Incidental auditory category learning

Incidental auditory category learning.

Very little is known about how auditory categories are learned incidentally, without instructions to search for category-diagnostic dimensions, overt category decisions, or experimenter-provided feedback. This is an important gap because learning in the natural environment does not arise from explicit feedback and there is evidence that the learning systems engaged by traditional tasks are dist...

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance Incidental Auditory Category Learning

Category variability effect in category learning with auditory stimuli

The category variability effect refers to that people tend to classify the midpoint item between two categories as the category more variable. This effect is regarded as evidence against the exemplar model, such as GCM (Generalized Context Model) and favoring the rule model, such as GRT (i.e., the decision bound model). Although this effect has been found in conceptual category learning, it is ...

Intentional and Incidental Classification Learning in Category Use

Traditional classification learning studies tell us that people learn to attend to the diagnostic features of exemplars (Kruschke, 1992; Medin & Schaffer, 1978; Shepard, Hovland, & Jenkins, 1961). But recent research has discovered that the learning task influences what information people learn about categories (Markman & Ross, 2003). A learning task can either be the primary goal or be inciden...

The effects of prior knowledge on incidental category learning.

This article describes 5 experiments investigating the role of prior knowledge in incidental category learning. Experiments 1 to 3 showed that prior knowledge improved learning only if the categories in a given set were related to contrasting themes; there was no consistent knowledge effect if the categories were related to the same theme. Experiments 4 and 5 showed that diagnostic verbal label...