Psychologists and educators have long pointed to myriad benefits of self-directed learning. Yet evidence of its efficacy in real-world domains is mixed and it remains unclear how it is constrained by basic perceptual and cognitive processes. Previous work suggests that, in particular, self-directed learning is affected by the way that people…

The strength of conclusions about the adoption of different categorization strategies--and their implications for theories about the cognitive and neural bases of category learning--depend heavily on the techniques for identifying strategy use. We examine performance in an often-used "information-integration" category structure and…

Category information is used to predict properties of new category members. When categorization is uncertain, people often rely on only one, most likely category to make predictions. Yet studies of perception and action often conclude that people combine multiple sources of information near-optimally. We present a perception-action analog of…

Researchers have proposed that an explicit reasoning system is responsible for learning rule-based category structures and that a separate implicit, procedural-learning system is responsible for learning information-integration category structures. As evidence for this multiple-system hypothesis, researchers report a dissociation based on…

Two experiments examined 3 variables affecting accuracy, response time, and reports of strategy use in a binary classification skill task. In Experiment 1, higher rule cue salience, allowing faster rule application, produced higher aggregate rule use than lower rule cue salience. After participants were pretrained on the relevant classification…

Category number effects on rule-based and information-integration category learning were investigated. Category number affected accuracy and the distribution of best-fitting models in the rule-based task but had no effect on accuracy and little effect on the distribution of best-fining models in the information-integration task. In the 2 category…