Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, United States of America.
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, United States of America.
Cognition. 2020 Jun;199:104238. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104238. Epub 2020 Feb 29.
Knowledge of predictive relations is a core aspect of learning. Beyond individual relations, we also represent intuitive theories of the world, which include interrelated sets of relations. We asked whether individual predictive relations learned incidentally in the same context become associatively bound and whether they spontaneously influence later learning. Participants performed a cover task while watching three sequences of events. Each sequence contained the same set of events, but differed in how the events related to each other. The first two sequences each had two strong predictive relations (R1 & R2, and R3 & R4). The third contained either a consistent pairing of relations (R1 & R2) or an inconsistent pairing (R1 & R3). We found that participants' learning of the individual relations in the third sequence was affected by pairing consistency, suggesting the mind associates relations to each other as part of the intrinsic way it learns about the world. This was despite participants' minimal ability to verbally describe most of the relations they had learned. Thus, participants spontaneously developed the expectation that pairs of relations should cohere, and this affected their ability to learn new evidence. Such associative binding of relational information may help us build intuitive theories.
知识的预测关系是学习的核心方面。除了个体关系，我们还代表了对世界的直观理论，其中包括相互关联的关系集。我们想知道在相同的背景下偶然学习到的个体预测关系是否会发生联想绑定，以及它们是否会自发地影响以后的学习。参与者在观看三个事件序列的同时执行覆盖任务。每个序列都包含相同的事件集，但事件之间的关系不同。前两个序列各有两个强预测关系（R1 和 R2，以及 R3 和 R4）。第三个序列包含一致的关系对（R1 和 R2）或不一致的关系对（R1 和 R3）。我们发现，参与者对第三个序列中个体关系的学习受到配对一致性的影响，这表明大脑将关系彼此关联，作为其学习世界的固有方式的一部分。尽管参与者几乎无法用言语描述他们所学的大部分关系，但这一点成立。因此，参与者自发地产生了这样的期望，即关系对应该一致，这影响了他们学习新证据的能力。这种关系信息的联想绑定可能有助于我们构建直观的理论。
