Which term describes when experience hinders learning in a new situation?

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Negative transfer happens when something you've already learned gets in the way of learning something new. The brain tries to apply familiar rules or patterns in a different context, but they don’t fit, so performance drops or errors increase. In reading, this can occur when a decoding rule from a familiar orthography is applied to a text with irregular spellings or different letter-sound correspondences, leading to mispronunciations or misreadings. It can also show up when a strategy that worked for a past task (like a quick skim) is forced onto a new task that requires careful attention, hindering comprehension. The idea contrasts with positive transfer, where prior knowledge helps with new learning. The other terms refer to different concepts: etymology is about word origins, inferential comprehension is about drawing inferences, and idiomatic expressions are fixed phrases with meanings not deducible from the individual words.