Document Type

Thesis

Date of Degree Completion

Fall 1972

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Don Guy

Second Committee Member

Max Zwanziger

Third Committee Member

Philip Tolin

Abstract

Performance on a concept learning task was investigated by employing familiar and unfamiliar stimulus patterns, three pretraining conditions, and two conceptual rules. Subjects were given either observation or preliminary paired associate practice in labeling shapes with meaningful or nonsense labels and were then required to solve a concept learning task to criterion. It was found that tasks involving familiar stimuli were learned more rapidly than those involving unfamiliar stimuli, and that meaningful verbal pretraining for unfamiliar stimuli resulted in more rapid learning than observation or nonsense label pretraining.

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