Learning as a function of haptic discriminability among items.

In Experiment 1, braille symbols for the letters A-J were found to be more haptically discriminable from one another than braille symbols for the letters K-T. In Experiment 2, subjects learned the names for the A-J symbols faster than for the K-T symbols. Experiment 3 demonstrated that faster learning of the names for the A-J than for the K-T symbols is attributable to characteristics of the symbol sets themselves (probably to the discriminability of the items from one another) and not to what they are called. The effects of discriminability on learning in these experiments are similar to those from experiments in which other modalities have been used.