Five experiments examined whether past elemental or configural learning affects the coding of novel compound stimuli in human learning. Experiments 1-2B confirmed, in an unspeeded task, that past experience can have a powerful influence on whether a novel compound stimulus is treated as a combination of separate elements or as an undivided whole. Experiment 3 revealed no evidence that humans are malleable in the use of their stimulus coding strategies if the task is speeded rather than unspeeded. Experiment 4 revealed that rule abstraction as measured by a postexperimental questionnaire was not related to the occurrence • of transfer. Implications for elemental and configural theories of associative learning are discussed.
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