Amount of pretraining as a factor in stimulus predifferentiation and performance set.

Abstract

Recent research has indicated a growing interest in the effects of various kinds of preliminary verbal training upon the later acquisition of skill in performing a motor task. A number of investigators (1,2,3,5,6,7,8,10) have studied the effects of pretraining in which S gains knowledge about the motor task stimuli. This pretraining has generally consisted of verbal paired-associates learning in which the stimuli are the same as, or substitutes for, those of the motor task, while the verbal responses are unrelated to the required motor responses. Increased discriminability among the motor task stimuli, as a result of the pretraining, has been referred to either as stimulus predifferentiation or acquired distinctiveness of cues. Several studies using stimulus predifferentiation training have demonstrated positive transfer to the motor task (1, 2, 5, 7, 8), but two investigators have found evidence of an interfering effect (1, 10).Superior motor performance has also been shown to be a result of the transfer of nonspecific factors following paired-associates learning in which both the stimuli and responses are unrelated to those of the motor task (6). Because of these effects of "per-1 This article is based on a dissertation submitted to the Graduate College of the State University of Iowa in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree. The writer is indebted to Dr. Don Lewis for advice and assistance throughout the course of the investigation.

Perceptual learning in the discrimination processes of children: An analysis of five variables in perceptual pretraining.

“…Arnoult's (1957) review of experiments employing verbal pretraining with adults found that positive transfer from such training may be expected after a minimum of 4 to 8 pretraining experiences per stimulus and reaches a maximum after 8 to 12 experiences per stimulus. For example, Cantor's (1955) study found that 72 experiences per stimulus in pretraining produced no greater positive transfer than only 12 experiences per stimulus. The similarity of these findings with those obtained with the present perceptual pretraining procedure, where positive transfer appeared with 8 experiences per stimulus and showed no further increase with 12 experiences per stimulus, points to a common process in these studies and suggests that the growth function of this process is sudden and discontinuous rather than gradual.…”

Some Effects of Amount of Verbal Pretraining and Availability of Verbal Labels upon Performance in a Discriminative Motor Task

“…Furthermore, individual differences in speed of responding are not expected to influence the response measure of a paced task as much as they might in the free responding situation of certain previous snldies (e.g., Cantor, 1955;McCormack, 1958;Marshall, 1965). First, the motor task of the present study was paced.…”

Stimulus meaning in stimulus predifferentiation.

“…It has been found that pretraining with stimuli will facilitate subsequent learning of responses to those stimuli, even though the pretraining was not of such a nature that transfer would have been predicted from response generalization (Baldwin, 1954;Cantor, 1955;Foster, 1953;Gagne & Baker, 1950;Goss, 1953). Such facilitation has come to be called stimulus predifferentiation, and no explanation for it has yet been established (Arnoult, 1957;Vanderplas, 1958).…”