Effects of Contextual Interference and Retention Intervals on Transfer

Abstract

The acquisition and transfer effects of contextual interference (Battig, 1979) were investigated with 54 female subjects over three retention intervals on a coincidence anticipation task. The experimental task involved predicting the arrival of a light at a predetermined intercept. A range effect was observed during both acquisition and transfer such that marked undershooting (early responses) was found for slower speeds and late responses were noted for faster speeds. As expected from prior work, responses under a blocked acquisition context (low contextual interference) were significantly more accurate and less variable than under a random context (high contextual interference). Significant improvement was found over-all from the first to the second block of trials. For multiple dependent measures there were no significant effects of retention interval by acquisition context. This ran counter to Battig's (1979) recommendation that the use of longer retention intervals would increase the effect of acquisition context on retention and intratask transfer. Recommendations are discussed for further investigations to observe the effects of long retention intervals on acquisition context.