Absolute and relative knowledge of ordinal position
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Psychiatry and Psychology
- Keywords
- derived list, transitive inference, positional inference, serial learning, symbolic distance effect
- Copyright
- © 2018 Kao et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Absolute and relative knowledge of ordinal position. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26453v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26453v1
Abstract
For more than 100 years, psychologists have struggled to determine what is learned during serial learning. The method of derived lists is a powerful tool for studying this question. In two experiments, we trained human participants to learn implicit lists by the Transitive Inference (TI) method. We then tested their knowledge of ordinal position of those items. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with pairs of photographic stimuli from five different 5-item training lists by presenting adjacent pairs of items from one list on every trial. Participants were then tested on pairs of items drawn from different lists, in which each item maintained its original ordinal position as it had during training. In Experiment 2, a different group of participants was trained on the same five 5-item lists as that of Experiment 1. However, the order of the items in the derived lists of Experiment 2 was changed systematically. In this latter experiment, the acquisition rate for the derived lists varied inversely with the degree of change of ordinal position. We explain these results by using a model in which participants learn to make positional, as well as transitive inferences, allowing them to infer the relative and absolute position of each item during testing on derived lists.
Author Comment
This is a research article manuscript, to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.
Figures and data previously released under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 license and available at the following DOIs:
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5786865.v1
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5786871.v1
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5786874.v1
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5786877.v1
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5786880.v1
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5786886.v1
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5786889.v1
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5786892.v1
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5786895.v1
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5786898.v1
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5787015.v1
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5787021.v1
Supplemental Information
R Analysis Script
R script implementing various multilevel logistic regressions using the "rethinking" and "rstan" packages as a frontend for the Stan programming language.
Experiment 1 Data
Anonymized data collected from all participants in Experiment 1.
Experiment 2 Dataset
Anonymized data collected from all participants in Experiment 2.