.

The children showed clear generalization gradients.

Responses peaked at the trained loud and soft tones and dropped off in between.

Some curves were lopsided, a pattern also seen in typical adults.

RISLEY (1964) ran the same two-button task one year later and got almost identical gradients.

Schwartz et al. (1971) later repeated the setup with monkeys and used response time instead of button presses.

The monkey study extends the 1963 finding to another species and shows the gradient holds even when you measure speed instead of rate.

SIDMAELLIOTT et al. (1962) had earlier mapped gradients in typical adults but looked at inhibitory control; the 1963 work shows the same method works for children with severe disabilities.

You can build auditory stimulus control even when vision is absent and IQ is very low.

Use two-response tasks and plot the gradient to check how well the child tells sounds apart.

If the curve is uneven, note the asymmetry—it may guide where to place teaching tones next.