Assessing the concreteness of relational representation.

Abstract

Research has shown that people's ability to transfer abstract relational knowledge across situations can be heavily influenced by the concrete objects that fill relational roles. This article provides evidence that the concreteness of the relations themselves also affects performance. In 3 experiments, participants viewed simple relational patterns of visual objects and then identified these same patterns under a variety of physical transformations. Results show that people have difficulty generalizing to novel concrete forms of abstract relations, even when objects are unchanged. This suggests that stimuli are initially represented as concrete relations by default. In the 2nd and 3rd experiments, the number of distinct concrete relations in the training set was increased to promote more abstract representation. Transfer improved for novel concrete relations but not for other transformations such as object substitution. Results indicate that instead of automatically learning abstract relations, people's relational representations preserve all properties that appear consistently in the learning environment, including concrete objects and concrete relations.

Feature predictiveness and selective attention in pigeons’ categorization learning.

“…However, selective attention mechanisms are never perfect nor do they allow an organism to exhibit flawless performance. In humans, interference from irrelevant information is frequently observed (e.g., Monsell, 2003; Rein & Markman, 2010). For example, in the classic Stroop task, people have difficulty verbalizing the color of a word (the relevant attribute) when the printed word (the irrelevant attribute) names a different color (MacLeod, 1991).…”

Relational categories as a bridge between cognitive and educational research.

“…When first encountering exemplars, relations are often represented in fragmented, and exemplar-specific manners (Doumas, Hummel, & Sandhofer, 2008; Gentner, 2010; Rein & Markman, 2010). However, the comparison process induces a structural alignment of the exemplars that highlights their common relational structure, helping to represent the relations in a more general manner.…”

On the efficacy of procedures to normalize Ex-Gaussian distributions

“…Finally, they performed analyses on the means of the trimmed means. Other researchers opt for taking the median RT of correct trials for each subject in each condition and perform analyses on the means of those medians (see for example Ansorge et al, 2010 ; Rein and Markman, 2010 ). Trimmed means, and other robust estimators of central tendency (e.g., Rosenberg and Gasko, 1983 ; Wilcox and Keselman, 2003 ; Bickel and Frühwirth, 2006 ; Vélez and Correa, 2014 ), can therefore be seen as non-invasive forms of data elimination in that outlying observations are temporarily canceled out in order to estimate an average.…”