Fotiadis Fotis A, Protopapas Athanassios
Department of Philosophy & History of Science, University of Athens, Ano Ilissia Campus, GR-157 71, Athens, Greece,
Mem Cognit. 2014 Jan;42(1):112-25. doi: 10.3758/s13421-013-0350-5.
Learning in a well-established paradigm of probabilistic category learning, the weather prediction task, has been assumed to be mediated by a variety of strategies reflecting explicit learning processes, such as hypothesis testing, when it is administered to young healthy participants. Higher categorization accuracy has been observed in the task when explicit processes are facilitated. We hypothesized that furnishing verbal labels for the cues would boost the formation, testing, and application of verbal rules, leading to higher categorization accuracy. We manipulated the availability of cue names by training separate groups of participants for three consecutive days to associate hard-to-name artificial auditory cues to pseudowords or to hard-to-name ideograms, or to associate stimulus intensity with colors; a fourth group remained unexposed to the cues. Verbal labels, cue individuation, and exposure to the stimulus set each had an additive effect on categorization performance in a subsequent 200-trial session of the weather prediction task using these auditory cues. This study suggests that cue nameability, when controlled for cue individuation and cue familiarity, has an effect on hypothesis-testing processes underlying category learning.
在一个成熟的概率性类别学习范式——天气预报任务中，当该任务应用于年轻健康的参与者时，人们认为其学习过程是由多种反映显性学习过程的策略介导的，比如假设检验。当显性过程得到促进时，在该任务中会观察到更高的分类准确率。我们假设为线索提供语言标签会促进语言规则的形成、检验和应用，从而提高分类准确率。我们通过连续三天训练不同组的参与者，将难以命名的人工听觉线索与伪词或难以命名的表意文字相关联，或者将刺激强度与颜色相关联，来操纵线索名称的可用性；第四组则不接触这些线索。在随后使用这些听觉线索进行的200次试验的天气预报任务中，语言标签、线索个体化以及对刺激集的接触对分类表现都有累加效应。这项研究表明，在控制线索个体化和线索熟悉度的情况下，线索的可命名性会对类别学习背后的假设检验过程产生影响。
