For over 40 years, the contextual interference effect in motor learning has been investigated. While the difference between levels of contextual interference experienced under blocked and random practice are well established, the difference in the levels of contextual interference experienced under serial and random practice is still ambiguous.…

In almost all daily activities fingers of both hands are used in coordinated succession. The present experiments explored whether learning in such tasks pertains not only to the overall sequence spanning both hands but also to the constituent sequences of each hand. In a serial reaction time task, 2 repeating hand-related sequences were…

Two experiments were conducted to examine the possibility that numbering might have an effect on learning of lists composed of more meaningful and highly available materials, words, and to further explore the possibility that different strategies may be employed in learning the two types of lists. In Experiment 1, 40 female students from…

Findings were: it did not matter whether the seriation involved the hues used in subsequent tasks or other hues; the presence or absence of reinforcement during perceptual pretraining did not affect pretraining, training, or transposition behavior; and seriation pretraining produced increased transposition in the intermediate-hue problem.…

A theory of practice in high-proficiency skills such as speech production is proposed, involving activation of a hierarchy of nodes in serial order within an output system of behavior. Increased flexibility with practice, response mechanism transfer in skills, motor equivalence, automaticity, and speed-accuracy trade-off are discussed. (Author/CM)

Results indicate that when subjects are given explicit instructions as to the interlist relationship and when the transfer list is presented at a relatively slow rate, both positive and negative transfer effects may be obtained in the serial/paired-associate paradigm. (Author)

The efficacy of small group instructional programs in classificatory, seriation, and combined class/series skills was evaluated for a sample of 60 urban, middle-class, 4- to 5-year-old children in a transfer of training design. Significant curriculum-specific transfer effects were found for the seriation instructional condition, whereas little…

Reported is a study of the teaching and transfer of seriation strategies using non-visual variables with first-grade children. Sixty first-grade children were administered Piaget's stick seriation task and classified as stage I (non-seriators) and stage III (seriators). From this group 24 were chosen and assigned to strategy treatment groups.…

A primary purpose of the present study was the evaluation of possible differences in process between the recall and anticipation methods of serial learning. (Author)

A discussion of research on the use of the task analysis procedures by both content specialists and instructional psychologists in instructional design. (HB)