Some Effects of Amount of Verbal Pretraining and Availability of Verbal Labels upon Performance in a Discriminative Motor Task

Abstract

Adult Ss were given either 3, 6, 9, 15, or 30 trials of relevant or irrelevant verbal pretraining prior to 21 trials on a common discriminative motor task. Relevant pretraining facilitated motor performance significantly over-all, and increasing amounts of relevant pretraining significantly increased the amount of specific proactive facilitation. Within relevant pretraining conditions, significantly superior motor performance was related to the subsequent correct recall of verbal pretraining responses. Methodological problems and theoretical implications are discussed.