How do People Solve the “Weather Prediction” Task?: Individual Variability in Strategies for Probabilistic Category Learning
Abstract
Probabilistic category learning is often assumed to be an incrementally learned cognitive skill, dependent on nondeclarative memory systems. One paradigm in particular, the weather prediction task, has been used in over half a dozen neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies to date. Because of the growing interest in using this task and others like it as behavioral tools for studying the cognitive neuroscience of cognitive skill learning, it becomes especially important to understand how subjects solve this kind of task and whether all subjects learn it in the same way. We present here new experimental and theoretical analyses of the weather prediction task that indicate that there are at least three different strategies that describe how subjects learn this task. (1) An optimal multi-cue strategy, in which they respond to each pattern on the basis of associations of all four cues with each outcome; (2) a one-cue strategy, in which they respond on the basis of presence or absence of a single cue, disregarding all other cues; or (3) a singleton strategy, in which they learn only about the four patterns that have only one cue present and all others absent. This variability in how subjects approach this task may have important implications for interpreting how different brain regions are involved in probabilistic category learning.
Footnotes
-
↵3 All authors contributed equally to this work.
-
↵4 Corresponding author.
-
E-MAIL gluck{at}pavlov.rutgers.edu; FAX (973) 353-1272.
-
Article and publication are at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.45202.
-
↵5 Note that this particular subject's mapping of cues to outcomes is partially incorrect; as per Table 2, squares and diamonds were most often associated with sun, and circles and triangles with rain.
-
↵6 Within the singleton group, one subject was better fit by assuming that she had summed evidence from multiple singletons on those trials in which two or more cards appeared; whereas there were not enough subjects well fit by this model to justify treating it as a separate group, it is worth noting that this is a potentially more sophisticated strategy than simply learning the singletons and guessing on multi-card patterns. However, on the questionnaire, this subject reported that she had been “memoriz[ing] the pattern of the cards and the sequence of how it appears.”
-
- Received November 7, 2001.
- Accepted September 24, 2002.
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
