ACQUISITION AND TRANSFER OF SKILLED PERFORMANCE - ARE VISUAL-DISCRIMINATION SKILLS STIMULUS-SPECIFIC

The authors examine how the difficulty of initial training influences the acquisition and transfer of both stimulus-specific knowledge and s trategic knowledge not tied to specific stimuli. Participants were ask ed to discriminate between random polygon stimuli. The order of exposu re to very similar and less similar discriminations was varied, in whi ch difficulty of discriminations was defined by the similarity of the stimuli being discriminated. Participants were then transferred to mak ing discriminations between a completely novel set of random polygons. Exposure to discriminations between highly similar stimuli led to eve ntually faster and more accurate discriminations and superior transfer performance on novel stimuli. The results are explained by a theory o f skill acquisition that includes both stimulus-specific knowledge and strategic knowledge that is driven by exposure to specific stimuli, b ut is not stimulus specific.