Transfer of Training in a Fault Diagnosis Task

Abstract

Two experiments on the learning and transfer of the hypothesis testing strategy of testing easy-to-test hypotheses first were conducted. The first experiment found that this strategy could be discovered and used in a very simple fault diagnosis task but not in a slightly more complicated task. Subjects who learned the strategy in the simple task were able to transfer it to the more complicated task. The second experiment showed far transfer: The learning of this principle of hypothesis testing transferred to a task sharing no surface features with the training task. It is concluded that it is worthwhile to train people on the use of fault diagnosis strategies.