Tactual learning and cross-modal transfer of an oddity problem in young children

The ability to solve tactual oddity problems, and transfer of oddity learning across the visual and the tactual modalities, was studied in 3- to 8-year-old children (N = 294). Oddity tasks consisting of one odd and two equal objects were made from stimuli that were easily discriminated visually and tactually. The results showed that tactual oddity learning increased gradually with age. The growth in tactual performance begins later than visual, suggesting that children are more adept at encoding visual stimulus invariances or relational properties than tactual ones. Bidirectional cross-modal transfer of oddity learning was found, supporting the suggestion that such transfer occurs when training and transfer oddity tasks share a common vehicle dimension. The cross-modal effect also shows that oddity learning is independent of a specific modality-labeled perceptual context. Our results are consistent with the view that development of oddity learning depends on a single rather than a dual process, and that the oddity relation may be treated as an amodal stimulus feature.