Speeded discrimination training, fluency and generalization in the laboratory: training fluency and promoting generalization using choice reaction time
Date
2000
Authors
Peters, Chris Deborah
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Abstract
The primary objectives of the present study were to assess the degree to which generalization would occur to novel, untrained stimulus discriminations following fluency training on a variety of choice reaction time (CRT) tasks. A choice reaction time paradigm and a program called "Speeded Discrimination Training" (SDT), which utilized a computer screen and a two-key response box, were used to deliver the probe and training stimuli to the four female participants who were given alternating probe and training sessions in this study. All participants were trained on various decks in tasks comprising homonym phrases, letter pairs, synonym and antonyms pairs, and sentences for which they received per cent correct and rate correct per minute (RCPM) feedback, upon which goals and monetary reinforcement were set and distributed. This study differs from previous work in the author's laboratory as the tasks and exemplars employed in the present study were more difficult, variable and diverse. The tasks were more difficult in that they required the participants to make grammatical discriminations among the stimuli being presented rather than simply discriminating among highly familiar word categories, letters, or numbers as in studies carried out by Kristofferson (1977) and Pashler and Baylis (1991). Evidence for generalization from trained decks to novel, untrained decks within tasks, as well as from trained tasks to untrained tasks, was revealed upon examination of the various figures produced from the participants' probe and training data. Generalization was demonstrated by participants starting at higher levels on successive training decks, for a particular task, than the decks in previous training sessions; participants requiring less time for successive training decks within and across tasks to reach, or exceed, previous RCPM levels; and participants showing improvement trends across the novel decks in successive probe sessions, as well the tasks that had not yet been trained and only seen in previous probe sessions. Overall, fluency-based training appeared to be successful in promoting generalization within, and in some instances, across speeded discrimination tasks.