Transfer of learning is what happens when something you learned in one place helps you in another, like using classroom math to split a restaurant bill. It is far less automatic than most people assume. Skills tend to stay tied to the setting where they were learned unless the new situation looks alike underneath. So the useful question is less whether transfer happens and more what makes it happen, and that depends mostly on how something was learned.
The Four Main Kinds of Transfer
Positive transfer is when earlier learning makes new learning easier.1Wikipedia. Transfer of learning Negative transfer is when earlier learning interferes with new learning.2Wikipedia. Transfer of learning The same past experience can be an asset in one task and an obstacle in another. Moving from tennis to badminton, for example, can give you a head start in footwork but cause trouble with your wrist swing, because the racket motion that served you well is now slightly wrong.
Transfer can also be near or far. Near transfer happens when the new situation shares many elements with the one where you learned the skill.3Wikipedia. Transfer of learning Far transfer happens when the new situation is very different from where learning took place.4Wikipedia. Transfer of learning Driving a different car of the same kind is near transfer, and usually a positive one. Using statistics from school to judge a news headline is far transfer. Near transfer is the everyday kind, while far transfer is what most people hope schooling and brain training will deliver.
Near and far are better seen as a spectrum than as two boxes. Similarity can lie in content, setting, timing or purpose, so a task can be near in one way and far in another. Math in a classroom and math at a store involve the same content but very different settings. People often fail to use knowledge they clearly have when the setting changes, because knowing a fact and recognizing when it applies are separate skills.
In the middle of a new task, negative transfer shows up as a habit that keeps firing even though you know it’s wrong here, like reaching for the old gear shift pattern in an unfamiliar car. Positive and negative transfer often appear in the same task, so the useful question is which parts of your old skill fit and which you need to unlearn. Negative transfer is most likely when the new task looks the same as the old one but needs a different response. Typing on a new keyboard layout after years on another is a classic case.
How Transfer Works in the Mind
The oldest explanation is about shared elements. An early idea from 1901 holds that learning carries from one activity to another when the two share many common elements.5IAFOR Journal of Education. Transfer of Learning and Teaching: A Review of Transfer Theories and Effective Instructional Practices The more the training setting resembles the setting where you perform, the more transfer you get.6IAFOR Journal of Education. Transfer of Learning and Teaching: A Review of Transfer Theories and Effective Instructional Practices That’s because what practice builds is a set of links between particular cues, in a particular setting and frame of mind, and particular responses.7Psychological Review. The Effect of Practice in One Mental Function upon the Efficiency of Other Functions Change the cues and setting enough and those links may not fire.
This matters for how you practice. Rehearsing a skill in a quiet room can leave you unprepared for the same skill under noise, time pressure or nerves, because those conditions were never part of the cues you practiced with. A musician who only rehearses alone may stumble in front of an audience for this reason, and the fix is to rehearse under conditions that resemble the performance.
A competing view says transfer comes from learning general principles that apply across situations.8SNDT Women’s University. What Is Transfer of Learning and How Does It Work? Transfer is usually thought to require seeing what is the same underneath two problems even when they look different on the surface.9Educational Psychologist. Seeing Deep Structure From the Interactions of Surface Features Experts seem to spot that hidden sameness by noticing how surface details relate to one another.10Educational Psychologist. Seeing Deep Structure From the Interactions of Surface Features So beginners tend to sort problems by what they look like, while experts sort them by how they work. The two views fit together: shared elements explain why near transfer is easy, and general principles explain the rarer cases of far transfer.
Surface features are the things you notice first, like the objects, names and story in a problem. Deep structure is the relationship underneath, such as how quantities change together or what has to be found. Take two word problems, one about trains and one about pipes filling a tank. Both can be rate problems. A learner focused on trains versus pipes sees two unrelated tasks, while a learner who sees the rate structure solves the second with the method from the first.
Comparison is one way to build that understanding. When people compare two examples that share a structure, they extract the common pattern and can store it as a general template.11Encyclopedia of the Human Brain. Analogical Reasoning, Psychology of People who compared two similar stories were better at later recalling and using the shared idea than people who read only one.12Encyclopedia of the Human Brain. Analogical Reasoning, Psychology of Actively comparing two examples also works better than reading them separately.13Encyclopedia of the Human Brain. Analogical Reasoning, Psychology of
What Happens in the Brain
The front-most part of the brain becomes more active when people transfer rules, and more so for complex rules.14PubMed Central. Complex Rule Transfer Recruits Rostral Prefrontal and Ventromedial Prefrontal Neural Networks That fits its role: this area is needed for learning abstract rules and spotting analogies.15PubMed Central. Complex Rule Transfer Recruits Rostral Prefrontal and Ventromedial Prefrontal Neural Networks A network linking the lower middle front brain with a memory center grows more active as people apply rules to new material, especially harder ones.16PubMed Central. Complex Rule Transfer Recruits Rostral Prefrontal and Ventromedial Prefrontal Neural Networks People whose memory center and this frontal area are more strongly connected at rest tend to transfer better.17PubMed Central. Transfer of learning relates to intrinsic connectivity between hippocampus, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and large-scale networks
These findings point to two jobs working together. Memory supplies what you already know, and the rule-handling front region decides how it applies to the new problem. If either part is weak, transfer can suffer, for example by knowing the facts but failing to see which one fits.
The front of the brain also stores many different mental templates for tasks and switches between them.18PubMed Central. A modeling framework for adaptive lifelong learning with transfer and savings through gating in the prefrontal cortex Computer models of this switching show how it lets old learning speed up new tasks while protecting older memories.19PubMed Central. A modeling framework for adaptive lifelong learning with transfer and savings through gating in the prefrontal cortex
Do Brain Games, Chess or Music Make You Smarter Overall
An early study reported that practicing a demanding memory game improved scores on reasoning tests, with more practice bringing larger gains.20PubMed Central. Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory Later, larger reviews did not hold this up.
Across many studies, memory training showed no convincing gains in reasoning, verbal ability, reading or arithmetic when compared with a fair comparison group.21PubMed Central. Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of “Far Transfer” How much people improved at the trained game had no link to gains elsewhere.22PubMed Central. Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of “Far Transfer” These programs give short-term gains at the trained task that do not carry over to real-world thinking skills.23PubMed Central. Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of “Far Transfer” In middle-aged adults, eight weeks of a memory game improved game scores but produced neither near nor far gains and no brain changes on scans.24PubMed Central. Adaptive working memory training does not produce transfer effects in cognition and neuroimaging For chess, music and memory training alike, gains largely vanished once groups were compared with people doing some other engaging activity.25PubMed Central. Does Far Transfer Exist? Negative Evidence From Chess, Music, and Working Memory Training Excitement and expectations about a new activity can make people score better regardless of the training.
Part of the reason may be that working memory capacity behaves as a fairly stable trait that predicts reasoning ability. A stable trait is hard to shift with weeks of practice, and practicing one task mostly sharpens strategies specific to that task.
Practice on any task makes you better at that task, so improved game scores are expected. What matters is whether the gain shows up on something you never practiced, like reasoning tests or daily tasks.
The comparison group decides what a study means. If a trained group is compared with people doing nothing, any improvement could come from the novelty and attention of taking part. Comparing with a group doing another engaging activity separates the effect of the training from the effect of being involved, and under that fairer comparison the gains largely vanished.
This gives you a way to judge a brain-training app’s claims. Ask whether it was tested against people doing another engaging activity, not doing nothing. Look for gains on everyday tasks that were never practiced. And if you like chess or music, learn them for their own sake, not to raise general intelligence.
How to Make Learning Carry Over
Mix different kinds of problems or examples instead of practicing one kind in a block. Across studies, mixing examples helped people both remember them and classify new examples they had never seen.26Review of Education. A systematic review of interleaving as a concept learning strategy In a university physics course, students given mixed homework did clearly better on surprise tests with new problems than those given blocked homework.27PubMed Central. Interleaved practice enhances memory and problem-solving ability in undergraduate physics But mixed practice felt harder on the homework itself, so it can seem to be working worse while it is working better.28PubMed Central. Interleaved practice enhances memory and problem-solving ability in undergraduate physics
The reason is that with blocked practice you know which method to use before reading each problem, so you only repeat it. Mixed practice forces you to decide which method fits, which is the same decision you face on a real test or in life.
To try it, shuffle flashcards from several chapters together instead of finishing one chapter at a time. In math, put different problem types in one set so you must pick the method before solving. Expect the first sessions to feel slower and messier, and judge the method by how you do on new problems later.
Explaining new ideas to yourself helps too. Explaining steps to yourself helped children carry a math procedure to new problems, whether or not they were first taught it directly.29PubMed. Promoting transfer: effects of self-explanation and direct instruction Students who explained worked math examples to themselves did better on new word problems, especially those whose explanations dug into why steps worked.30Japanese Psychological Research. Effects of self‐explanation as a metacognitive strategy for solving mathematical word problems But in one study on reasoning puzzles, self-explanation prompts did not help transfer and even lowered practice scores.31Frontiers in Education. Effects of Self-Explaining on Learning and Transfer of Critical Thinking Skills So it helps most when it targets the reasons behind steps, not as an add-on to every task.
To do it well, ask after each worked step why this step and not another. Say how the example connects to something you already know, and try to state the general rule in your own words.
Comparison can be used deliberately as well. Study two different-looking examples of the same idea side by side and write down what they share beneath the surface. Then look for a third case in your own life that fits.
Setting matters too. Learning an idea only in the abstract makes it hard to know when to use it in real life.32Journal of Academic Librarianship. The Effect of a Situated Learning Environment in a Distance Education Information Literacy Course Knowledge also gains meaning by being used in different situations.33Journal of Academic Librarianship. The Effect of a Situated Learning Environment in a Distance Education Information Literacy Course
34Journal of Academic Librarianship. The Effect of a Situated Learning Environment in a Distance Education Information Literacy CourseWhen Old Learning Gets in the Way
Earlier learning can impose a cost on later learning.35Oxford University Press. Interference Theory It happens because old ways of encoding cues carry over and disrupt storing the new pairings.36Elsevier. A cognitive interpretation of negative transfer and forgetting of paired associates And when the same cue is tied to two different answers, recalling the right one becomes harder.37Elsevier. A cognitive interpretation of negative transfer and forgetting of paired associates
Everyday cases are easy to find. Driving on the other side of the road abroad pulls you toward old habits, because the situation looks familiar but needs the opposite response. Mixing up words between two similar languages happens because the same cue, a meaning, has two different answers stored. Using old software shortcuts in a new program can trigger the wrong action, because the screen looks like the one you know.
Similar tasks cause the most trouble. When tasks are completely different, the old response isn’t triggered at all, so there is little to interfere. When they look alike but need different responses, the old habit is cued strongly and competes with the new one. Someone who knows one language well may find a closely related one harder to keep separate than an unrelated one.
You can reduce the problem. Practice the new response in contrast with the old one so the differences stand out, and space out learning of two similar things. Expect early slips and treat them as a sign of overlap.
Mindset, Motivation and Age
One proposed framework names open-minded learning, tailored support, a growth mindset, a forgiving environment, serious commitment and learning several skills at once as drivers of broad thinking gains.38CrossRef API / Human Development. A Novel Theoretical Life Course Framework for Triggering Cognitive Development across the Lifespan These factors tend to decline from childhood into older adulthood as people specialize.39CrossRef API / Human Development. A Novel Theoretical Life Course Framework for Triggering Cognitive Development across the Lifespan In practice, open-minded learning means being willing to try approaches that differ from what you already do. A forgiving environment tolerates mistakes, which makes it easier to try and fail. Learning several skills at once means building varied abilities rather than narrowing to one. In case studies of two graduate writers over six years, their mindsets shaped whether they used feedback in later writing.40BYU ScholarsArchive. How Mindsets Shape Response and Learning Transfer: A Case of Two Graduate Writers