Facilitating mentally retarded children's relational learning through novelty-familiarity training.

The relationship between novelty-familiarity learning and oddity-matching learning by developmentally young (MA 3 to 6 years) mentally retarded children was investigated. Delayed oddity-matching was shown to be easier to learn than simultaneous oddity-matching. This difference was attributed to the influence of the novelty-familiarity dimension. In a transfer task simultaneous problem performance was higher for subjects initially trained on delayed problems than for subjects initially trained on the identical simultaneous task. Results showed that learning one type of relational problem increases attentional sensitivity to other types of relations, suggesting an efficient training strategy. Finally, data were presented to support the argument that novelty-familiarity and oddity-matching are not simply variants of a common underlying mechanism but differ in an important respect.