Three experiments with 88 college-aged participants explored how unlabeled experiences--learning episodes in which people encounter objects without information about their category membership--influence beliefs about category structure. Participants performed a simple one-dimensional categorization task in a brief supervised learning phase, then…

Previous research has shown that disfluency--the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognitive operations--leads to deeper processing. Two studies explore the extent to which this deeper processing engendered by disfluency interventions can lead to improved memory performance. Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts…

Humans and animals can perform much more complex tasks than they can acquire using pure trial and error learning. This gap is filled by teaching. One important method of instruction is shaping, in which a teacher decomposes a complete task into sub-components, thereby providing an easier path to learning. Despite its importance, shaping has not…