Learning to categorize perceptually similar stimuli can result in people becoming more sensitive to differences along perceptual dimensions that are relevant to category membership and/or less sensitive to equivalent differences along irrelevant perceptual dimensions. These effects of acquired distinctiveness and acquired equivalence may be caused…

Attempting to guess an answer to a memory question has repeatedly been shown to benefit memory for the answer compared to merely reading what the answer is, even when the guess is incorrect. In this study, we investigate 2 potential explanations for this effect in a single experimental procedure. According to the semantic explanation, the benefits…

Two experiments assessed the effects of extinguishing a conditioned cue on subsequent context conditioning. Each experiment used a different video-game method where sensors predicted attacking spaceships and participants responded to the sensor in a way that prepared them for the upcoming attack. In Experiment 1 extinction of a cue which signaled…

Learning to ignore irrelevant stimuli is essential to achieving efficient and fluid attention, and serves as the complement to increasing attention to relevant stimuli. The different cholinergic (ACh) subsystems within the basal forebrain regulate attention in distinct but complementary ways. ACh projections from the substantia innominata/nucleus…

Recent studies show that both adults and young children possess powerful statistical learning capabilities to solve the word-to-world mapping problem. However, the underlying mechanisms that make statistical learning possible and powerful are not yet known. With the goal of providing new insights into this issue, the research reported in this…

The participation of attentional and associative mechanisms in extinction, spontaneous recovery, external disinhibition, renewal, reinstatement, and reacquisition was evaluated through computer simulations with an extant computational model of classical conditioning (N. A. Schmajuk, Y. Lam, & J. A. Gray, 1996; N. A. Schmajuk & J. A. Larrauri,…

In 5 experiments, results showed that when participants are faced with materials embedding relations between both adjacent and nonadjacent elements, they learn exclusively the type of relations they had to actively process in order to meet the task demands, irrespective of the spatial contiguity of the paired elements. These results are consonant…

Two experiments examined role of affective correspondence between signal and outcome in 4-month olds' associative learning. Found that only when consoling infant-directed speech signaled the sad face did infants' visual interest in a checkerboard increase. Arousing infant-directed speech signaling either the smiling or sad face produced positive…

The study investigated the effects of attentional deficits on the relative preferences for associative, acoustic, and orthographic attributes in word recognition by 45 learning disabled children in grades 2, 4, and 6. (Author/PHR)

This paper summarizes our present knowledge and understanding of the processes and outcomes of learning. The basic idea about learning is that the outcomes of learning (e.g., propositional knowledge, procedural skills, and mental models) reflect differences in learning processes (e.g., encoding skills, attention allocation, and hypothesis…