Oddity and Discrimination Learning after Pretraining on a Nonrepeated Oddity Task

Abstract

128 kindergarten children learned an oddity task with no repeated stimuli until they reached one of the three criteria of 4/4, 8/8, and 8/8 + 20 correct responses, and then they were given either an oddity task with repeated stimuli or a discrimination task. With increasing numbers of pretraining trials, the repeated oddity learning became significantly easier but ease of the discrimination learning did not change significantly. These findings were interpreted as showing that attention to relational cues increased to a high level through learning the nonrepeated oddity task, whereas attention to absolute cues remained at almost the same level as in the control group with no pretraining.