60 male mental defectives were given a pretraining task. Groups I and II learned to respond to color characteristics of visual stimuli, Group II being given additional training; Groups III and IV responded to form characteristics, Group IV receiving extra training; and Group V was given neither a color nor a form set. All groups then learned a new task with the form concept. If the mediating responses learned in pretraining were relevant, positive transfer was hypothesized; if not, negative transfer should occur. The ordering of performance from best to worst was predicted as IV, III, V, I, and II. There was no significant difference between Groups IV and III, but all other predictions were confirmed. From Psyc Abstracts 36:02:2JI37B.
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