The investigation of the conditions necessary for infants to learn conditional discrimination is a challenge due to the difficulties related to maintaining small children in experimental conditions. The objective was to teach matching identity tasks to a 12-month-old infant in a experimenter organized in a room at a daycare center. Toys used as stimuli were displayed in an apparatus consisting of three windows cutout in a box, in front of which sat an experimenter with the infant. The trials began with the opening of the windows and the display of stimuli: in the case of the selection of the stimulus defined as S+, the infant could take the toy and play, in the case of the selection of S- the windows were closed until the following trial. In the matching phase with the model, a stimulus identical to one of the comparison stimuli was first presented in the center window of the apparatus. Constant analyses of the participant’s performance were carried out to manipulate the variables in force to maintain the infant in the experimental situation and to perform the proposed tasks. The discussion relates the quality of performance to the control exercised by variables such as social contact with the experimenter, alterations in the duration of tasks and variety of stimuli.
discrimination; matching to model; infants
