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| -Courtesy of westfordcomp.com- |
How do people learn to play a new instrument? Except for a select few individuals, the minor tone differences between a note, and the sharp or flat versions of those notes are almost indistinguishable. One could liken this inability to tell the notes apart to stimulus generalization. Through training and repeated exposure to these similar stimuli one can begin to differentiate between these minor differences. Take for example someone who has picked up a guitar for the very first time and is told the guitar is out of tune and it is their job to tune it. In this endeavour the amateur may spend upwards of half an hour trying to find and match the proper notes to tune the guitar. Take the same guitar and place it into the hands of a veteran guitar player with years of experience and their ear will be able to pick these minute differences in tone out so quickly that within seconds they will have the instrument tuned properly. This little snippet is just one practical application of stimulus discrimination, stimulus generalization, the differences between them, and how with proper training someone can learn to discriminate between very similar environmental stimuli.
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