Temperament and Visual Category Learning Strategy Use

Abstract

Transient affective states have been shown to affect cognition, including category learning, but less is known about the role of stable temperament traits and categorization. We examined affective temperament traits to see whether the tendency to experience negative and positive affect is predictive of category learning performance and strategy use. Working memory and attentional control were measured as covariates. Participants first completed the Adult Temperament Questionnaire (Evans & Rothbart, 2007) including two affective temperament factors and an attentional control factor. Then they completed a memory task followed by either a conjunctive rule-based (CR) or an information integration (II) category learning task. Results showed that people who tend to experience more positive affect and less negative affect achieved higher accuracy and were more likely to find the optimal strategy in the II task compared to people who tend to experience more negative affect and less positive affect. However, no performance or strategy use difference was seen in the CR task across different temperament profiles. These results extend prior literature and provide additional insights on the effects of stable traits on category learning.