Associative Effects vs Differentiation: Comment on Saltz and Wickey's Reply to Birnbaum

Abstract

The addition of distinctive colors to verbal stimuli can facilitate learning. The question is whether this is due to color serving as an additional associative cue or because color aids in differentiation in some other way. Saltz and Wickey (1967) failed to find positive correlations between the order of difficulty of items in a list with colors as stimuli and other lists where the colors were combined with verbal components. An example is constructed to show that this finding is consistent with the Associative hypothesis.