Judgments of learning impair rule-based discovery.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Learning Sciences

Background:

• Judgments of learning (JOLs) are known to enhance memory recall in some learning tasks, a phenomenon termed reactivity.
• The impact of JOLs on category learning, which involves generalization beyond training data, remains largely unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effect of JOLs on relational rule discovery within a category learning paradigm.
• To examine whether JOLs influence strategy selection in categorization tasks.

Main Methods:

• Participants completed categorization tasks with varying degrees of reliance on relational rules versus visual features.
• JOLs were elicited at different stages of the learning process.
• Performance was assessed based on rule discovery accuracy and feature memorization.

Main Results:

• In tasks allowing both rule discovery and feature memorization, JOLs impaired relational rule discovery but not feature memorization.
• When only relational rules were viable for categorization, JOLs did not produce significant reactivity effects.
• Findings suggest JOLs encourage a shift towards more obvious strategies when multiple options exist.

Conclusions:

• The elicitation of JOLs can negatively impact relational rule discovery in category learning when simpler strategies are available.
• A conservative strategy-shift account explains reactivity, proposing that JOLs prompt a shift to the most apparent strategy.
• Understanding JOLs' effects is crucial for optimizing learning strategies in complex cognitive tasks.