Development of oddity concept learning in children: an evidence of intra-modal transfer

Abstract

We investigated the formation of oddity concept in human subjects by means of multiple oddity discrimination tasks. Four human subjects were concurrently trained to discriminate an odd object from three identical objects in a row where the former one was reinforced. Discrimination tasks were gradually increased (e.g. 12 oddity tasks, 30 oddity tasks). Two out of four human subjects rapidly learned the acquisition tasks with higher accuracy rate suggesting that they seemed to avoid responding based on the strategy of the item-specific learning and to adopt relational processing. This assumption was stronger when robust transfer of learning with higher accuracy in baseline training performances was showed by them in transfer test 1 and transfer test 2. Although these findings offer evidence of relational oddity learning in humans, the possibility of the effect of stimulus generalization and the sense of perceptual oddity could not be excluded.