A cumulative method of paired-associate and serial learning

Abstract

A study is reported of a cumulative method (CM) of paired-associate presentation which exposes S to successive portions of a list before he proceeds to the entire list. A comparison was made of learning under this method with the standard method (SM), in which all pairs in the list appear equally often, once on each trial. Experiment I examined the two methods with materials of high and low meaningfulness (M). A prediction of an interaction between Methods and M was not supported; performance was significantly better under CM at both M levels. Experiment II, which used different materials, a longer list, and a warm-up task, tended to support the hypothesis of an interaction, with better learning under CM with low M but not with high M, but this effect was not significant. Experiment III examined the effects of the list order used in the cumulative expansion with lists of heterogeneous rated difficulty. A CM order in which the added items became successively easier (difficult-first) was compared with an order in which added items were progressively more difficult (easy-first). Both CM conditions were slightly inferior to SM; the difficult-first order of CM failed to surpass the easy-first order of CM. A comparison of SM with CM in serial learning was made in Exp. IV. No significant differences were obtained in recall either in the mean number of serially correct responses or in the mean number of correct responses regardless of correct serial placement. The lack of consistent differences in amount of learning between CM and SM throughout the present studies suggests that S can perform with about equal efficiency under widely different conditions in paired-associate and serial learning.