Effects of instruction accuracy and feedback density on following elaborating and transmitting descriptions in conditional discrimination tasks

Abstract

 To evaluate the effects of instructional specificity (specific vs. generic) and feedback density (none, continuous, or delayed) on instruction following and rule elaboration, 30 college students were randomly assigned to one of six experiemental groups in order to perform a conditional discrimination task (first-order matching to sample) in Experiment 1. The results showed that instructional specificity and the elaborated descriptions. In experiment 2, we investigated the use of descriptions made by different subjects of the previous experiment as instructions of 30 undergraduate students. In general, we observed performances levels that oscillate between 12 correct responses and a wide sample of irrelevant descriptions. These results are discussed in terms of the correspondence between instructions, performance and descriptions in the transmission of descriptions, and the importance of the kind of protocol utilized to obtain those descriptions.