Center for Studies of Psychological Application, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China.
Department of Psychology, Molecular, Cellular and Integrative Neurosciences Program, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA.
Br J Dev Psychol. 2024 Nov;42(4):495-510. doi: 10.1111/bjdp.12509. Epub 2024 Jul 16.
When learning new categories, do children benefit from the same types of training as adults? We compared the effects of feedback-based training with observational training in young adults (ages 18-25) and early school aged children (ages 6-7) across two different multimodal category learning tasks: conjunctive rule based and information integration. We used multimodal stimuli that varied across a visual feature (rotation speed of the "planet" stimulus) and an auditory feature (pitch frequency of a pure tone stimulus). We found an interaction between age and training type for the rule-based category task, such that adults performed better in feedback training than in observational training, whereas training type had no significant effect on children's category learning performance. Overall adults performed better than children in learning both the rule based and information integration category structures. In information integration category learning, feedback versus observational training did not have a significant effect on either adults' or children's category learning. Computational modelling revealed that children defaulted to univariate rules in both tasks. The finding that children do not benefit from feedback training and can learn successfully via observational learning has implications for the design of educational interventions appropriate for children.
当学习新类别时，儿童是否受益于与成人相同类型的训练？我们在两个不同的多模态类别学习任务（基于联合规则的和信息整合的）中比较了基于反馈的训练与观察训练对年轻成年人（18-25 岁）和早期学龄儿童（6-7 岁）的影响。我们使用了多模态刺激，这些刺激在视觉特征（“行星”刺激的旋转速度）和听觉特征（纯音刺激的音高频率）上有所不同。我们发现基于规则的类别任务中存在年龄和训练类型之间的相互作用，即成年人在反馈训练中的表现优于观察训练，而训练类型对儿童的类别学习表现没有显著影响。总的来说，成年人在学习基于规则和信息整合的类别结构方面的表现优于儿童。在信息整合类别学习中，反馈与观察训练对成年人或儿童的类别学习都没有显著影响。计算模型表明，儿童在两个任务中都默认使用单变量规则。儿童不能从反馈训练中受益，只能通过观察学习成功学习的发现，对为儿童设计合适的教育干预措施具有启示意义。
