S1 (FriAM 1-65) - The Psychonomic Society

Papers 29–34 Friday Morning
duction”? NATE KORNELL & ROBERT A. BJORK, UCLA (read by
Robert A. Bjork)—Learning about a new concept or category by observing
examples—that is, inductive learning—happens constantly,
from a baby learning a new word to a doctor classifying x-rays. What
influence, though, does the spacing of such exemplars have on the efficiency
of induction? We designed two experiments to test Ernst Z.
Rothkopf’s assertion that “spacing is the friend of recall, but the
enemy of induction.” In both experiments participants studied paintings
by 12 different artists. A given artist’s paintings were presented
either consecutively (massed) or interleaved with other artists’ paintings
(spaced). Memory was tested using a cued-recall task in Experiment
1 and a recognition task in Experiment 2. To our surprise, inducing
artists’ styles profited from spacing, not massing. Massed
practice, however, apparently created a sense of fluent induction: Participants
rated massing as more effective than spacing for learning an
artist’s style even after their own test performance had demonstrated
the opposite.
8:40–8:55 (29)
Learning Algebra by Exploration. ANGELA BRUNSTEIN &
JOHN R. ANDERSON, Carnegie Mellon University—A major component
of learning a skill like algebra is knowing which operators are
appropriate for what situations. This study investigated learning to
solve algebra-isomorphic problems either by exploration or by a stepby-step
instruction. Instructed participants performed better on early
problems, whereas explorers performed better on solving related
problems later on. Explorers were less likely to acquire shallow operators
that only applied in the original learning situation. Exploring
problems on their own also enhanced participants’ capabilities for debugging
and acquiring new operators. More importantly, exploration
also changed the way they perceived new situations: Although these
situations were new to all participants, explorers were better able to
focus on task relevant aspects. Therefore, they were more likely to
choose the correct operators in new situations.
9:00–9:15 (30)
What Does It Take to Link a Cue With a Behavior in Human Skill
Acquisition? HAL PASHLER, University of California, San Diego,
EDWARD VUL, MIT, & TIMOTHY C. RICKARD, University of
California, San Diego—Much has been learned about when mental
linkages are (and are not) formed in Pavlovian conditioning and in
contingency judgments, but far less is known about what principles
govern the acquisition of cue–behavior linkages in human skill acquisition.
In several experiments, we had subjects make speeded responses
based upon an instructed stimulus–response mapping. Additional
redundant cues were also presented at certain times within each
training trial, reliably predicting the appropriate response. In some
cases these cues did not appear until it was too late to use them. The
results (assessed in various types of transfer-test blocks) shed light
upon whether acquisition of cue–behavior linkages requires (1) actual
experience using the cue to select a response during training, (2) perceiving
the cue prior to selecting the response on the training trial, or
(3) merely having the cue appear, correlated with the response, even
if it was not useful or timely.
9:20–9:35 (31)
How Conceptualizing Music Affects Novice Trumpeters’ First Sound
Attempts. MATTHEW STEINFELD, MICHAEL F. SCHOBER, &
MICHELLE F. LEVINE, New School for Social Research (read by
Michael F. Schober)—To what extent do novice musicians need to
conceptualize music as they acquire musical skill? We tested novice
trumpeters (individuals who could not read written music and who had
never played a wind instrument before) in their first encounter with a
trumpet, under three different conditions: (1) simply following fingered
instructions; (2) hearing the to-be-achieved pitches before following
the fingered instructions; and (3) hearing and singing the tobe-achieved
pitches before following the fingered instructions. If
conceptualizing the music and hearing it internally matter, as McPher-
5
son (2005) has proposed, then novice trumpeters who hear and sing
the pitches should be able to play the desired pitches more often and
more accurately than when they simply follow fingered instructions.
The results reflect this pattern, and are consistent with a model of musical
production that suggests working from internally represented
sound to action is more effective than acting without musical conceptualization.
SYMPOSIUM: Mechanisms of Cognitive Development:
Domain-General Learning or Domain-Specific Constraints?
Regency ABC, Friday Morning, 9:40–12:00
Chaired by Vladimir M. Sloutsky, Ohio State University
9:40–9:55 (32)
Mechanisms of Cognitive Development: Domain-General Learning
or Domain-Specific Constraints? VLADIMIR M. SLOUTSKY,
Ohio State University—How do children come to acquire language,
to individuate objects, to navigate in space, to use numbers, and to
have concepts? For the past two decades, the prevailing answer has
been that the environmental input is fundamentally indeterminate and
therefore learning is organized by a set of innate domain-specific constraints.
However, a growing body of evidence indicates that the input
is more systematic than previously believed and that there are powerful
domain-general learning mechanisms capable of exploiting these
regularities and building sophisticated domain-specific knowledge.
Although no single comprehensive learning account of cognitive development
has been offered yet, there are accounts of how infants and
children extract regularities from the input, to acquire language, to
learn to navigate in space, and to form concepts. This symposium will
focus on domain-general learning and its role in language learning
(Christiansen, Smith), conceptual development (McClelland, Sloutsky),
and spatial navigation (Newcombe). Successes and limitations
of the domain-general learning account will be discussed (Goldstone).
10:00–10:15 (33)
Self-Organizing “Constraints” on Word Learning. LINDA B.
SMITH, Indiana University, & HANAKO YOSHIDA, University of
Houston—Growing evidence suggests that children learn how to learn
language, creating language learning mechanisms that fit the learning
task, as they proceed. One line of evidence supporting this view
concerns cross-linguistic differences—not just in what children know
about their language, but in the very processes and strategies they use
to learn language. This talk will present evidence on the developmental
emergence of cross-linguistic differences in language learning
in 12- to 36-month-old children learning Japanese or English as their
first and only language. The evidence shows emerging differences in
strategies of noun learning, verb learning, and in such important distinctions
as animate and inanimate.
10:20–10:35 (34)
Statistical Learning and Language: In Search of Underlying Neural
Constraints. MORTEN H. CHRISTIANSEN, Cornell University,
CHRISTOPHER M. CONWAY, Indiana University, & LUCA ONNIS,
Cornell University—Over the past decade, statistical learning—the
discovery of structure by way of statistical properties of the input—
has emerged as an important paradigm for studying domain-general
constraints on language acquisition. The basic assumption of this research
is that statistical learning and language are subserved by the
same mechanisms, an assumption for which there is little neural evidence.
We therefore used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate
the distribution of brain activity while adults performed (1) a natural
language reading task and (2) a statistical learning task involving
sequenced stimuli. The same positive ERP deflection, the P600 effect,
typically linked to difficult or ungrammatical syntactic processing,
was found for structural incongruencies in both natural language as
well as statistical learning and had similar topographical distributions.
These results suggest that the same neural mechanisms are recruited