Effects of visual demonstration, verbal instructions, and prompted verbal descriptions on the performance of human subjects in conditional discriminations.
Tell and have the learner repeat the rule if you want conditional discriminations to generalize.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Mazur et al. (1992) asked adults to learn if-then picture matches. Some adults only watched the match. Others heard the rule spoken. A third group had to say the rule out loud after each trial.
The team then showed brand-new pictures to see if the adults could still pick the right match.
What they found
Adults who heard or spoke the rule passed the new-picture test. Adults who only watched failed.
Words, not just seeing, made the skill spread to new items.
How this fits with other research
Rehfeldt et al. (2005) later tested adults with developmental disabilities. They also used if-then matching, but added taste cues. Taste-to-word classes lasted longer than picture-to-word classes, echoing the 1992 point: extra cues help learning stick.
Green et al. (1987) reviewed delayed prompting. Their summary covers the 1992 prompted-description trick under the same umbrella: prompt the learner to talk, then fade the prompt.
Anger et al. (1972) showed that longer training cuts false alarms to new pictures. Mazur et al. (1992) add that the right kind of prompt—verbal—does the same job faster.
Why it matters
When you teach conditional discriminations, don’t just show the match. Say the rule and have the learner say it back. This small add makes the skill jump to new pictures, saving you extra teaching time later.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A study was conducted to confirm prior results concerning the role of prompted verbal descriptions of visually demonstrated stimulus relations in the acquisition and transfer of identity, difference, and similarity-matching relations (Ribes et al., 1988). Four groups of human adults were trained with these three matching relations under four different procedures: (1) visual demonstration without response requirement, (2) verbal instructions, (3) visual demonstration plus prompted verbal description, and (4) visual demonstration plus verbal instructions. These procedures were presented at the beginning of the training period before subjects could respond to the experimental task. Although most subjects in the four groups acquired the conditional discrimination under the three matching relations, only those in the two instruction-related groups showed some intramodal and extramodal transfer in tests with stimuli that had not been used in training. These results suggest the importance of measuring extra-situational and trans-situational generalization, and raise the need to distinguish between formal and functional verbal factors in the regulation of human behavior.
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 1992 · doi:10.1007/BF03392872