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Category Learning (category + learning)
Selected AbstractsModeling Age Differences in Infant Category LearningINFANCY, Issue 2 2004Thomas R. Shultz We used an encoder version of cascade correlation to simulate Younger and Cohen's (1983, 1986) finding that 10-month-olds recover attention on the basis of correlations among stimulus features, but 4- and 7-month-olds recover attention on the basis of stimulus features. We captured these effects by varying the score threshold parameter in cascade correlation, which controls how deeply training patterns are learned. When networks learned deeply, they showed more error to uncorrelated than to correlated test patterns, indicating that they abstracted correlations during familiarization. When prevented from learning deeply, networks decreased error during familiarization and showed as much error to correlated as to uncorrelated tests but less than to test items with novel features, indicating that they learned features but not correlations among features. Our explanation is that older infants learn more from the same exposure than do younger infants. Unlike previous explanations that postulate unspecified qualitative shifts in processing with age, our explanation focuses on quantitatively deeper learning with increasing age. Finally, we provide some new empirical evidence to support this explanation. [source] Erratum for: The Role of Explanation in Discovery and Generalization: Evidence from Category Learning, by Joseph J. Williams and Tania Lombrozo, in Cognitive Science 34(5)COGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 6 2010Article first published online: 3 AUG 2010 No abstract is available for this article. [source] Illusory and spurious correlations: distinct phenomena or joint outcomes of exemplar-based category learning?EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2006Thorsten Meiser Stereotype formation about novel groups was analyzed with trivariate stimulus distributions that were generated by group membership, valence of behavior, and a context variable. Within this stimulus setting, we manipulated the confounding role of the context variable and the distinctiveness of events in terms of their relative infrequency. The experimental procedure allowed us to analyze illusory and spurious correlations in a joint framework, to conduct focused tests for memory effects of relative infrequency and to investigate the detection of covariations with the context variable. The results revealed that illusory and spurious correlations were formed without enhanced memory for infrequent events and with existing covariations of the confounding context factor being well extracted. These observations suggest that illusory and spurious correlations can be understood without assuming specific cognitive processes that are tied to the particular characteristics of a given stimulus distribution, such as enhanced memory in the case of relative infrequency and neglect of a context variable in the case of a confounding factor. Instead, computer simulations with an exemplar-based learning model demonstrated that exemplar-based category learning may provide a coherent and integrative theoretical framework for illusory correlations, spurious correlations and true contingency learning in social cognition. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Input and Second Language Acquisition: The Roles of Frequency, Form, and Function Introduction to the Special IssueMODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 3 2009NICK ELLIS The articles in this special issue explore how the acquisition of linguistic constructions as form,function mappings is affected by the distribution and saliency of forms in oral input, by their functional interpretations, and by the reliabilities of their form,function mappings. They consider the psycholinguistics of language learning following general cognitive principles of category learning, with schematic constructions emerging from usage. They analyze how learning is driven by the frequency and frequency distribution of exemplars within construction, the salience of their form, the significance of their functional interpretation, the match of their meaning to the construction prototype, and the reliability of their mappings. These investigations address a range of morphological and syntactic constructions in instructed, uninstructed, and laboratory settings. They include both experimental and corpus-based approaches (some conducted longitudinally) and consider the relationship between input and acquisition in the short term and over time, with a particular emphasis on spoken input directed to second and foreign language learners. [source] Symbolic Versus Associative LearningCOGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 6 2010John E. Hummel Abstract Ramscar and colleagues (2010, this volume) describe the "feature-label-order" (FLO) effect on category learning and characterize it as a constraint on symbolic learning. I argue that FLO is neither a constraint on symbolic learning in the sense of "learning elements of a symbol system" (instead, it is an effect on nonsymbolic, association learning) nor is it, more than any other constraint on category learning, a constraint on symbolic learning in the sense of "solving the symbol grounding problem." [source] |