Effects
of overtraining on conditional discrimination shifts
T. Sugimura & Y. Hirose |
College
students were trained on a conditional discrimination problem consisting
of two stimulus dimensions and a conditional cue dimension, and then
were given conditional intradimensional (ID) or extradimensional
(ED) shift. The combinations of stimulus dimensions and conditional
cues in the original and shift discriminations were the same for
ID shift and different for ED shift. When Ss were trained on the
original discrimination to reach the criterion (8/8) no significant
difference was found between ID and ED shifts. When Ss were overtrained,
ID shift learning was significantly faster than ED shift, which indicated
that ID shift tended to be easy and ED shift difficult after overtraining.
The results may be explained by assuming that what is learned in
conditional discrimination changes from the connections between stimulus
values and conditional cues into those between stimulus dimensions
and cues with increasing amount of training.
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