Training for Optimal Strategic Skills

Abstract

The present research examined the impact of discrimination difficulty on the acquisition and transfer of strategic visual discrimination skills for meaningful stimuli. Participants were trained to discriminate between airplane silhouettes that varied in similarity. Some participants were trained to make difficult discriminations between similar airplane silhouettes, whereas others were trained to make easy discriminations between dissimilar airplane silhouettes. Participants were then transferred to making discrimination judgments at all similarity levels. The results suggest that initial training difficulty influences strategic skills even when participants have a priori strategies for processing stimuli. The findings improve our understanding of strategic skill acquisition, and training suggestions are discussed.