Examination of the Role of “Higher-Order” Consistency in Skill Development

Three experiments examined the importance of “higher-level” consistencies---consistency not defined by the individual stimuli themselves but by the relationships among stimuli. In the first experiment subjects made either a consistent or a varied decision concerning the ordinal value of numbers in a display. The second experiment used stimuli that had no pre-experimental relational ordering (symbols such as @ or #) to examine the development of this relational learning. Half of the subjects made consistent decisions and half made inconsistent decisions. The final experiment tested the importance of consistent relationships by randomly ordering the symbols on each trial. The experiments demonstrate that subjects can develop performance indicative of automatic processing if the relationships among stimuli remain consistent. Decision consistency is most important for stimuli possessing well-learned relationships. The importance of the data revolve around a determination of what can become automatic, the development of an extended definition of consistency, and an understanding of what may be the “learning unit” in complex real-world tasks.

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