Scripps Institution of Oceanography

SIO Reference 62-21. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of early-practice during training in a simple visual discrimination task. Four experimentally naive subjects completed a series of fiftyxexperimental sessions, and their data, based upon threshold estimates reduced from 50,000 observations, were examined for both short-term and long-term practice effects. Short-term effects were found to be limited to very early sessions, with essential stability of sensitivity having been reached by the fifth session. This result is consonant with other studies of training effects in the visual domain. Long term effects, up to the fiftieth session at least, were not found. It has been concluded that naive observers may confidently be assumed to have attained a stable level of performance after very few training sessions in tasks requiring a simple discrimination.