Contingency-descriptive texts as initial instructions in matching-to-sample tasks

Abstract

Four groups of college students were exposed to a second-order matching-to-sample task as well as intramodal, extramodal, and extradimensional transfer tests. The difference between groups was the absence (Group 1) or the addition of contingency-descriptive texts that referred to pertinent matching instances (Group 2), modalities (Group 3), and relations (Group 4) as initial instructions of the task. The three functional kinds of contingency-descriptive texts enhanced the accuracy of the performance during the training phase, principally those that referred to pertinent matching modalities and instances. In transfer tests, only the texts that referred to the pertinent matching-relations promoted high performances, with a little incremental tendency in the extradimensional transfer test. These results are discussed in relation to previous studies in which contingency-descriptive texts were added in other segments of the task.