Jeffrey T. Coldren

Youngstown State University | YSU · Department of Psychological Sciences and Counseling

This is a collaborative research practitioner partnership (RPP) study between expert practitioners and researchers to develop and implement an accessible computing curriculum for student with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The RPP team members include two researchers from a regional public higher education institution in Midwest and three practit...

Introduction Effective learning involves the acquisition of information toward a goal and cessation upon reaching that goal. Whereas the process of learning acquisition is well understood, comparatively little is known about how or when learning ceases under naturalistic, open-ended learning conditions in which the criterion for performance is not...

To explain prior findings that humans fail to cease learning tasks that offer no further success, we investigated the role of culture by comparing learners from the US and China. Both samples continued without success in an unsolvable task, but Chinese learners also persisted in a task they had mastered.

To explore prior findings from our lab that humans are irrationally persistent in learning tasks, two experiments documented that college students, unlike machine learning agents, fail to consider a rational cost-benefit analysis of learning progress or failure in deciding whether to persist or quit in a task.

We explored whether college-learners’ self-reported grit was predicted by actual performance in learning tasks or by various personality traits, demographic characteristics, and academic measures. Undergraduates completed three learning-based tasks. The first was solvable (with a fixed criterion for success); the second involved overtraining (in wh...

This project identifies the conditions under which learners persist or cease in a laboratory task. Kindergarten children and college-aged students completed three perceptual discrimination learning problems. The first problem was solvable as learners attained a criterion of success; the second was solvable but with no criterion so learners achieved...

This project examines the persistence of preschool learners in a laboratory task. Preschool children in a Headstart program completed two perceptual discrimination learning problems. Each problem was solvable as learners attained a criterion of success. Participants were assigned to either a treatment condition that encouraged self-reflection durin...

Two experiments examined college students’ persistence in a discrimination-learning task. After solving an initial task, participants showed high persistence in problems that were either easily mastered or non-solvable. Such performance is maladaptive as it ignores the lack of progress, and suggests the need to explore processes involved in learnin...

Children’s ability to shift behavior in response to changing environmental demands is critical for successful intellectual functioning. While the processes underlying the development of cognitive control have been thoroughly investigated, its functioning in an ecologically-relevant setting such as school is less well understood. Given the alarming...

The purpose of this experiment is to test whether shift flexibility in kindergarten children is a joint function of rule-usage and inhibition of attention. Sixty-six children were given either a distraction or facilitation condition in a computerized version of the dimensional change card sort task. In the distraction condition, the background of t...

Assuming that learning is an inherently social process, this research explores interpersonal variables that affect teaching. Specifically, does the interpersonal teaching style affect student impressions of the instructor? Eighty-five undergraduates viewed one of three ten-minute videos that portrayed either an authoritarian, authoritative, or neut...

In response to the comments of B. Gholson (see record 1995-12955-001) on the work of J. T. Coldren and J. Colombo (see record 1995-12944-001), the concern raised about the precision of the shift procedure methodology is addressed. Coldren and Colombo agree with Gholson that the procedure fails to elucidate other possible processes that may be opera...

The present research examines whether an interpersonal environment may exist in classrooms that are notoriously impersonal: large lecture-based freshman-level general psychology classes. The artificial categorization of teaching and learning styles, and the limits of those categories, is also addressed. Students evaluated the style of teaching in t...

The purpose of this experiment was to compare the executive functioning performance of children with autism with chronological- and verbal-matched controls in a spatial-reversal task. Three groups of children participated in this experiment. One group was identified as having autism (7 boys), the 2nd group contained 7 typically developing children...

Three experiments were performed to test whether infants show a bias for detecting the presence of a feature in a stimulus rather than its absence. In the 1st experiment, 24 16-week-old infants were given 3 paired-comparison problems, each of which included a 25-s familiarization phase followed by 2 test trials. Infants were familiarized to 1 membe...

Four experiments were conducted using stimuli that included a central stimulus cue and a background context pattern. At issue was how attention, encoding, and recognition are affected when these stimulus components are manipulated within habituation, familiarization, and recognition procedures. Results indicate that infants attend to and encode bot...

Four experiments were conducted using stimuli that included a central stimulus cue and a background context pattern. At issue was how attention, encoding, and recognition are affected when these stimulus components are manipulated within habituation, familiarization, and recognition procedures. Results indicate that infants attend to and encode bot...

In three experiments, the dominance of global versus local visual properties was investigated in 4-month-old infants as a function of individual differences in fixation duration (i.e., “long-” versus “short-looking” infants). Dominance was assessed through paired-comparison discrimination tasks in which global and local visual properties were place...

Tested the possibility that stimuli with the properties of adult-to-infant (AI) speech are more detectable in a noisy ambient environment. 27 4-mo-olds were habituated to white noise. Following habituation, 1 of 3 signal stimuli were added to the white noise: a monotonic pure tone, a frequency-modulated sweep corresponding to the intonation paramet...

Nine-month-old infants' performance on discrimination-learning problems was investigated in four experiments using the synchronous reinforcement paradigm. These experiments were organized around basic theoretical postulates concerning the relation between attention and learning. In each of the experiments, infants were trained to respond differenti...

Cognitive performance and development is negatively correlated with fixation duration patterns during infancy, and evidence suggests that long-looking infants may process visual information more slowly than short-looking infants. 3 experiments described here tested the possibility that these differences may be due to differential sensitivity to glo...

Individual differences in the duration of infants' visual fixations are reliable and stable and have been linked to differential cognitive performance; short-looking infants typically perform better than long-looking infants. 4 experiments tested the possibility of whether short lookers' superiority on perceptual-cognitive tasks is attributable to...

Individual differences in the duration of infants' visual fixations are reliable and stable and have been linked to differential cognitive performance; short-looking infants typically perform better than long-looking infants. 4 experiments tested the possibility of whether short lookers' superiority on perceptual-cognitive tasks is attributable to...

In five experiments, 10-month-olds were habituated to exemplars of a form category and tested for categorization in paired-comparison trials involving in-category versus out-of-category stimuli. Across these experiments, color was systematically manipulated during habituation and/or test trials. Infants categorized form when color was either held c...

In four studies, 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old human infants were tested in a discrimination learning task in which visual fixation to a particular stimulus or lateral position was reinforced with an auditory stimulus. In Experiment 1, all age groups exhibited acquisition, extinction, and reinstatement of fixation to the reinforced target or position. Ex...

A sample of infants tested on paired-comparison visual discriminations at 4 and 7 months were tested at 16 months on tasks measuring their exploration of a novel environment, short-term spatial memory, and attention span/task persistence. Seven-month novelty preferences were related to accuracy on a spatial memory task, supporting the possibility t...

Cataract patients suspected of having disease which might interfere with good postoperative visual function were referred for evaluation. Monocular steady-state luminance visual evoked potentials (VEPs) were elicited with closed eyes at a stimulus rate of 10 flashes/sec. VEPs were rated as either normal or abnormal. Patients with normal VEPs were p...

Seven subjects whose corrected Snellen acuities were normal had their monocular acuities (14 eyes) tested by visually evoked potentials (VEPs) elicited by eight checkerboard patterns which reversed 15 times per second. Check size ranged from 20 to 3.4 min. arc. Monocular VEP acuities were determined by least squares regression with linear or logari...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Kansas, Human Development and Family Life, 1992. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-108).