Concept learning in mental defectives as a function of appropriate and inappropriate "attention sets."

Abstract

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.

Verbal cues in the transfer of concepts.

“…Cues have been shown to affect problem solving (Bensberg, 1958;Luchins, 1942;Maier, 1930). Even a brief verbal cue, e.g., "Don't be blind," can have a decided effect upon problem solving.…”

Reversal and nonreversal shift learning in normal children and retardates of comparable mental age.

“…However the House and Zeaman results are difficult to interpret in this respect due to the absence of a normal comparison group, and procedural differences from studies using normals. In addition 5s in their study received 125 overtraining trials on the original problem, a factor which could have served to retard nonreversal shift (Bensberg, 1958;Mackintosh, 1962).…”