Transfer of experience with a class-schema to identification-learning of patterns and shapes.

The idea that experience provides the organism with some apperceptive mass which facilitates later perception and learning is an old one, with many variants and elaborations. The concept of a schema as an entity mediating the effects of past experience has been prominent in recent British psychology, chiefly because of the thinking of Bartlett (5) and his associates, as reflected in the summary and review of Oldfield and Zangwill (12). Woodworth (13) and Hebb (7) have used the term schema in a sense which is somewhat more restricted and more definite than Bartletts. After considering a number of experiments on memory for form, Woodworth concluded that a new configuration is usually remembered in terms of a schema, with correction. For example, a figure which may be described as a square with a nick on one side is easier to learn than