AN APTITUDE-TREATMENT INTERACTION APPROACH TO TRANSFER WITHIN TRAINING

The issues of skill specificity and transfer of training were examined from an aptitude-treatment interaction approach. The current investig ations extended A. M. Sullivan's (1964) approach by using a procedural transfer task and training conditions that differed in amount of trai ning task practice and the degree of training task similarity to the t ransfer task. Two experiments were conducted with 232 college students . Experiment 1 examined the effects of a length-of-training manipulati on on reasoning ability and transfer task performance relationships, a nd on the amount of transfer. Experiment 2 evaluated the effects of 2 training tasks that differed in terms of similarity to the transfer ta sk on ability-performance relationships and the amount of transfer. Re sults suggest that Sullivan's approach partially generalizes to the ac quisition of procedural knowledge.