Role of Contextual Cues in Determining Transfer of Oddity Rule in Children

Abstract

60 kindergarten and 60 first grade children were trained on an oddity problem with perceptual (P) or conceptual (C) attribute for a fixed number of trials (30). After mastering the training problem, the subjects were randomly assigned to either an intradimensional (CC or PP group) or an extra-dimensional (CP or PC group) oddity shift. The transfer performance showed CC > PC > PP = CP group. These differences were attributed to the pattern hypotheses sampled at the start of transfer. Subjects who had acquired a conceptual oddity rule in the training had a strong tendency to sample hypotheses by the prior rule, but subjects under conditions where a perceptual-oddity rule was relevant tended to make a shift to a cue from new (conceptual oddity) rule. The older children yielded more of such a sampling mode than the younger children did, and the former were easily able to abandon a dis-confirmed rule and sample hypotheses from the relevant rule domain.