The effects of type and amount of pretraining on transfer in concept formation

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of 2 types of dir ected attention pretraining, a form of stimulus predifferentiation, on imme diate- and delayed-transfer tasks in concept identification. In both experi ments, the participants received either the ''seeing-and-discriminating'' o r ''seeing" technique of pretraining, except for those assigned to the cont rol group. The participants received different amounts of pretraining. In t he first experiment, participants were required to learn new concepts from the same category for the delayed-transfer task, whereas in the second expe riment, the delayed-transfer task involved concepts from a different catego ry. Among the major findings in both experiments are that the pretraining m ethods resulted in positive transfer on all transfer tasks. In general, the seeing-and-discriminating method yielded a more positive transfer than the seeing technique. Maximal positive transfer effects were found with a smal l number of trials. The implications of the findings for understanding the effectiveness of various training methods used for problem solving are disc ussed.