Remindings in Declarative Concept Learning

Abstract

Remindings are a fundamental building block of cognition that prompt people to retrieve relevant experiences when faced with novel stimuli. Remindings may allow learners to generalize across the common aspects of the earlier learning instance and the current one to gain the knowledge that will be used in the later categorization. The benefits of remindings in category knowledge have been well-established in the literature, yet the effectiveness of remindings in learning declarative concepts remains an open question. The goal of the thesis is to assess the role of remindings in near transfer and far transfer in learning declarative concepts. Across two experiments, remindings were encouraged by presenting new examples that were similar to prior studied examples, or remindings were discouraged by presenting new examples that were different than previously studied examples. However, across both experiments, no evidence was found that similar or different novel examples enabled different amounts of remindings. Further, no significant differences were found in category learning in near (Experiment 1) or far (Experiment 2) transfer. Implications for theories of category learning are discussed.