Sequence learning is fundamental to a wide range of cognitive functions. Explaining how sequences--and the relations between the elements they comprise--are learned is a fundamental challenge to cognitive science. However, although hundreds of articles addressing this question are published each year, the actual learning mechanisms involved in the…

Interleaving examples of to-be-learned categories, rather than blocking examples by category, frequently enhances category induction. The presently dominant theory is that interleaving promotes discriminative-contrast, and suggests that category similarity structure modulates this interleaving benefit: that blocking should benefit learning when…

Infants have shown variable success in quantity comparison tasks, with infants of a given age sometimes successfully discriminating numerical differences at a 2:3 ratio but requiring 1:2 and even 1:4 ratios of change at other times. The current explanations for these variable results include the two-systems proposal--a theoretical framework that…

In both healthy participants and various patient populations, performance on attentional set-shifting tasks has been found to be affected by learned irrelevance and/or perseveration. The present study examined whether or not these processes also play a role during the initial discrimination learning phase of those tasks. To this end, participants…

We explored the circumstances in which rats engage either declarative memory (and the hippocampus) or habit memory (and the dorsal striatum). Rats with damage to the hippocampus or dorsal striatum were given three different two-choice discrimination tasks (odor, object, and pattern). These tasks differed in the number of trials required for…

Research supported by U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, OEO-4120.

This study investigated the effects of two stimulus manipulations (spatial distinctness and number of dimensions) on the performance of 24 kindergartners and 24 fifth graders in (1) tasks requiring distributed attention and (2) tasks requiring selective attention. Results suggest that kindergartners attempt to use one processing mode (distributed…