Doyon Jonathan K, Shomstein Sarah, Rosenblau Gabriela
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA.
Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA.
Commun Psychol. 2025 May 13;3(1):77. doi: 10.1038/s44271-025-00259-w.
Object knowledge is bound together in semantic networks that can be spatially represented. How these knowledge representations shape and are in turn shaped by learning remains unclear. Here, we directly examined how object similarity representations impact implicit learning of feature dimensions and how learning, in turn, influences these representations. In a pre-experiment, 237 adult participants arranged object-pictures in a spatial arena, revealing semantic relatedness of everyday objects across categories: activity, fashion, and foods. The subsequent experiment assessed whether these semantic relationships played a role in implicitly learning specific object features in a separate adult participant group (N = 82). Participants inferred the meanings of two pseudo-words through feedback. Using computational modeling, we tested various learning strategies and established that learning was guided by semantic relationships quantified in the pre-experiment. Post-learning arrangements reflected object similarity representations as well as the learned feature. We directly show that similarity representations guide implicit learning and that learning in turn reshapes existing knowledge representations.
客体知识在能够进行空间表征的语义网络中被整合在一起。这些知识表征如何塑造学习以及又如何反过来被学习所塑造，目前仍不清楚。在这里，我们直接考察了客体相似性表征如何影响特征维度的内隐学习，以及学习又如何反过来影响这些表征。在一项预实验中，237名成年参与者在一个空间场景中排列物体图片，揭示了跨类别（活动、时尚和食物）的日常物体的语义相关性。随后的实验评估了这些语义关系在另一组成年参与者（N = 82）对内隐学习特定客体特征的过程中是否发挥作用。参与者通过反馈推断两个伪词的含义。通过计算建模，我们测试了各种学习策略，并确定学习是由预实验中量化的语义关系所引导的。学习后的排列反映了客体相似性表征以及所学特征。我们直接表明，相似性表征引导内隐学习，而学习反过来又重塑了现有的知识表征。
