A study was designed to test the effects of the presence of age-mates on the preacademic performance of socially unresponsive, disadvantaged preschool children. Each of four low performing male subjects was confronted with three high performing male and three low performing male peers. Of the peers in each of the two performance groups, one was from a middle class preschool, one from a different lower class preschool, and one from the subject's lower class preschool. The subject went through a match-to-sample discrimination task session with each of his 6 peers. All of these sessions included 4 conditions: (1) baseline alone with experimenter, (2) observed by peer, (3) competing with peer, and (4) final baseline. Results showed that the subjects deteriorated in performance compared to baseline when familar peers observed, but that their performance improved when they competed with low performing familiar peers. Subjects' performance in the observation phase was only superior to baseline when the observer was a middle class high performer. The small sample size, however, renders any generalizations from these results highly speculative (MH)