Department of Communication Science and Disorders, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2021 Jun;28(3):898-909. doi: 10.3758/s13423-021-01878-0. Epub 2021 Feb 2.
Category learning is a fundamental process in human cognition that spans the senses. However, much still remains unknown about the mechanisms supporting learning in different modalities. In the current study, we directly compared auditory and visual category learning in the same individuals. Thirty participants (22 F; 18-32 years old) completed two unidimensional rule-based category learning tasks in a single day - one with auditory stimuli and another with visual stimuli. We replicated the results in a second experiment with a larger online sample (N = 99, 45 F, 18-35 years old). The categories were identically structured in the two modalities to facilitate comparison. We compared categorization accuracy, decision processes as assessed through drift-diffusion models, and the generalizability of resulting category representation through a generalization test. We found that individuals learned auditory and visual categories to similar extents and that accuracies were highly correlated across the two tasks. Participants had similar evidence accumulation rates in later learning, but early on had slower rates for visual than auditory learning. Participants also demonstrated differences in the decision thresholds across modalities. Participants had more categorical generalizable representations for visual than auditory categories. These results suggest that some modality-general cognitive processes support category learning but also suggest that the modality of the stimuli may also affect category learning behavior and outcomes.
类别学习是人类认知中的一个基本过程，它跨越了感官。然而，对于支持不同模态学习的机制，我们仍然知之甚少。在当前的研究中，我们在同一批个体中直接比较了听觉和视觉类别学习。30 名参与者（22 名女性；18-32 岁）在一天内完成了两个基于规则的单维类别学习任务——一个使用听觉刺激，另一个使用视觉刺激。我们在第二个实验中使用一个更大的在线样本（N = 99，45 名女性，18-35 岁）复制了结果。这两个模态中的类别结构相同，以方便比较。我们比较了分类准确性、通过漂移扩散模型评估的决策过程，以及通过泛化测试得到的类别表示的泛化能力。我们发现，个体在听觉和视觉类别上的学习程度相似，并且在两个任务中的准确性高度相关。参与者在后期学习中有相似的证据积累率，但在早期，视觉学习的速度比听觉学习慢。参与者在跨模态的决策阈值上也表现出差异。参与者对视觉类别有比听觉类别更具类别可泛化的表示。这些结果表明，一些模态通用的认知过程支持类别学习，但也表明刺激的模态可能会影响类别学习的行为和结果。
