Serial rote-learning: Incremental or all-or-none?

Abstract

If the associative connections in a serial list are acquired in an all-or-none fashion, rather than gradually with every trial adding an increment of associative strength, then changing the serial order of the middle items in the list during the course of practice should have no effect on the rate of learning the list as a whole or even of the particular items that have been interchanged. Thirty subjects learned a serial list by the anticipation method. The middle items of the list were reversed in serial order approximately half-way through the number of trials required for mastery. The subjects took no longer to learn the list and made no more errors than did 30 control subjects for whom there was no change in serial order. The serial-position curves of the two groups were almost identical. It was also shown that the learning “curves” of single items in the series, when plotted for individual subjects do not reveal a gradually increasing probability of the correct response, but show instead a sudden jump on one trial from the chance guessing level to a level close to 100 per cent, correct responses. The results are consistent with a non-incremental theory of serial learning.