Cognitive transfer theory, specifically Thorndike and Woodworth's theory of identical elements, was applied to music preferences. Two separate but related issues were examined in this study: (a) the effect of student familiarity through performance-oriented instruction as a means of increasing preference toward a genre of music and (b) the transfer of preference from taught to untaught pieces of an unfamiliar genre. Traditional African, Asian Indian, Japanese, and Hispanic songs with instrumental accompaniment were taught to 26 sixth-grade students over a 5-week period. A pretest-posttest listening test was administered, incorporating taught and untaught selections from the ethnic genres, as well as current popular and western classical pieces. Results indicated significant preference differences between the taught and untaught selection of the treatment genres. Although instruction increased preference for unfamiliar non-Western songs, there was no transfer of preference to untaught pieces of the same genre.
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