Efectos de la variación modal de los estímulos en la adquisición y transferencia de una discriminación condicional en humanos adultos

Abstract

Two experiments were carried out to evaluate the errects of increasing the number of discriminative modalities and randomly varying non-discriminative modalities of stimuli in a second-order matching to sample task with human adults. Form, color, hue, intermittency, size and rotation were used as stimulus modalities in similarity and difference matching to sample tasks, under unimodal and bimodal criteria. Three training sequences were used in both experiments: with irrelevant stimulus modalities being constant in the first study and randomly varying in the second study. In the first experiment the unimodal-bimodal training sequence produced the highest acquisition, transfer and maintenance performances. In the second experiment, unimodal-unimodal-bimodal and bimodal-bimodal training sequences produce higher acquisition and maintenance scores, transfer performance being similar in all groups. Subjects that participated in both experiments showed the best performance in the second study, suggesting that training sequenced according to task difficulty was the main determinant for acquisition and transfer of conditional discrimination performance, overshadowing the physical properties of stimuli.