Work

Learning bundles of stimuli renders stimulus order as a cue, not a confound

Year: 2014

Type: article

Abstract: The order in which stimuli are presented in an experiment has long been recognized to influence behavior. Previous accounts have often attributed the effect of stimulus order to the mechanisms with which people process information. We propose that stimulus order influences cognition because it is an important cue for learning the underlying structure of a task environment. In particular, stimulus order can be used to infer a "stimulus bundle"--a sequence of consecutive stimuli that share the same underlying latent cluster. We describe a clustering model that successfully explains the perception of streak shooting in basketball games, along with two other cognitive phenomena, as the outcome of finding the statistically optimal bundle representation. We argue that the perspective of viewing stimulus order as a cue may hold the key to explaining behaviors that seemingly deviate from normative theories of cognition and that in task domains where the assumption of stimulus bundles is intuitively appropriate, it can improve the explanatory power of existing models.

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1416109111

Authors: Ting Qian, Richard N. Aslin

Institutions: Brown University, University of Rochester

Language: English

Topic: Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics

Subfield: General Decision Sciences

Field: Decision Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Awards: G266246797, G3443121339, Statistical learning of multiple patterns in infants, adults, and monkeys, Statistical approaches to linguistic pattern learning