Lowered inter-stimulus discriminability hurts incremental contributions to learning.

ABSTRACT: How does the similarity between stimuli affect our ability to learn appropriate response associations for them? In typical laboratory experiments learning is investigated under somewhat ideal circumstances, where stimuli are easily discriminable. This is not representative of most real-life learning, where overlapping "stimuli" can result in different "rewards" and may be learned simultaneously (e.g., you may learn over repeated interactions that a specific dog is friendly, but that a very similar looking one isn't). With two experiments, we test how humans learn in three stimulus conditions: one "best case" condition in which stimuli have idealized and highly discriminable visual and semantic representations, and two in which stimuli have overlapping representations, making them less disc

SUBMITTER: Yoo AH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10545593 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature