Effect of conditional discrimination learning on subsequent multiple-cue discrimination in children

Thirty-six five-year old children were exposed to a visual multiple-cue discrimination task and to a test which assessed the control over responding acquired by the cues. The training and the test followed a treatment that varied between three groups of twelve children. A conditional discrimination task and a multiple-cue discrimination task were arranged in two different groups. No pretraining was given to a third group. Conditional discrimination training led to fewer errors on the test that followed the multiple-cue task than each of the other treatments. There was no reliable different between the numbers of errors after the other treatments. The results can be explained by an observing response account of transfer in discrimination learning.