The effects of type of stimulus pretraining on discrimination performance in preschool children.

Several recent experiments have demonstrated that certain types of stimulus pretraining facilitate subsequent discrimination learning and performance. Using adult human Ss, Dysinger (3) and J. Cantor (2) have demonstrated that Ss taught to respond to a set of stimuli with distinctive verbal responses subsequently perform better in a task requiring the learning of other responses to this same set of stimuli than do Ss who were given the same pretraining with an irrelevant (different) set of stimuli. Gerjuoy (4) and G. Cantor (i) report similar findings with elementary school and preschool Ss. Lawrence (6) found that if rats had first learned a simultaneous discrimination problem involving a given pair of stimulus cues, they subsequently learned a successive problem with the same cues more rapidly than did rats that had been trained on a different pair of cues in the first problem. One interpretation of these results makes use of the hypothesis of acquired distinctiveness of cues. Briefly, it is assumed that making a distinctive response (e.g., a name) to a stimulus produces a distinctive stimulus which becomes part of the total stimulus complex. If a distinctive response is learned to each member of a set of similar stimuli, the effective similarity of these stimuli is reduced. This decreases the amount of generalization among them, which, in turn, decreases the difficulty involved in associating a new set of distinctive responses to the stimuli. Another interpretation has been suggested by Kurtz (5) in specific reference to the Rossman and Goss (7) findings but presumably applicable to other similar studies. Briefly, Kurtz suggested that the function of the verbal pretraining is to establish appropriate "observing responses" which transfer into the second task. The name-learning, then, is interpreted as merely a convenient criterion that E may use to determine when the appropriate observing responses have been set up. In his own experiment, Kurtz established observing responses with a familiarization procedure