Joy Yarden, Kao Tina, Jensen Greg
Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
Department of Psychology, New York City College of Technology, CUNY, New York, NY, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2025 Jul;53(5):1330-1342. doi: 10.3758/s13421-024-01654-0. Epub 2024 Oct 30.
Transitive inference (TI), referring to one's ability to learn that if A > B and B > C, one can infer that A > C, is a form of serial learning that has been tested using a variety of experimental protocols. An element of most of these protocols is the presentation of some form of visual corrective feedback to help inform naïve participants about the nature of the task. Therefore, corrective feedback is often used as a critical tool for experimental TI. To further explore this tool, we presented varying forms/presence of visual feedback during TI performance: corrective, none, and ambiguous. Of the three conditions, presentation of the ambiguous feedback yielded the clearest disruption of TI performance, obvious in measurements of both response accuracy and reaction times. Participants appears to remain engaged with feedback was withheld entirely, but to disengage when presented with ambiguous feedback. Therefore, the choice regarding the form of feedback provided during testing may be critical for information processing of inferences.
传递性推理（TI）是指个体能够通过学习得知如果A大于B且B大于C，那么就可以推断出A大于C，它是序列学习的一种形式，已经通过多种实验方案进行了测试。大多数这些方案的一个要素是呈现某种形式的视觉纠正反馈，以帮助告知新手参与者任务的性质。因此，纠正反馈经常被用作实验性传递性推理的关键工具。为了进一步探索这个工具，我们在传递性推理表现过程中呈现了不同形式/存在情况的视觉反馈：纠正性、无反馈和模糊性反馈。在这三种条件中，呈现模糊性反馈对传递性推理表现产生了最明显的干扰，这在反应准确性和反应时间的测量中都很明显。当完全不提供反馈时，参与者似乎仍保持参与状态，但当呈现模糊性反馈时则会脱离。因此，测试期间提供的反馈形式的选择对于推理的信息处理可能至关重要。
