Systematic Human Learning and Generalization From a Brief Tutorial With Explanatory Feedback.

ABSTRACT: We investigate human adults' ability to learn an abstract reasoning task quickly and to generalize outside of the range of training examples. Using a task based on a solution strategy in Sudoku, we provide Sudoku-naive participants with a brief instructional tutorial with explanatory feedback using a narrow range of training examples. We find that most participants who master the task do so within 10 practice trials and generalize well to puzzles outside of the training range. We also find that most of those who master the task can describe a valid solution strategy, and such participants perform better on transfer puzzles than those whose strategy descriptions are vague or incomplete. Interestingly, fewer than half of our human participants were successful in acquiring a valid solution st

SUBMITTER: Nam AJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10898786 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature