Why Are There Failures of Systematicity? The Empirical Costs and Benefits of Inducing Universal Constructions

Systematicity is a property of cognition where capacity for certain cognitive abilities implies capacity for certain other (structurally related) cognitive abilities. This property is thought to derive from a capacity to represent/process common structural relations between constituents of cognizable entities, however, systematicity may not always materialize in such admissible contexts. A theoretical challenge is to explain why systematicity fails to materialize in contexts that allow the realization (e.g., by induction) of common structure (universal construction). We hypothesize that one cause of failure arises when the potential gain afforded by induction of common structure is overshadowed by the immediate benefit of learning the task as independent stimulus-response associations. This hypothesis was tested in an experiment that required learning two series of pair maps that involved products (universal construction), or non-products (control) of varied size: the number of unique cue/target elements (three to six) constituting pairs. Each series was learned in either ascending or descending order of size. Only performance on the product series was affected by order: systematicity was obtained universally in the descend group, but only on large sets in the ascend group, as revealed by the significant order × size interaction for errors in the product condition, F (3, 87) = 3.38, p < 0.05. Smaller maps are more easily learned without inducing the common product structure, which is more readily observable with larger maps: larger maps provide more evidence for relationships between stimulus dimensions that facilitate the discovery of the common structure. The new challenge, then, is to explain the systematic learnability of stimulus-response maps, i.e., second-order systematicity.