transfer of training
transfer of training, influence the learning of one skill has on the learning or performance of another. Will knowledge of English help a person learn German? Are skillful table-tennis (Ping-Pong) players generally good court-tennis players? Can a child who does not know how to add learn to multiply? Such questions represent the problems of transfer of training.
Kinds of transfer
Basically three kinds of transfer can occur: positive, negative, and zero. The following examples from hypothetical experiments, purposely uncomplicated by distracting detail, illustrate each. Suppose a group of students learn a task, B, in 10 practice sessions. Another group of equivalent students, who previously had learned another task, A, is found to reach the same level of performance on task B in only five practice sessions. Since the average number of practice sessions required to learn B was reduced from 10 to five, transfer of training from task A to task B is said to be positive (10 − 5 = +5). Many successful training aids, such as those that simulate the cockpit of an airplane and that are applied to teach people how to use instruments for flying blind without leaving the ground, produce positive transfer; when students who have preliminary training in such trainers are compared to those who do not, those with preliminary training almost invariably require less practice in achieving the desired level of skill.
Sometimes the effect of transfer of training is to hamper effectiveness in subsequent activity. If after learning task A a group of people need 15 practice sessions to learn task B whereas only 10 sessions are required for those without any previous training in task A, then task A is said to lead to negative transfer of training on task B (10 − 15 = −5). Having learned to drive on the right side of the road often is observed to produce negative transfer for the tourist from Japan or continental Europe or North America when he is travelling in Great Britain, where cars are to be driven on the left-hand side of the road.
The degree to which transfer of training occurs between two different tasks is often minimal and may be so small that it is called zero transfer. If learning task B with or without previous training in task A requires 10 practice sessions, then the amount of transfer from one task to the other is said to be zero (10 − 10 = 0). Learning to knit Argyle socks is apt to produce zero transfer of training in learning to sing an operatic aria in French.
Although in contemporary psychology transfer of training is a distinct topic of investigation with its own experimental designs and procedures for measurement, its implications pervade practically all of psychology, from conditioning to personality development. Ivan P. Pavlov discovered that when a dog is conditioned to salivate in response to a sound wave of 1,000 cycles per second, it will also salivate if it is next exposed to a tone of 900 cycles per second, although typically the volume of saliva will be slightly reduced. In this case, transfer of training occurs between two similar auditory stimuli; in general, phenomena of this sort are called stimulus generalization. At the very root of modern theories of personality development is the assumption that what a person learns during his childhood will show a pervasive degree of transfer to his adult behaviour. In some cases stimulus generalization mediates this transfer. Some cases of excessive fears may have their origins in unpleasant experiences during early life.
Education and transfer
The experimental study of transfer of training has historical roots in problems of educational practice. Educators in Western countries at the end of the 19th century widely endorsed the doctrine of formal discipline, contending that psychological abilities, called “mental faculties” by such philosophers as Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), could be strengthened, like muscles, through exercise. By learning geometry, one was expected to improve his ability to reason; studying Latin was held to “strengthen” the so-called faculty of memory, and so on. Although what contemporary educators have demoted from the doctrine to the theory of formal discipline once seemed reasonable to many, experimental tests have refuted it. When the reasoning abilities of groups of mathematics students in secondary schools were compared with those of other equally talented students who had not had the same mathematical training, no differences in general logical effectiveness were observed between the groups.
An alternative theory of identical elements was proposed in which it was postulated that transfer between activities would take place only if they shared common elements or features. Thus it was predicted that one’s training in addition would transfer to his ability to learn how to multiply. It was reasoned that both tasks share identical features, multiplication basically requiring a series of successive additions, and that both tasks demand the individual’s concentration.
But the identical-elements formulation soon came under attack when experimental results suggested that one’s understanding of general principles, rather than the presence of identical task elements, has substantial effects on transfer of training. In one notable experiment, two groups of boys practiced throwing darts at a target placed under about a foot of water. Only one group, however, was instructed about the principle that water bends (refracts) light. According to this principle, the apparent position of the target should vary with the depth of the water. When the target depth was reduced to four inches, the group that had been taught the general principle of refraction adjusted rapidly to the change and exhibited substantial positive transfer; the other boys showed comparative difficulty in learning to hit the target at the shallower level.
These formulations (formal discipline, identical elements, and general principles), when considered carefully, might be recognized as points of view rather than as rigorously specified theories that could lead to unequivocal predictions of the results of new experiments in transfer of training. For example, failure to demonstrate positive transfer between mathematical training and general reasoning ability could be attributed to ineffective teaching of mathematics; in such case, the results need not be interpreted as refuting the theory of formal discipline. If the then-traditional manner of teaching mathematics could be changed to emphasize logical thinking (rather than routinized application of formulas), it was argued that perhaps mathematical training could improve reasoning ability in general. Some theorists also suggested that the positive transfer observed to result when boys learned the principle of refraction was consistent with the hypothesis of identical elements; these theorists observed that a general principle may be considered an element common to many tasks. According to this line of reasoning, the group of boys who exhibited positive transfer with the shift to a new target depth shared the principle of refraction as an element in common with the previous task, along with those of aiming and throwing. By contrast, the youngsters who performed without the benefit of knowing about refraction were held to have gained positive transfer from throwing but to have suffered negative transfer as a result of aiming incorrectly.
Experimental analysis of transfer of training
The indeterminate character of the broad theoretical formulations offered to account for transfer of training and the often unsuccessful ways in which they were applied to the practical problems of classroom teaching led some psychologists to retreat to the laboratory in the hope of identifying more clear-cut, fundamental processes in transfer of training. As a result, a number of different transfer-of-training phenomena were discovered, several of which may be reviewed as follows.
Stimulus and response similarity
The method of paired-associate learning, in which a person is asked to learn to associate one syllable or word with another (e.g., complete–hot, safe–green, wild–soft), encouraged the investigation of the influence of stimulus and response similarity on transfer of learning. Typically these pairs of verbal items are presented to the laboratory subject so that the first, or stimulus, member (e.g., complete) is exposed alone, followed after a short interval by the second, or response, member (e.g., hot). The subject’s task is to respond to the stimulus term before the response term appears, as when an English-speaking student in learning French is supposed to respond to le livre with the book.
When two successive lists of paired associates are learned in which the stimulus elements are the same but the response terms are changed (e.g., complete–hot in the first list and complete–new in the second), negative transfer typically results. Apparently, in learning the second list the subject tends to respond to the stimulus term (e.g., complete) with the previously learned correct response term (e.g., hot), the result being interference with new learning to produce negative transfer. If he were learning the second list without having learned the first, the subject would not be so handicapped.
Another question concerns the sort of transfer that results when response terms are different and stimulus elements are similar but not identical; for example, entire is similar to complete. After one has learned complete–hot, the experimental evidence is that his ability to learn entire–new becomes definitely more difficult. Both entire and complete seem to have a tendency to evoke the response hot and to be incompatible with subsequently learning the association of entire with new. The principle that appears to operate in such situations is that the greater the similarity in stimulus elements, the greater the degree of negative transfer.
The influence of response (rather than stimulus) similarity on transfer of training is more complex; in paired-associate learning, the subject needs to learn the response term of each pair (response learning) and then to remember that it is linked with its appropriate stimulus partner (associative learning). When response terms are relatively difficult to learn (as in the case of unfamiliar or foreign words), the subject tends to profit considerably from learning the first list. But when response terms already have been learned (or are easy to learn), little if any positive transfer is likely to occur. The degree of transfer between lists that contain similar response terms depends both on how similar they are and on their level of difficulty; increasing the similarity between response terms is most likely to increase positive transfer when the response terms are relatively difficult to learn.
Although attempts have been made to formulate an all-embracing theory that would account for the effects of similarity among paired associates on transfer of training, a major obstacle that has prevented fully satisfying results is that the degree of positive or negative transfer is typically a product of many interacting influences beyond those of stimulus and response similarity. For example, the amount of training that the subject receives also has significant effects on transfer. When initial training is given on a simulated task (e.g., learning to operate a set of dummy controls in preparation for a second task of acquiring a complicated skill, such as flying an airplane), negative transfer effects frequently appear during the initial stages of learning the second task and then give way with further training to generally positive transfer effects.
Another stumbling block in developing theoretical explanations has to do with the meaning of the central concept of similarity. In such experiments as those in which the salivary reflex is conditioned to different auditory stimuli, similarity is measured in terms of physical stimulus properties (e.g., pitch or loudness); in other studies, as in paired-associate learning, similarity typically is expressed in terms of verbal meaning. In neither case has a universally adopted method yet been devised to measure similarity in a reliable and precise way; perhaps none can be, simply since there are so many different aspects of physical and linguistic or semantic similarity. Despite these difficulties, efforts to analyze transfer experimentally in terms of the properties of stimulus and response events have been productive in identifying conditions that can be varied to alter the direction and the degree of transfer of training.
Retroactive and proactive inhibition
Closely related to stimulus and response similarity are phenomena called retroactive inhibition and proactive inhibition; these demonstrate how forgetting seems to result from interfering activities.
In a study of retroactive inhibition, both the experimental and control groups of people learn task A (for example, a list of adjectives) and are tested for their ability to recall A after a specified time interval. The groups differ in what they are asked to do during the interval; the experimental group learns a similar task B (say, another list of words), while the control group is assigned some unrelated activity (for example, naming a series of coloured chips) designed to prevent them from rehearsing task A. The results of numerous studies of retroactive inhibition show that the experimental subjects typically are poorest in recalling information from task A. The interpolated activity, particularly a comparable one such as memorizing a second list of adjectives, apparently interferes with one’s ability to recall words from the first list. Habit competition, or what is sometimes called interference, between the items of the original and the interpolated word lists at the time of recall is considered to be one of the major sources of the negative transfer exhibited in retroactive inhibition.
Experimental designs for demonstrating proactive inhibition differ from those used for showing retroactive inhibition in that the experimental group learns task B before, instead of after, task A. Whereas B was a task that was interpolated between the learning and the recall of task A in the retroactive inhibition study, B is a task that precedes the learning of task A in the proactive inhibition study. To evaluate the effects on the experimental subjects of their having learned B prior to A, the control people are instructed to relax during the time the experimental group is learning B. Typically an experimental subject’s ability to recall from task A is inferior to that of a control person, the degree of inferiority depending in part on how similar the two tasks are; the greater the similarity, the poorer the recall tends to be. Although proactive inhibition, so called to indicate that it acts forward from the first-learned task to the second, produces appreciably less forgetting than does retroactive inhibition, they both support the theory that interference can produce forgetting (see memory: Theories of forgetting).
