Date of Award

7-17-2020

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Author's Department

Psychology

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Type

Dissertation

Abstract

The present study investigated the effects of simultaneous (relative to sequential) presentation on participants’ learning of both simple (Experiment 1) and complex (Experiment 2) categories. Previous research has studied the impact of presentation mode on categorization of novel transfer objects, but the present study is the first to date that also examined its influence on learners’ strategy preferences. Participants were trained (using a blocked observational training procedure) on two categories of abstract shapes that were defined by a bi-dimensional disjunctive rule. Some participants were shown objects sequentially, while others were presented with an organized simultaneous display depicting all to-be-learned stimuli at once. During training, participants responded to block-by-block strategy probes that provided online insight into the extent to which they were utilizing rule-based or exemplar-based strategies. Following training, participants classified ambiguous, rule-favored, and memory-favored transfer objects, and also reported any rules they had developed during training. Measures of working memory were also obtained. Participants’ categorization performance on the transfer tasks were conditionalized on degree of rule acquisition as well as their block-level strategy preferences. The findings revealed that, in contrast to existing literature, simultaneous presentation generally promoted an exemplar-based approach to category learning.

Language

English (en)

Chair and Committee

Mark McDaniel

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