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It is common to have good declarative but poor procedural knowledge of a foreign language, especially for classroom learners. To study this gap in a constrained manner, we asked Chinese learners of English to repeat, correct and produce indirect speech. The indirect speech construction was selected in the present study because it is known to be a particularly complex construction. Chinese university students who all had good declarative knowledge of the rules governing indirect speech were selected to have overall low or high oral proficiency when assessed in a free speech situation. High proficiency participants pursued strategies that increased their speech rate while reducing errors. They used more idiomatic English, more chunked expressions, and showed less negative transfer from Mandarin, compared to low proficiency participants. Indeed use of chunks was the primary means by which both groups of participants were able to increase their accuracy, complexity, and speaking rate. Low proficiency but not high participants showed evidence of a speed-accuracy trade-off. They either kept errors low at the cost of high pausing, or produced many errors with the benefit of rapid speech. Identifying preferences for speed versus accuracy could facilitate methods for encouraging learners to move out of their comfort zones.

This is a follow-up study that explores if there are any common patterns among the cases of negative transfer in the participants’ answers on implicit differentiation problems using the multiple case study methodology. The data was collected from eighty-one undergraduate students who were in STEM majors in a university in the Midwest. The participants’ answers indicated three main sources of negative transfer including 1) trigonometric identity, 2) u, v substitution technique of integration by parts, and 3) partial derivative. There were also other cases of negative transfer that applied improper concepts or the mixture of negative transfer and failed positive transfer. The findings and the limitation of this study suggest directions of potential future studies.

This study investigates the effects of the use of explicit negative evidence in teaching on students’ perception of two types of ungrammatical Chinese sentences in which –le should not be used. Two groups of advanced learners of Chinese were pre-tested immediately before receiving instruction that included explicit negative evidence about the use of -le, and post-tested twice: once directly after the completion of the instruction, and again four weeks later, using a grammaticality judgment test. The results of the grammaticality judgment test indicated that including explicit negative evidence in teaching helps advanced English-speaking learners of Chinese identify sentences in which –le is used incorrectly. The implication is that including negative evidence in teaching can reduce errors caused by negative transfer from a student’s native language.

Automatic prediction of personalities from meeting videos is a classical machine learning problem. Psychologists define personality traits as uncorrelated long-term characteristics of human beings. However, human annotations of personality traits introduce cultural and cognitive bias. In this study, we present methods to automatically predict emergent leadership and personality traits in the group meeting videos of the Emergent LEAdership corpus. Prediction of extraversion has attracted the attention of psychologists as it is able to explain a wide range of behaviors, predict performance, and assess risk. Prediction of emergent leadership, on the other hand, is of great importance for the business community. Therefore, we focus on the prediction of extraversion and leadership since these traits are also strongly manifested in a meeting scenario through the extracted features. We use feature analysis and multi-task learning methods in conjunction with the non-verbal features and crowd-sourced annotations from the Video bLOG (VLOG) corpus to perform a multi-domain and multi-task prediction of personality traits. Our results indicate that multi-task learning methods using 10 personality annotations as tasks and with a transfer from two different datasets from different domains improve the overall recognition performance. Preventing negative transfer by using a forward task selection scheme yields the best recognition results with 74.5% accuracy in leadership and 81.3% accuracy in extraversion traits. These results demonstrate the presence of annotation bias as well as the benefit of transferring information from weakly similar domains.

The study attempts to investigate whether there is a relationship between individual differences in cognitive abilities, learners’ perceptions about typology relations, and negative transfer in written production. To this aim, data were analyzed from Spanish/Catalan bilingual learners of L3 English (n= 47) aged 10-15, with German as L2. The cognitive abilities measured were working memory, attention control, and attention switching. Furthermore, proficiency in the L3 was also controlled, based on the results of the participants’ performance in the Oxford Placement Test. It was found that learners with lower attentional abilities had a harder time in identifying areas of structural contrast between the L2 and the L3, which, in turn, resulted in a higher rate of transfer from this language.

Language transfer is always the hot topic in the history of Linguistic researches. The influence of L1 thinking absolutely exists in the process of second language acquisition and varies with second language learners’ personal language acquisition ability. According to Piaget, junior high school students are in the transitional stage from the Concrete Operation to the Formal Operation, and some of them may belong to the later. Also, the learning years in junior high school is the initial time to study English grammar and write compositions, so this research takes junior high school students of Grade-one as research participant, and mainly focuses on the errors occur in their English compositions. Through the analysis of the reason why they made such errors, the author aims at revealing the influence of L1 thinking on Chinese students’ second language acquisition, also, the author intends to help educators to have clearer thoughts when sorting out educational plans and strategies, and enable both teachers and students to realize the importance of cultivating students’ second language thinking in junior high school.

In this study, a vocabulary cognition experiment is designed with cross-language startup paradigm from the cognitive perspective to analyze the time course of English vocabulary semantic accessibility of college students, the influence of words and speech information on English semantic accessibility, and the relationship between English learning and Chinese learning and their mutual influence on the cognitive process. The experiment uses event-related potential technology to record the sensory and cognitive processes of the brain online in a continuous and real time manner. The components of the scalp area are separated to determine the cortical areas activated by the mental activity, thus determining the internal nerve source of the explicit behavior. This study discusses English vocabulary learning from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, mainly to understand learners' cognitive characteristics and cognitive process of English vocabulary learning. In view of this phenomenon, it is proposed that learners should establish the cognitive schema of English vocabulary to form the semantic network of English vocabulary, overcome the negative transfer of mother tongue, and achieve vocabulary cognition through a great deal of English input and mastery of context knowledge. This study complements the research on vocabulary cognition of college students, and the results provide theoretical guidance for college students' English learning and language teaching.

Negative transfer can be phonological or lexical. This thesis takes the negative cultural transfer as the research scope. The study of interpretation is cross-linguistic; it is a kind of transformation activity between two languages or among more than two languages. However, it is a communicative act different from simple oral expression. In the early stage of learning, the students are potentially affected by the thinking mode, conventional habits or culture of mother tongue. As a result, they make inexact interpretation or even misinterpretation. What they interpret does not convey the connotations of the speaker, thus, negative cultural transfer arise. The author investigates the reasons which cause negative cultural transfer of the beginners of interpreting, and combines it with interpretation teaching practice. It is a bold attempt and brand-new perspective to study linguistics and interpretation teaching.

The water maze is one of the most widely employed spatial learning paradigms in the cognitive profiling of genetically modified mice. Oftentimes, tests of reference memory (RM) and working memory (WM) in the water maze are sequentially evaluated in the same animals. However, critical difference in the rules governing efficient escape from the water between WM and RM tests is expected to promote the adoption of incompatible mnemonic or navigational strategies. Hence, performance in a given test is likely poorer if it follows the other test instead of being conducted first. Yet, the presence of such negative transfer effects (or proactive interference) between WM and RM training in the water maze is often overlooked in the literature. To gauge whether this constitutes a serious concern, the present study determined empirically the magnitude, persistence, and directionality of the transfer effect in wild-type C57BL/6 mice. We contrasted the order of tests between two cohorts of mice. Performance between the two cohorts in the WM and RM tests were then separately compared. We showed that prior training of either test significantly reduced performance in the subsequent one. The statistical effect sizes in both directions were moderate to large. Although extended training could overcome the deficit, it could re-emerge later albeit in a more transient fashion. Whenever RM and WM water maze tests are conducted sequentially in the same animals – regardless of the test order, extra caution is necessary when interpreting the outcomes in the second test. Counterbalancing test orders between animals is recommended. Fil: Serrano Sponton, Lucas Ezequiel. Mainz University Hospital. Department of Neurosurger; Alemania. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza; Argentina Fil: Soria, Gonzalo Jose. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza; Argentina Fil: Dubroqua, Sylvain. Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science; China. Laboratory of Behavioural Neurobiology; Suiza Fil: Singer, Philipp. Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science; China. Roche Diagnostics; Suiza Fil: Feldon, Joram. Laboratory of Behavioural Neurobiology; Suiza. Roche Diagnostics; Suiza Fil: Gargiulo, Pascual Angel. Universidad Nacional de cuyo. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza; Argentina Fil: Yee, Benjamin K.. Laboratory of Behavioural Neurobiology; Suiza. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Faculty of Health and Social Sciences,; China

Current research into self-control that is based on the sequential task methodology is currently at an impasse. The sequential task methodology involves completing a task that is designed to tax self-control resources which in turn has carry-over effects on a second, unrelated task. The current impasse is in large part due to the lack of empirical research that tests explicit assumptions regarding the initial task. Five studies test one key, untested assumption underpinning strength (finite resource) models of self-regulation: Performance will decline over time on a task that depletes self-regulatory resources. In the aftermath of high profile replication failures using a popular letter-crossing task and subsequent criticisms of that task, the current studies examined whether depletion effects would occur in real time using letter-crossing tasks that did not invoke habit-forming and breaking, and whether these effects were moderated by administration type (paper and pencil vs. computer administration). Sample makeup and sizes as well as response formats were also varied across the studies. The five studies yielded a clear and consistent pattern of increasing performance deficits (errors) as a function of time spent on task with generally large effects and in the fifth study the strength of negative transfer effects to a working memory task were related to individual differences in depletion. These results demonstrate that some form of depletion is occurring on letter-crossing tasks though whether an internal regulatory resource reservoir or some other factor is changing across time remains an important question for future research.

Subjective organization refers to the human tendency to impose order on seemingly unrelated events in a person’s environment. This phenomenon that has been studied among individuals with acquired and traumatic brain injuries as they have a diminished ability to subjectively organize novel information. Thus, researchers have begun developing measures of subjective organization intended to be used as a diagnostic tool. The purpose of this review is to summarize what is known about subjective organization and to outline how a measure of subjective organization can be used to assess the extent of organizational deficits for persons with acquired and traumatic brain injuries. Moreover, this review will discuss the clinical implications of measuring subjective organization among individuals with a brain injury.

Pragmatic transfer traces back to Thomas' (1983, 1984) definition of "pragmatic failure" as a violation of sociolinguistic rules which result in misinterpretation (for a historical overview, see Bou Franch, 2012). As a result, negative transfer has received a great deal of attention for being a cause of miscommunication in L2 and a domain where corrective strategies towards native-like performance were much in need (see Kasper, 1992). In this study, positive transfer is triggered by a cognitive procedure rather than a sociolinguistic skill and is examined in terms of learners' acquired ability to infer pragmatic meanings in L1 and L2. Using the relevance-theoretic distinction of conceptual-procedural meaning (Wilson, 2011), the study seeks to unveil facilitating effects of L1, L2 and interventions on participants' ability to interpret newspaper editorials while using procedural expressions as evidence for pragmatic inferences drawn. © 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

In this paper we define the cognitive space of subtraction and place emphasis on procedural control and on the processes that need to be improved by the educa- tional framework for proper acquisition. We describe the theory behind error acquisi- tion. To do this, we consider the analysis of negative transfer processes induced from the educational context. The analysis is inscribed within the intersection between educational theory and cognitive theories of algorithmic learning., En este trabajo definimos el espacio cognitivo de la sustracción e incidimos en el control del procedimiento y en los procesos que tiene que potenciar el marco educativo para su correcta adquisición. Describimos la teoría que subyace a la adquisición del error. Para ello, tomamos como referencia el análisis de los procesos de transferencia negativa inducidos desde el contexto educativo. El análisis se inscribe en la intersección entre la teoría de la educación y las teorías cognitivas sobre el aprendizaje algorítmico., Dans cet article, on définie l’espace cognitif de la soustraction en mettant l’accent sur le contrôle des mécanismes pour son correcte acquisition et sur les diffé- rents processus devant être mis en place par le cadre éducatif. La théorie sous-jacente à l’acquisition de l’erreur y est décrite. Pour ce faire, on tient compte de l’analyse des processus de transfert négatif induits par le contexte éducatif. L’analyse s’inscrit au point de rencontre de la théorie de l’éducation et des théories cognitives sur l’apprentissage algorithmique.

In 2 experiments we examined the impact of memory for prior events on conflict detection in simulated air traffic control under conditions where individuals proactively controlled aircraft and completed concurrent tasks. Individuals were faster to detect conflicts that had repeatedly been presented during training (positive transfer). Bayesian statistics indicated strong evidence for the null hypothesis that conflict detection was not impaired for events that resembled an aircraft pair that had repeatedly come close to conflicting during training. This is likely because aircraft altitude (the feature manipulated between training and test) was attended to by participants when proactively controlling aircraft. In contrast, a minor change to the relative position of a repeated nonconflicting aircraft pair moderately impaired conflict detection (negative transfer). There was strong evidence for the null hypothesis that positive transfer was not impacted by dividing participant attention, which suggests that part of the information retrieved regarding prior aircraft events was perceptual (the new aircraft pair "looked" like a conflict based on familiarity). These findings extend the effects previously reported by Loft, Humphreys, and Neal (2004), answering the recent strong and unanimous calls across the psychological science discipline to formally establish the robustness and generality of previously published effects. (PsycINFO Database Record

The goal of this study is to help learners to be consciously aware of pragmatic failure in a conversation and to suggest techniques to get over this. In daily life, we may frequently face pragmatic failure due to lack of cultural information, negative transfer from our first language, different beliefs and values, incorrect translation, and different shared knowledge. For language learners, pragmatic failure is very common in every kind of conversation. When we face pragmatic failure in a specific context, we need to recognize it, ask for clarification and ask directly about implied meaning to continue a conversation smoothly without being embarrassed. Studying dialogues in movies or sitcoms is a very effective way to help students learn about pragmatic failure, because they provide authentic contexts with abundant examples of pragmatic failure. This study analyzes some conversations of family members in the sitcom, Modern Family to look at how pragmatic failure occurs in a given context and how it affects a conversation. Beyond cognitive awareness of pragmatic failure, a teacher needs to teach their students some techniques or strategies to consciously overcome it.

Models of attentional allocation in associative learning are typically structured according to one of two guiding principles: the predictiveness principle, which posits that attention is paid to cues that have reliably predicted an outcome in the past, or the uncertainty principle, which states that attention is paid to cues about which little is known. Both principles are well supported by studies of animals. However, in studies of human learning, there is very little direct empirical support for the uncertainty principle. In the study reported here, we addressed this gap by investigating negative transfer, a phenomenon that may provide unique support for the uncertainty principle. In two human learning experiments using an allergist task, we replicated the primary findings of previous research on animal learning. We believe that these data provide the first direct evidence for the uncertainty principle in human associative learning.

Professional athletes involved in sports that require the execution of fine motor skills must practice for a consider- able length of time before competing in an event. Why is such practice necessary? Is it merely to warm-up the muscles, tendons, and ligaments, or does the athlete's sensorimotor network need to be constantly recalibrated? In this article, the authors present a point of view in which the human sensorimotor system is charac- terized by: (a) a high noise level and (b) a high learning rate at the synaptic level (which, because of the noise, does not equate to a high learning rate at the behavioral level). They argue that many heuristics of human skill learning, including the need for a prolonged period of warm-up in experts, follow from these assumptions.

The paper reports the results of a pilot experiment carried out by De Wit (2008), investigating the acquisition of French wh-questions by Dutch L2-learners. The results of the experiment (an elicited production task) offer strong evidence for positive and negative transfer. Interestingly, however, the data also suggest the existence of interlanguage grammars that make use of positive transfer, while filtering out the effects of negative transfer.

In problem-solving research, insights into the relationship between monitoring and control in the transfer of complex skills remain impoverished. To address this, in 4 experiments, the authors had participants solve 2 complex control tasks that were identical in structure but that varied in presentation format. Participants learned to solve the 2nd task on the basis of their original learning phase from the 1st task or learned to solve the 2nd task on the basis of another participant's learning phase. Experiment 1 showed that, under conditions in which the participant's learning phase was experienced twice, performance deteriorated in the 2nd task. In contrast, when the learning phases in the 1st and 2nd tasks differed, performance improved in the 2nd task. Experiment 2 introduced instructional manipulations that induced the same response patterns as those in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, further manipulations were introduced that biased the way participants evaluated the learning phase in the 2nd task. In Experiment 4, judgments of self-efficacy were shown to track control performance. The implications of these findings for theories of complex skill acquisition are discussed.

Cognitive flexibility can be studied using the task-switching paradigm. This paradigm requires subjects to adapt behaviour to changing contexts as indicated by a cue. In our study, we addressed the question of how cue-based implementation of mental “task sets” occurs. We assumed that cues build up associations to the tasks that they indicate. These associations lead to retrieval of the associated task set once the cue shows up again. In three experiments, we tested this assumption using a negative transfer paradigm. First participants were exposed to one cue–task mapping. After a training phase, the cue–task mapping changed in either of two ways. Whereas one group of participants got new cues, the other experienced a reversal of the learnt cue–task mapping. Our results show that participants build up cue–task associations and that these formerly learnt associations can hamper the implementation of new cue–task mappings (particular with mapping reversal). Prolonged preparation time decreased the cost of changing the cue–task mapping but did not change the overall pattern of results.

ion of previously acquired knowledge resources that may assist a learner with performing a required task. Perkins and Salomon make a further significant distinction between positive and negative transfer. Positive transfer, by their formulation, occurs when what is learned in a previous setting enhances learning in the present setting, whereas learning delayed or hindered by what is learned in the previous setting is referred to as negative transfer. They additionally define forward-reaching transfer as the ability to anticipate how learning in a present context will be helpful for learning in a future context, while backward-reaching transfer is used to describe a process of actively recalling relevant past experiences and applicable knowledge to aid with a task in the present situation. Ultimately, their essay works to establish an “ideal” kind of transfer in educational contexts: high-road, positive, and forward-reaching. While Perkins and Salomon’s (1988) metacognitive view continues to have a profound impact on cross-disciplinary conceptualizations of learning transfer, it has been called into question for its unclear stance on the role of individual agency. In effect, their model tends to depict action as somewhat predetermined – given the “right” conditions and the appropriate instruction, individuals will act in particular ways. Further questions

This article reviews recent research on bilingual phonological development and describes the nature of bilingual phonology, focusing on characteristics of cross-linguistic influence on bilingual phonological abilities. There is evidence of positive and negative transfer (acceleration and deceleration) on children's phonological abilities. Several methodological issues limit the ability to generalize findings from previous research to larger groups of bilingual children (e.g., small sample size, lack of consideration of age of acquisition of each language, and language abilities of the participants). Sources of heterogeneity in language development are presented and discussed. Phonological abilities are related to language abilities in bilingual first language learners of English and Spanish. Empirical evidence from research in our laboratory supports this claim. We discuss implications of research findings and limitations for future research and clinical practice. We provide specific recommendations for bilingual research and for clinical assessment of young bilingual children.

Two experiments examined possible negative transfer in nonexperts from the use of pictorial examples in a laboratory design problem-solving situation. In Experiment 1, 89 participants were instructed to "think aloud" and were assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: (a) control (standard instructions), (b) fixation (inclusion of a problematic example, describing its problematic elements), or (c) defixation (inclusion of a problematic example, with instructions to avoid using problematic elements). Negative transfer due to examples was measured both quantitatively and qualitatively through verbal protocols. Verbal protocols (N = 176) were analyzed for participants' reasons for reference to the examples. In Experiment 2, fixation to examples was evaluated in nonverbalizing participants (N = 60). Results of both experiments suggest that (a) although participants consulted the problem instructions, they tended to follow the examples even when they included inappropriate elements and (b) the fixation effects can be diminished with the use of defixating instructions.

This investigation was designed to apply contextual interference to acquisition of snowboarding skills. 20 participants completed several acquisition stages lasting about 2 hours while either alternating the direction of the turn within each stage or completing the whole stage while attempting turns in one direction, then repeating the stage for the other direction of turn. Following acquisition, all participants returned 1 wk. later for a retention test. Alternating practice yielded better performance during acquisition and retention as measured by the arc and form attained within the turns. Because this differs from typical contextual interference effects, it is suggested that the relation between the skills may have affected the results. Negative transfer operating within blocked practice and increased between-task comparisons within alternating practice may be related to the similarity between the tasks.

Two experiments examined the transfer of stereotype-driven inferences. In Experiment 1, participants studied ambiguous sentences such as, “Some felt that the politician's statements were untrue,” and in a subsequent cued-recall task showed positive transfer for pairs consistent with the inference implied by the stereotype (“politician-lied”) and negative transfer to an alternative interpretation (“politician-erred”). In Experiment 2, transfer effects were obtained when strategic factors during the cued-recall task were all but eliminated. These data support the claim (Dunning & Sherman, 1997; Kunda & Sherman-Williams, 1993) that stereotypes influence the construal of ambiguous social behavior and that this effect occurs during the encoding process.

Individual bees often restrict their visits to only a few species out of the multitude of available plants. This flower constancy is likely caused by limitations of memory for motor patterns, sensory stimuli, or reward levels. Here we test the implications of sensori-motor learning and memory for flower constancy. Artificial “flowers” with two distinct “morphologies” were used, so that in each flower type, a different motor pattern was needed to reach the nectar. As in natural flowers, these morphological types were associated with sensory signals (blue and yellow color stimuli). Bees which learned only a single task were more efficient in several ways than those which had learned two: they made fewer errors, had shorter flower handling times, took shorter times to correct errors, and transitions between flowers were initially more rapid. For bees which had learned two tasks, performance depended strongly on the training schedule: if each task was learned with blocked trials, the memory for the second appeared to interfere with that for the first. Interference affected only the association between flower signal and motor pattern, not the motor pattern itself. This was not the case if bees were trained for both tasks with alternating trials. In that case, bees rapidly learned both tasks, albeit with worse saturation levels than bees which had learned only one. Bees transferred the experience gained on one task to a second task: their initial performance on the second task was better than their initial performance on the first. On the other hand, performance on the second task in the saturation level (in which bees no longer improve their efficiency) was worse than on the first task (negative transfer). In the saturation phase, performance did not directly depend on switch frequency, but on whether the bee had one or two options in memory. Thus, while bees would become proficient at two tasks more quickly if their acquisition phase included switches, such switches had no measurable effect in the saturation phase. The implications of these findings for foraging are discussed using modern learning theory.

80 Ss performed a horizontal adduction movement of the arm attempting to approximate a velocity of 6 or 10 ft/sec with or without a 2-lb. weight in the hand, and Ss were randomly divided into 4 equal subgroups based upon the possible velocity-weight combinations. Ss were blindfolded and received only verbal cues as to the direction of error. After 60 trials on the initial task, each group was divided into 4 subgroups, based upon the original velocity-weight combinations, and performed 60 transfer trials. The two groups approximating the faster velocity were significantly more accurate on the initial task while weight had no effect on accuracy. Negative transfer occurred from the faster movement to the slower, more difficult movement.

Two parallel tasks involving rule learning were used to assess implicit and explicit learning. The complex task (occurring in the complex rule-line condition) involves predominantly implicit learning, and the simple task (occurring in the simple rule-number condition) requires primarily explicit learning. Implicit learning clearly showed negative transfer from previous implicit learning experience, whereas explicit learning showed strong positive transfer. Subjects' explicit knowledge declined and implicit knowledge remained at the same level when retested one week later. The results are discussed in terms of principles guiding the learning and transfer of explicit and implicit knowledge. This is consistent with the assertion that implicit and explicit learning involve two functionally different learning systems.

The present research investigated alternative explanations of heightened interference in AB-AC learning in individuals with memory loss related to medial temporal lobe dysfunction. In Experiment 1, patients with left or right temporal lobectomy and control subjects were administered the standard AB-AC test. Relative to the other groups, left temporal patients exhibited significant negative transfer that was characterized by large numbers of response intrusion errors. In Experiment 2, groups of community-dwelling old and young adults were administered the standard test and an implicit version in which, during AC testing, subjects were instructed to provide the first word that comes to mind in response to stimulus words. There were no differences between groups on either version. Of particular interest was that both groups made significantly more intrusion errors on the implicit test and did not differ on this measure. It was concluded that exaggerated interference in AB-AC learning, as reflected by response intrusion errors, is related to the use of implicit memory processes rather than a failure of inhibitory mechanisms. Memory-impaired individuals, who have a selective loss of explicit memory, are vulnerable on this task because they rely excessively on implicit memory processes.

Subjects were given a prediction task in which they had to learn that one cue, P (positive), was followed by the outcome, and a compound of P and another cue, N (negative), was not followed by the outcome. Next, N was tested in compound with a transfer cue, T, which had signalled the outcome but had never been compounded with N. Experiment 1 confirmed an important assumption of the Rescorla–Wagner model (Wagner & Rescorla, 1972) that negation of T should depend on the specific P cue compound with N being positively contingent. Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed the model's prediction that no decrement in negative transfer should be observed following postlearning devaluation of P. Unfortunately, the model did not anticipate that a large proportion of devaluation trials relative to learning trials would attenuate negative transfer (Experiment 4), nor did it predict that negative transfer would occur when P was neutral during the learning stage and was only later made positive (Experiment 3). The results can be accommodated by the Rescorla–Wagner model if one assumes that absent cues have their associative strengths altered.

This paper investigates the influence of three factors on pronunciation accuracy of Chinese adult foreign language learners. Ten target sounds including phonemes and syllables are included in the pre-test, an analysis of which shows that the mispronunciation of the randomly chosen target sounds mainly results from L1 negative transfer. It is observed in intervention that some mispronounced target sounds are more difficult to be corrected than the others. However, the hierarchy of difficulty for pronunciation acquisition cannot be constructed without considering the impact of task variables, for even the same subject’s performance might vary in post-test including vocabulary reading, sentence reading and spontaneous speech, in which tasks individual aptitude in perception, mimicry and monitoring also has a role to play in the improvement of pronunciation accuracy.

Executive-control processes regulate thoughts, emotions, actions, and behaviors that are critical for everyday functioning. Recently, researchers have suggested that these processes can be flexibly modified by tasks that require executive control. Specifically, it has been argued that executive-control tasks can deplete these executive-control processes, which can in turn lead to negative transfer on subsequent task performance. Importantly, the degrees of malleability in executive-control processes and transfer to different tasks are of ongoing debate. The present study critically examined the hypothesis that executive-control processes can be exerted and whether or not this exertion would negatively transfer to performance on various subsequent tasks. Across a series of experiments, negative transfer effects from extensive performance on the antisaccade task were not found. Traditional hypothesis testing and Bayes factor computations were used to validate these findings. Collectively, the present results put in question the use of the antisaccade task to observe both near and far negative transfer from using executive-control processes.

We examined the occurrence of negative transfer in the learning of a novel motor task with regard to the schema theory (Schmidt, 1975) premise that practicing similar movements should have a facilitatory effect on learning. Given that negative transfer is often difficult to produce, an attempt was made to use a design similar to that of Lewis, McAllister, and Adarns (1951), in which the interpolated task was a complete reversal of the original task. Forty-eight university students were tested on a discrete pursuit-tracking task. They completed trials on both the original task and an interpolated reversed task before relearning the original task. The decrement between the first re- learning trial and the last original learning trial was analyzed for a negative transfer effect. Schmidt's (1982) hypothesis that negative transfer is due to temporary cognitive or decision confusion, not the result of a motor control problem, was supported. All evident performance decrements were observed only in the first rele...

This article presents an overview of different approaches to the study of how people learn computers as tools. The varieties of learning most relevant for computer learners and also mostly discussed by human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers are transfer, construction of mental models, and learning by doing. Transfer from prior knowledge is a well-developed theory within HCI. Empirical data show that quantitative predictions of positive transfer from prior knowledge can be made for simple tasks. The occurrence of negative transfer can be predicted, but effects of prior knowledge that conflict with the material to be learned cannot be covered by a simple transfer theory. It is generally acknowledged that users develop mental models by interacting with a system. However, the exact nature of these models are difficult to capture empirically, since mental models have to be inferred from users' behaviour. In normal use, people seem to have difficulty talking about their mental models. People express their mental models mainly when their expectations are violated. It seems relevant to support the forming of adequate mental models by instruction, but the effects of such educational models are not clear-cut. Several factors influence the comprehension and use of the models given. People do not learn very efficiently by doing, because they have difficulty in choosing alternative actions, observing outcomes, and interpreting them. To conclude, users of computer tools mostly learn as a result of performing a task and do not focus on learning the computer system per se. This implies that learning new aspects of a computer tool is more similar to problem solving than to intentional learning.

Chapter 7 described some of the negative outcomes of both mainstream and ESL approaches in the formal education of speakers of unstandardised dialects. Chapter 8 showed little evidence of success in actual D2 acquisition in accent modification programs and the failure of SESD classroom approaches in the 1970s. However, much more positive outcomes were described for dialect coaching for performance and for instrumental, accommodation and awareness approaches in the classroom. This chapter explores some of the reasons for these results, both negative and positive. In doing so, it refers back to some of the factors that affect naturalistic SDA, as presented in Chapters 3 to 6. The chapter moves on to a discussion of further steps that can be taken to promote SDA in classroom contexts, followed by a short conclusion with some suggestions for further research. Unsuccessful outcomes Accent modification As we saw in Sections 3.2 and 7.1 above, while actors can learn to produce other dialects for performance, it is much more difficult to acquire another dialect to the extent that it can be maintained in everyday use. The difference is that production for performance requires only explicit knowledge or conscious awareness of some of the features of the D2, and the ability to imitate them accurately. Actual acquisition of the D2, however, requires not only this explicit knowledge but also implicit competence, or the set of computational procedures needed to produce the D2 features automatically and consistently, as well as accurately.

In individually administered treatment sessions, tenth-grade students first learned the number (chronological order) of several randomly selected U.S. presidents by employing either mnemonic (memory-enhancing) illustrations or their own preferred method of study. Subsequently, mnemonic-illustration, mnemonicimagery, or no-strategy control materials were provided for the task of additionally learning some biographical information about each of the same presidents. All types of second-phase mnemonic instruction greatly facilitated students' recall of the biographical information, and neither positive nor negative transfer effects associated with the initial number-learning task were detected. Considered in the discussion is the educational utility of mnemonic techniques for enabling students to acquire large amounts of factual material efficiently.

In this paper, I suggest that studies of motor development, learning and memory may provide important insights into technological change and conservatism in prehistoric craft activities. The physical and mental processes involved in the learning and development of highly skilled motor activities result in strongly rooted changes in an individual’s actions and levels of performance. In terms of craft production, this means that mature, skilled artisans have a selective and efficient array of actions and strategies, which they can draw upon to produce competent products of predictable quality and quantity.The flip side of this degree of specialized physical training is, however, the possibility of ‘negative transfer’ when it comes to learning new skills. The presence within late second millennium bc in Italy of both handmade and wheelmade pottery technologies can be explained in part by the degree of difficulty mature craftspeople may have experienced in learning the radically different physical processes involved in wheel-manufacture.

A resource depletion framework motivated a novel strategy for investigating whether the central executive is unitary or separable into relatively independent subprocesses. The idea that tasks with overlapping neural representations may involve similar executive components was also critical to our approach. Of particular interest were tasks requiring resolution of interference among competing representations. Within a single experimental session intensive training reduced the ability to resolve interference on a transfer task if the training task placed high demands on interference resolution. Negative transfer was absent when interference resolution was minimally required by the task, or when the training and transfer tasks did not rely on overlapping neural representations. These results suggest a nonunitary central executive composed of separable subcomponents, at least one of which mediates interference resolution. Our results are consistent with an executive control process specialized for the selection of task-relevant representations from competitors. The results also agree with the view that higher cognitive processes are resource limited and can be temporarily depleted.

Processing of a probe stimulus can be affected either positively or negatively by presenting a related stimulus immediately before it. According to structural accounts, such effects occur because processing of the prime activates or inhibits the mental representation of the probe before it is presented. In contrast, transfer-appropriate processing accounts suggest that success in processing a probe depends on resources made available by earlier experiences of related stimuli. The authors manipulated the similarity between the prime and probe on color, lexical status, and orthographic structure, requiring either lexical decision or color identification on each. The authors observed a complex pattern of positive and negative transfer that cannot easily be explained through activation-inhibition of mental structures. Instead, that pattern provides evidence in favor of transfer-appropriate processing.

Stimulus imagery level (pictures vs. words) and instructions to subjects (neutral vs. interactive imagery) were orthogonally manipulated in order to investigate their joint effect on transfer. One hundred forty-four students learned three lists conforming either to an A-B, A-D, A-F transfer paradigm or to an A-B, C-D, E-F transfer paradigm. With neutral instructions, there was no evidence of significant negative transfer for pictures or words. With imagery instructions, there was significant negative transfer for words but not for pictures. Discussion focused on the failure to find reduced associative interference in the typical paradigm (words with imagery instructions) used in popular mnemonic techniques.

According to dynamic pattern theory, intrinsically stable bimanual coordination patterns affect, and are affected by, the acquisition of a new coordination pattern. In Experiment 1, subjects practiced either a 45 degrees or a 135 degrees relative phase pattern for 4 days; in Experiment 2, they practiced a 90 degrees relative phase pattern over 6 days. Retention tests were conducted 4 weeks after the last practice session in both experiments. Performance on both the in-phase (0 degree) and anti-phase (180 degrees) patterns was also measured on each day. Contrary to predictions, the experiments revealed that reciprocal effects between the intrinsic patterns and the new pattern were only temporary, and did not affect learning in any permanent way. As well, learning a new pattern was not differentially affected by its relation to an intrinsic pattern. Though commonly believed to be prevalent in skill acquisition, negative transfer effects are rather uncommon in motor learning research (Schmidt, 1988). One reason for this is that the locus of negative transfer effects is cognitive, found most commonly in tasks where the translation required between thought and action has been altered from what might be considered natural (e.g., Lewis, McAllister, & Adams, 1951). It is this issue of what is natural that is the core of the present research: how something that can be performed "naturally" (efficiently and without practice) affects new learning and how new learning affects what was once considered natural. Most would agree that the acquisition of a new motor skill is influenced by the existing skills possessed by an individual (Adams, 1987; Schmidt, 1988). For many researchers, however, this influence is little more than an annoyance, and motor learning research is replete with laboratory tasks that were created to avoid the influence of existing skills on new learning. In some cases, tasks were designed to be so simple that subjects were assumed to have a mastery of the fundamental skills involved in achieving successful performance before the new task was practiced. Reaction time, line positioning, and target aiming tasks are examples. Another type was the "novel" task, which was designed to require motor skill that no subject would have acquired previously. In theory, a novel task required new learning, and the uniqueness of the task ensured that existing skills would contribute minimally to new learning. Rotary pursuit tracking, mirror tracing, and free-standing ladder climb tasks are examples of novel tasks that have been used for this purpose. However, as with very simple tasks, the use of novel tasks provided little information about the role of existing skills in new learning. When the influence of existing skills on new learning was the purpose, researchers faced a different problem the experimental design. Historically, researchers typically used a transfer design for this purpose (see Schmidt, 1988, for review). For example, one group of subjects would learn Task A followed by practice on Task B. Their performance on the second task (the transfer task) was compared to the performance of a control group that learned Task B without having previously learned Task A. The relative performance of the experimental and control groups on Task B reflected the influence of previous experience on Task A. Although this design has been used extensively (Adams, 1987), there are limitations. The most important is the problem of individual differences, as the influence of previous learning is made by comparing separate groups of individuals. The potential problems with this type of between-group design include Hawthorne effects, counterbalancing, and equating group performances prior to practice (see Schmidt, 1988, Chapter 11, for more discussion). As well, the amount of practice that is given to the experimental group on Task A is a critical variable: how well Task A has been learned, and how this is evaluated (i.e., what performance on task A is compared to). …

International audience; Several studies of procedural learning in Parkinson's disease (PD) have demonstrated that these patients are impaired with respect to age-matched control subjects. In order to examine more closely the specific impairment, we considered three dimensions along which a procedural learning task could vary. These are: (1) implicit vs explicit learning, (2) instance vs rule learning, and (3) learning with internal vs external error correction. We consider two hypotheses that could explain the impairments observed in PD for different types of explicit motor learning: (H1) an impairment related to the acquisition of rules vs specific instances, and (H2) an impairment in learning when no explicit error feedback is provided. In order to examine the condition of rule learning with external error feedback, we developed a modified version of the serial reaction time (SRT) protocol that tests analogical transfer in sequence learning (ATSL). Reaction times are measured for responses to visual stimuli that appear in several different repeating sequences. While these isomorphic sequences are different, they share a common rule. Verbatim learning of a sequence would result in negative transfer from one sequence to a different one, while rule learning would result in positive transfer. Parkinson's patients and age-matched controls demonstrate significant acquisition and positive transfer of the rule between sequences. Our results demonstrate that PD patients are capable of learning and transferring rule or schema-based representations in an explicit learning format, and that this form of learning may be functionally distinct from learning mechanisms that rely on representations of the verbatim or statistical structure of sequences.

The rejection of contrastive analysis (CA) input in teaching and learning materials in North America in the seventies resulted from its close association with the stigmatized structural method and not from a demonstration of its inappropriateness on the basis of empirical evidence. Its status of persona non grata in the field was further emphasized in the eighties by the selective citing of findings of studies in Error Analysis by Dulay, Burt & Krashen (1982). Such findings were not supported by comparative studies of inductive and deductive approaches particularly in Europe which had demonstrated that the latter, based on the combination of CA and explanation had proven to be the most effective approach. Meanwhile, researchers in SLA have manifested renewed interest in negative transfer, now termed crosslinguistic influence, though their findings have as yet had no effect on teaching materials. There is, therefore, a need to reevaluate the effectiveness of CA input in language teaching. The study reported herein is a contribution to responding to this need. It hypothesizes that a deductive approach exploiting CA input will be more effective in minimizing error rates than an inductive one which does not take it into account. The findings support the hypothesis the implications of which are further explored.

Our emphasis shifts in this chapter from nonverbal learning to verbal learning. The traditional tasks employed in verbal-learning research, both basic and gerontological, have been those of paired-associate learning and serial learning. In addition to reviewing aging research on these tasks, we will also review aging research in the related areas of mnemonics and transfer.

Five Korsakoff amnesics and five non-amnesic alcoholics were compared in two studies in which they learnt semantically related paired-associate words in a negative transfer paradigm. The incidence of prior list intrusions was manipulated to determine the effect of response competition on new list learning. The results showed that impaired learning by amnesics was due to the effects of interference independent of response competition. It was suggested that amnesic patients suffer an exaggerated tendency to remain under the control of persistent mental sets and stimulus elements that could affect encoding and retrieval mechanisms.

Two experiments were designed to clarify the priority effect in the A-B, A-C paradigm, higher first-list than second-list recall in the MMFR test following equal amounts of study of both lists. The results of the experiments suggested that the priority effect is a consequence of severe impairment of learning A-C pairs when A-B pairs are not tested prior to the presentation of A-C pairs. This impairment of learning of A-C pairs, negative transfer, is independent of specific A-B pairs tested, but its overall magnitude appears to be an inverse function of the proportion of pairs in the A-B set that are tested. Since no theory of transfer or interference makes any provisions for the effects of testing of one list on the learning and recall of another, the testing effects observed in these experiments are puzzling.