Trainability of Abilities.

The feasibility of training selected abilities so as to facilitate transfer among tasks requiring these abilities and therefore reduce training time and increase personnel flexibility was investigated. Undergraduate college students participated in several studies of from one to five days duration. Experimental subjects received extensive practice with feedback provided on a set of tasks known to require the ability of being trained. Control subjects received no practice. All subjects were tested on transfer tasks which were dissimilar to the training tasks but which had earlier been demonstrated to require for successful task performance the abilities being trained. Results indicated that training significantly enhanced one of three of the abilities as measured by a standard ability test administered before and after training. There was no evidence that performance on the transfer of tasks was affected significantly as a result of training i.e., there was no transfer of training. Author