Hofmann Wiebke, Kinder Annette, Pekár Judit
Institute of Psychology of Learning, Department of Education and Psychology, Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Corporate Member of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt Universität Zu Berlin, Charité Campus Mitte (CCM), Berlin, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2024 Jan 30;14:1287429. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1287429. eCollection 2023.
It has long been debated how humans estimate the numerosity of sets of elements and what role continuous visual properties play in this process. The dot comparison task, in which the more numerous of two dot arrays must be selected, is a dominant method to investigate this phenomenon. It has been shown that the visual properties of the two dot patterns strongly influence the comparison. This influence can be systematically investigated by manipulating visual properties congruently and incongruently with numerosity. However, it remains unclear how learning and prior experience affect the influence of the visual properties. To address this question, we introduced feedback into the classical dot comparison task: during the learning phase, participants in the experimental group received feedback after each trial indicating whether their answer was correct whereas participants in the control group did not. After the learning phase, neither group received feedback. The convex hull of the dot patterns and the average dot diameter were manipulated congruently and incongruently with numerosity. Our results show that feedback had no effect on overall performance. However, when manipulated separately, dot diameter no longer affected performance in the experimental group after the learning phase, but it did in the control group. Moreover, this effect remained visible even when diameter and convex hull were manipulated simultaneously. This pattern of results is consistent with the notion of sensory integration which proposes that weights are assigned to different visual cues and that numerical judgments depend on an additive combination of these weights. We also found a correlation between performance on an arithmetic task and performance on trials in which dot size was manipulated incongruently with numerosity. However, there were no correlations between an inhibition task and performance in the dot comparison task. Taken together, the current results suggest that learning with feedback may affect some visual properties but not others. Future studies should further investigate a wider range of visual properties to examine which of them can be influenced by learning and under what conditions learning occurs.
长期以来，人们一直在争论人类如何估计元素集合的数量，以及连续视觉属性在这一过程中扮演什么角色。点比较任务是研究这一现象的主要方法，在该任务中，必须从两个点阵列中选择数量较多的那个。研究表明，两个点图案的视觉属性会强烈影响比较结果。通过与数量一致和不一致地操纵视觉属性，可以系统地研究这种影响。然而，学习和先前经验如何影响视觉属性的影响仍不清楚。为了解决这个问题，我们在经典的点比较任务中引入了反馈：在学习阶段，实验组的参与者在每次试验后都会收到反馈，表明他们的答案是否正确，而对照组的参与者则没有。学习阶段结束后，两组都不再收到反馈。点图案的凸包和平均点直径与数量一致和不一致地进行操纵。我们的结果表明，反馈对整体表现没有影响。然而，当分别操纵时，学习阶段后，点直径在实验组中不再影响表现，但在对照组中仍有影响。此外，即使同时操纵直径和凸包，这种影响仍然可见。这种结果模式与感觉整合的概念一致，该概念提出，权重被分配给不同的视觉线索，数字判断取决于这些权重的相加组合。我们还发现算术任务的表现与点大小与数量不一致操纵的试验中的表现之间存在相关性。然而，抑制任务与点比较任务的表现之间没有相关性。综上所述，目前的结果表明，有反馈的学习可能会影响一些视觉属性，但不会影响其他属性。未来的研究应该进一步调查更广泛的视觉属性，以检查其中哪些可以受到学习的影响，以及在什么条件下会发生学习。
