The Contribution of Falsework Fading to the Stimulus Generalization of a Skill

It has been established in the animal literature that context generalization gradients flatten over time—performance of a learned behavior is more likely to be expressed in novel situations after longer retention intervals. We attempted to extend this finding to stimulus generalization among human participants. One hundred twenty participants were trained to trace mirror-reversed shapes using either a blocked or variable schedule and then tested on a novel shape immediately, after 2 days or after 1 week. We found that variable training led to more effective transfer performance immediately, but while those in the blocked condition improved their transfer performance over time, those in the variable training condition declined. We believe that the improvement of the blocked trained group is due to a reduction in the strength of the “falsework” connection initially formed between the training stimulus and the new skill.