SETTING SIMILARITY AND SUCCESSIVE DISCRIMINATION LEARNING BY CHILDREN

The experiment was designed to test the theoretical prediction that a decrease in the similarity of the settings, achieved by increasing the number of nonspatial dimensions varying between settings, decreases the difficulty of the successive discrimination problem. Three successive problems, differing as to the number of nonspatial dimensions that varied between settings, were administered to children. The pairs of stimuli in the two settings of Problem 3 differed with respect to three dimensions. They differed on two dimensions in Problem 2. One dimension varied between settings in Problem 1, the standard successive discrimination problem. As predicted, performance was highest on Problem 3, intermediate on Problem 2, and lowest on Problem 1. However, only the difference between Problems 3 and 1 was statistically significant. © 1969.