Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent studies suggest that participants commonly abstract rules when learning concepts, but a remaining question is whether they retain and apply knowledge of individual instances subsequent to rule abstraction. Research in the category learning domain indicates that exemplar information is retained and that exceptions to a category rule have special status in memory (Palmed & Nosofsky, 1995). The present experiment examines whether these findings extend to function learning. Participants learned associations between stimulus and response magnitudes that were related according to a negative linear function. Twelve stimulus-response pairs were given, some consistent with the negative linear rule, others exceptions to the rule. After each of six training sessions, previously studied stimulus magnitudes were presented as tests of learning accuracy. Participants were also given extrapolation trials followed by a final recognition test that included old and new rule-congruent and rule-incongruent items. Extrapolation was extensive. In addition, analyses revealed poorer learning and recognition for exceptions than for rule-congruent items, plus a high rate of false alarms for new rule-congruent items. These findings suggest that although the conceptual knowledge acquired in function learning tasks centers on rules, exceptions to these rules do not have special status in memory.