Effects of explanation and comparison on category learning

Year of Conference
2013

Type

Conference Proceedings
Abstract

Generating explanations and making comparisons have both been shown to improve learning. While each process has been studied individually, the relationship between explanation and comparison is not well understood. Three experiments evaluated the effectiveness of explanation and comparison prompts in learning novel categories. In Experiment 1, participants explained items’ category membership, performed pairwise comparisons between items (listed similarities and differences), did both, or did a control task. The explanation task increased the discovery of rules underlying category membership; however, the comparison task decreased rule discovery. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that (1) comparing all four category exemplars was more effective than either within-category or between-category pairwise comparisons, and that (2) “explain” participants reported higher levels of both spontaneous explanation and comparison than “compare” participants. This work provides insights into when explanation and comparison are most effective, and how these processes can work together to maximize learning.

Conference Name
Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
Pages
406-411
Publisher
Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society
Documents