RULE LEARNING AND TRANSFER AS A FUNCTION OF AGE AND STIMULUS STRUCTURE
WILLIAM L. KING · Child Development · 1968
Previous research suggested that Ss learn bidimensional classification rules by encoding the stimuli into the 4 combinations of the presence and absence of the 2 relevant attributes and learning to assign these combinations to the 2 response classes. The present study examined and rejected the hypothesis that the difficulty of encoding each combination was a function of the number of unique patterns comprising it, as would be predicted by a theory restricted to associative processes. The results indicated that Ss as young as 6 years old solved these problems by generating and testing hypotheses, since the number of patterns comprising each combination had no effect on its dificulty. Moreover, an inverse relation between initial difficulty and transfer was observed.