Transfer based on stimulus object’s morphology or in textual properties

Abstract

Five groups of the children and five groups of college students were trained on second- order, matching-to-sample tasks. Matching-to-sample training involved identify with respect to the physical and modal properties of the stimuli, or identify with respect to their linguistic categories (animal, object, or vegetable). Transfer tests then included changes of instance, stimulus modality, relation, dimension or combined changes of instance and modality. The tasks trained on all five tasks had the best performances. Transfer seemed more difficult when the transfer tests involved changes of dimension and relation, especially when the subjects were trained on only one task. These results are discussed in terms of descending-vertical transfer and the difficulty of identifying texts according to geometrical properties (as opposed to linguistic ones).