Abstract
This study was designed to assess the nature of dimensional dominance, as defined in terms of relative cue similarity, with 128 5- to 6-year-old children. They received either a perceptual pretraining or a control task, then performed a reversal or a non-reversal shift task for which the brightness dimension had either high dominance (BH) or low dominance (BL). The results were that (a) the subjects given BH task learned the reversal shift significantly faster and tended to learn the nonreversal shift more slowly than those given BL task, and (b) dimensional dominance did not interact with type of pretraining. These results were discussed in relation to perceptual and attentional theories of discrimination learning.