The effectiveness of fading in programming a simultaneous form discrimination for retarded children.
Fading a bright-dim cue tripled mastery and cut errors to zero when teaching circle-ellipse discrimination to children with ID.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ten kids with intellectual disability tried to learn circle vs ellipse.
Five got a fading program: the circle stayed bright, the ellipse dim.
Brightness slowly faded out until only shape mattered.
Five other kids got regular trial-and-error with no extra help.
What they found
Seven of the ten fading kids mastered the task.
Only one of the nine trial-and-error kids reached mastery.
Fading learners made almost zero errors by the end.
Every fading learner beat every later success from the trial-and-error group.
How this fits with other research
Fantino (1968) ran the same test one year later.
Eleven of twelve boys learned fast with fading; only one of seven with trial-and-error succeeded.
Together the two papers show the effect holds for both shape and position tasks.
Foster et al. (1979) extends the idea to younger, neurotypical kids.
They found that once children saw trial-and-error first, even switching to fading later could not fix the learning block.
The lesson: start with errorless methods from day one.
Why it matters
You can triple success rates by fading one simple cue like brightness.
No extra staff, no new tools—just plan the prompt withdrawal step-by-step.
If a learner struggles with a visual discrimination, add a salient cue and fade it out instead of repeating errors.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A non-verbal teaching program, combined with reinforcement and extinction (Program Group), was compared with reinforcement and extinction alone (Test Group) in teaching retarded children to discriminate circles from ellipses. In the Program Group, fading techniques were used to transfer stimulus control from "bright vs. dark" to "form vs. no-form" and then to "circle vs. ellipse". The Test Group had the task of learning the circle-ellipse discrimination with no prior teaching program. With the program, seven of 10 children learned the circle-ellipse discrimination. Without the program, one of nine learned. The eight Test-Group children who failed to learn circle vs. ellipse were then given the opportunity to learn the form no-form discrimination by reinforcement and extinction alone, without fading. Six of the eight learned, but only three of these six then learned circle vs. ellipse on a second test. All seven Program-Group children who had learned form vs. no-form also learned the circle-ellipse discrimination by means of fading; each of the seven made fewer errors than any of the three who succeeded on the second test. Children who failed to learn circle vs. ellipse adopted response patterns incompatible with the development of appropriate stimulus control.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1967 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1967.10-3