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

Abstract

Sttnzmary.--Adult Ss were given either 3, 6, 9, 15, or 30 trials of relevant or irrelevant verbal pretraining prior to 21 trials on a common discriminative motor task. Relevant pretraining facilitated motor performance significantly over-all, and increaing amounts of relevant pretraining significantly increased the amount of specific proactive facilitation. Within relevanc pretraining conditions, significantly superior motor performance was related to the subsequent correct recall of verbal pretraining responses. Methodological problems and theoretical implications are discussed.

Common label pretraining: Interference and/or facilitation?

“…DISCUSSION Four features of the error measures of the transfer task are of interest. First, the superior performance of Group ICL to that of Group NL confirms previous findings that discrimination set and other more general performance-set factors such as warm-up and learning-to-Iearn are significant sources of proaction in the present experimental design (Marshall, 1968).…”

“…Verbal acquisition for Groups RDL, RCL, and ICL proceeded by the paced paired-associates anticipation method. All Ss were brought to a criterion of three successive blocks of six correct anticipations.The 20 trials of the paced paired-associates motor task were given by the anticipation-correction method using an apparatus described in detail by Marshall (1968). Ss were informed that on this task a different motor response was to be learned to each of six shapes, and they were told to attempt an anticipation upon each stimulus presentation.…”

“…The 20 trials of the paced paired-associates motor task were given by the anticipation-correction method using an apparatus described in detail by Marshall (1968). Ss were informed that on this task a different motor response was to be learned to each of six shapes, and they were told to attempt an anticipation upon each stimulus presentation.…”

Ambivalent proaction following common label pretraining

“…The 20 trials of the paced paired-associates motor task were also administered by the anticipation-correction method using a lever-pulling apparatus and a visual correction procedure described elsewhere (Marshall, 1968a). All Ss were informed that on this task a different motor response was to be learned to each of the six presented shapes.…”