background: understanding the learning styles of medical students can drive the institutions to adapt instructional materials to enhance students’ learning of knowledge and skills. this study explored the learning styles of undergraduate medical students, comparing gender variations in terms of their significant preferences. materials and methods: a cross-sectional observational study was perfo...

Individuals learn both from the outcomes of their own internally generated actions ("experiential learning") and from the observation of the consequences of externally generated actions ("observational learning"). While neuroscience research has focused principally on the neural mechanisms by which brain structures such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) support experiential learning...

Much natural learning occurs by observation without explicit feedback or tutaring, yet few models of learning address this class of tasks. Further, many natural cases of observational learning are complex, ond efficient learning seems to demand strategic learning procedures. The present work adopts o design perspective and asks what learning mechanisms would be both useful and feasible for natu...

We propose a simple model in which an agent observes not only the choices made by others, but also some information about the process that led them to those choices. We consider two cases: In the first, an agent observes whether another agent has compared the alternatives before making his choice. In the second, an agent observes the time invested in deliberation before the other agent makes hi...

An extensive literature identifies how privately-informed rational people who observe the behavior of other privately-informed rational people with similar tastes may come to imitate those people, emphasizing when and how such imitation leads to inefficiency. This paper investigates not the efficiency but instead the behavior of fully rational observational learners. In virtually any setting ap...

We study observational learning in environments with congestion costs: as more of one’s predecessors choose an action, the payoff from choosing that action decreases. Herds cannot occur if congestion on an action can get so large that an agent would prefer to take a different action no matter what his beliefs about the state. To the extent that “switching” away from the more popular action also...

Can observational learning be effector dependent? In 3 experiments, observers watched a model respond to a 6-item unique sequence in a serial reaction time task. Their sequence knowledge was then compared with that of controls who had performed an unrelated task or observed a model responding to random targets. Observational learning was indicated when the introduction of a new sequence was ass...