Please view the posters presented at the 18th Annual CityTech Faculty and Student Research Poster Session below. You can click on each poster to enlarge it and view the PDF version under the poster abstract.
We thank all presenters for sharing their innovative and informative research with the CityTech community and beyond!
22. Category Learning in a Transitive Inference Paradigm
The implied order of a ranked set of visual images can be learned by transitive inference (TI), without reliance on stimulus features that explicitly signal their order. Such learning is difficult to explain by associative mechanisms but can be accounted for by cognitive representations and processes such as TI. Our study seeks to determine if those processes are also applied to categories of images. Specifically, we asked whether participants can (a) infer that images being presented belonged to familiar categories, even when every image presented during every trial is unique, and (b) perform TI about the ordering of those categories. Despite receiving minimal instruction, participants learned the implied order of lists of fixed stimuli and lists of ordered categories, using trial-unique exemplars. However, participants who were presented with category exemplars did not display a symbolic distance effect, unlike participants whose TI training used fixed stimuli. These findings suggest that differing cognitive processes may underpin serial learning when learning about specific stimuli as opposed to stimulus categories. View or download a PDF version of this poster.
