A developmental analysis of the comparative difficulty level of oddity and two-choice discrimination learning in children

Abstract

This investigation was designed to compare the relative difficulty of the oddity, one irrelevant dimension discrimination, and two irrelevant dimension discrimination tasks, with colour or form as the relevant dimension. Subjects were seventy-two children in three age levels: preschool, kindergarten, and grade 2. All subjects were given planometric colour, form, and size pretraining followed by stereometric oddity, one irrelevant dimension discrimination, and two irrelevant dimension discrimination training in a counterbalanced order. The Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices was administered individually following the last experimental task. -- The data were analysed by nonparametric statistics and the results showed significant main effects for age, task, and dimension. The findings of this study show considerable agreement with and extend the results of other studies in this area.