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To study the relative merits of three training principles - difficulty of training, specificity of training, and variability of training - subjects were trained to follow navigation instructions to move in a grid on a computer screen. Subjects repeated and then followed the instructions by mouse clicking on the grid. They were trained, given a short distractor task, and then tested. There were three groups, each receiving different message lengths during training: easy (short lengths), hard (long lengths), and mixed (all lengths), with all subjects given all lengths at test. At test, the mixed group was best on most lengths, the easy group was better than the hard group on short lengths, and the hard group was better than the easy group on long lengths. The results support the advantages of both specificity and variability of training but do not support the hypothesis that difficult training of the form used here would lead to overall best performance at test.

Two experiments examined transfer of a prospective, time production skill under conditions involving changes in concurrent task requirements. Positive transfer of the time production skill might be expected only when the attentional demands of the concurrent task were held constant from training to test. However, some positive transfer was found even when the concurrent task at retraining was made either easier or more difficult than the concurrent task learned during training. The amount and direction of transfer depended more on the pacing of the stimuli in the secondary task than on the difficulty of the secondary task, even though difficulty affects attentional demands more. These findings are consistent with the procedural reinstatement principle of skill learning, by which transfer from one task to another depends on an overlap in procedures required by the two skills.

In three experiments, we examined transfer and contextual memory in a category search task. Each experiment included two phases (training and test), during which participants searched through category and exemplar menus for targets. In Experiment 1, the targets were from one of two domains during training (grocery store or department store); the domain was either the same or changed at test. Also, the categories were organized in one of two ways (alphabetically or semantically); the organization either remained the same or changed at test. In Experiments 2 and 3, domain and organization were held constant; however, categories or exemplars were the same, partially replaced, or entirely replaced across phases in order to simulate the dynamic nature of category search in everyday situations. Transfer occurred at test when the category organization or domain was maintained and when the categories or exemplars matched (partially or entirely) those at training. These results demonstrate that transfer is facilitated by overlap in training and testing contexts.

Two experiments explored the benefits to retention and transfer conferred by mental practice. During familiarization, participants typed 4-digit numbers and took an immediate typing test on both old and new numbers. Participants then typed old 4-digit numbers, either physically or mentally, with either a different response configuration or the opposite hand from that used during familiarization. On a delayed test, participants physically typed both old and new numbers with the same response configuration and hand used during familiarization. Mental practice led to less retroactive interference and more transfer than did physical practice, supporting the hypothesis that mental practice strengthens an abstract representation that does not involve specific effectors., ((c) 2008 APA)

In two experiments, we examined training, retention, and transfer of a duration production skill in a prospective paradigm. Participants were trained with feedback and then were either tested immediately for transfer without feedback or retrained with feedback 1 week later. There were three training and retraining conditions, two involving secondary tasks. Retention of the duration production skill was perfect across the 1-week delay when the secondary task condition was unchanged, but there was no skill transfer when that condition was changed. These findings demonstrate specificity of training, with the assumption that the cognitive operations learned during duration production training incorporate requirements of the secondary task. More generally, this study challenges the current practice in which training conditions often do not match eventual testing conditions.

N. R. Brown and R. S. Siegler (1996) found that training participants on a subset of country populations improved estimations for novel transfer country populations, an effect called seeding that remained intact over time. They attributed this effect to the abstraction by participants of a general metric framework for estimating populations not dependent on specific country anchors. In a series of 3 follow-up experiments, the authors found that training on seed populations produces both general metric information and durable specific country information. Moreover, minimal amounts of general (mean or range of populations) or specific (1 or 3 countries) information made available for inspection while estimating produced a significant seeding effect. Retention over long intervals was facilitated by both presenting 3 seed countries as opposed to 1 and providing names for the seed countries.

This study examined conceptual rule learning (RL) deficit in male schizophrenic Ss categorized into three groups as defined by Whitaker Index of Schizophrenic Thinking (WIST). Ss were administered a conjunctive, disjunctive, conditional or biconditional rule learning task, WIST, and Shipley-Hartford Memory Scale. It was shown that: (a) the WIST reliably differentiates among three levels of thought disorder as reflected by a deficit in inter-problem transfer of rule learning; (b) certain WIST and Shipley parameters reliably predict RL performance; and (c) phenothiazine dosage levels show no influence on the WIST and no correlation with RL. The findings indicate that cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenics is evidenced by limited inductive reasoning, insufficient channel capacity for filtering out irrelevant information, and inability to gain from antecedent RL experience. Principal locus of schizophrenic thought disorder is examined within a stimulus encoding-information processing paradigm.