Concept Identification with and without Blank Trials
Veronika Coltheart · Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology · 1973
The blank trials technique introduced by Levine (1966) has been of considerable importance in the study of concept identification and human discrimination learning, as it provides a means of identifying the hypotheses generating choice responses. However, this technique involves the interpolation between normal feedback trials of several trials during which no feedback concerning the correctness of a subject's responses is given. An experiment was conducted to study the comparability of concept identification with and without blank trials. No differences in trials to criterion, number of errors, or in presolution latencies were observed. These results tend to justify inferences about normal concept identification from blank trial data, and they also have some implications concerning the role of memory in concept identification.