Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans are highly variable in their ability to learn and executecomplex tasks; however, there are conflicting theories on skillacquisition. This study compared two different explanationsfor how association learning interacts with other cognitiveprocesses: a) reinforcement learning and working memory areseparate, competing processes operating simultaneously onassociation learning; and, b) associations are proceduralizedinto production rules and reinforcement learning acts on thoserules. Participants completed a simple association learning taskfollowed by a delayed test under two conditions designed tocontrast these theories. The results are consistent with aproceduralization account in which reinforcement learning andworking memory are not competitive interfering systems, butthere remain important questions about how these two accountsmay be best integrated.