Search

In rule-based (RB) category-learning tasks, the optimal strategy is a simple explicit rule, whereas in information-integration (II) tasks, the optimal strategy is impossible to describe verbally. Many studies have reported qualitative dissociations between training and performance in RB and II tasks. Virtually all of these studies were testing predictions of the dual-systems model of category learning called COVIS. The most prominent alternative account to COVIS is that humans have one learning system that is used in all tasks, and that the observed dissociations occur because the II task is more difficult than the RB task. This article describes the first attempt to test this difficulty hypothesis against anything more than a single set of data. First, two novel predictions are derived that discriminate between the difficulty and multiple-systems hypotheses. Next, these predictions are tested against a wide variety of published categorization data. Overall, the results overwhelmingly reject the difficulty hypothesis and instead strongly favor the multiple-systems account of the many RB versus II dissociations.

Early animal-metacognition researchers singled out simultaneous metacognition paradigms for theoretical criticism, because these paradigms presented concretely rewarded perceptual responses and the metacognitive response simultaneously. This method potentially introduced associative cues into the situation that could confound the interpretation of the metacognitive response. Evaluating this possibility, we compared humans' metacognitive performances in simultaneous and nonsimultaneous (prospective, retrospective) paradigms that were otherwise identical. Results show that the metacognition response in these tasks is not prompted by associative cues arising from the simultaneous task format. To the contrary, the metacognitive response is used more robustly and accurately when it is removed from direct competition with the primary perceptual responses. Thus, early researchers were correct to judge that the nonsimultaneous paradigms tap metacognition more robustly and sensitively. However, this is probably true because the simultaneous paradigm mingles responses adjudicated on two different cognitive-processing levels. And, in that case, the metacognitive response can be outcompeted and suppressed by the salient presence of primary, concretely rewarded perceptual responses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Categorization researchers have long debated the possibility of multiple category-learning systems. The need persists for paradigms that dissociate explicit-declarative category-learning processes (featuring verbalizable category rules) from implicit-procedural processes (featuring stimulus-response associations lying beneath declarative cognition). The authors contribute a new paradigm, using perfectly matched exclusive-or (XOR) category tasks differing only in the availability or absence of easily verbalizable conceptual content. This manipulation transformed learning. The conceptual task alone was learned suddenly, by insightful rule discovery, producing explicit-declarative XOR knowledge. The perceptual task was learned more gradually, consistent with associative-learning processes, producing impoverished declarative knowledge. We also tested participants under regimens of immediate and deferred reinforcement. The conceptual task alone was learned through processes that survive the loss of trial-by-trial reinforcement. All results support the idea that humans have perceptual-associative processes for implicit learning, but also an overlain conceptual system that under the right circumstances constitutes a parallel explicit-declarative category-learning system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Self-agency is a crucial aspect of self-awareness. It is underresearched given the phenomenon's subjectivity and difficulty of study. It is particularly underresearched comparatively, given that animals cannot receive agency instructions or make agency declarations. Accordingly, we developed a distinctively new self-agency paradigm. Humans and rhesus macaques learned event categories differentiated by whether the participant's volitional response controlled a screen launch. They learned by trial and error after minimal instructions with no agency orientation (humans) or no instructions (monkeys). After learning, humans' verbalized category descriptions were coded for self-agency attributions. Across three experiments, humans' agency attributions qualitatively improved discrimination performance-participants not invoking self-agency rarely exceeded chance performance. It also produced a diagnostic latency profile: classification accuracy depended heavily on the temporal relationship between the button-press and the launch, but only for those invoking agency. In our last experiment, monkeys performed the launch task. Their performance and latency profiles mirrored that of humans. Thus, self-agency can be self-discovered as a frame organizing discrimination. And it may be used as a discrimination cue by some nonhuman animals as well. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The study of nonhumans' metacognitive judgments about trial difficulty has grown into an important comparative literature. However, the potential for associative-learning confounds in this area has left room for behaviorist interpretations that are strongly asserted and hotly debated. This article considers how researchers may be able to observe animals' strategic cognitive processes more clearly by creating temporally extended problems within which associative cues are not always immediately available. We asked humans and rhesus macaques to commit to completing spatially extended mazes or to decline completing them through a trial-decline response. The mazes could sometimes be completed successfully, but other times had a constriction that blocked completion. A deliberate, systematic scanning process could preevaluate a maze and determine the appropriate response. Latency analyses charted the time course of the evaluative process. Both humans and macaques appeared, from the pattern of their latencies, to scan the mazes through before committing to completing them. Thus monkeys, too, can base trial-decline responses on temporally extended evaluation processes, confirming that those responses have strategic cognitive-processing bases in addition to behavioral-reactive bases. The results also show the value of temporally and spatially extended problems to let researchers study the trajectory of animals' online cognitive processes. (PsycINFO Database Record

Comparative and cognitive psychologists interpret performance in different ways. Animal researchers invoke a dominant construct of associative learning. Human researchers acknowledge humans' capacity for explicit-declarative cognition. This article offers a way to bridge a divide that defeats productive cross-talk. We show that animals often challenge the associative-learning construct, and that it does not work to try to stretch the associative-learning construct to encompass these performances. This approach thins and impoverishes that important construct. We describe an alternative approach that restrains the construct of associative learning by giving it a clear operational definition. We apply this approach in several comparative domains to show that different task variants change-in concert-the level of awareness, the declarative nature of knowledge, the dimensional breadth of knowledge, and the brain systems that organize learning. These changes reveal dissociable learning processes that a unitary associative construct cannot explain but a neural-systems framework can explain. These changes define the limit of associative learning and the threshold of explicit cognition. The neural-systems framework can broaden empirical horizons in comparative psychology. It can offer animal models of explicit cognition to cognitive researchers and neuroscientists. It can offer simple behavioral paradigms for exploring explicit cognition to developmental researchers. It can enliven the synergy between human and animal research, promising a productive future for both.

Cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychologists have long been interested in humans’ and animals’ ability to respond to abstract relations, as this ability may underlie important capacities like analogical reasoning. Cross-species research has used relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks in which participants try to find stimulus pairs that “match” because they both express the same abstract relation (same or different). Researchers seek to understand the cognitive processes that underlie successful matching performance. In the present RMTS paradigm, the abstract-relational cue was made redundant with a first-order perceptual cue. Then the perceptual cue faded, requiring participants to transition from a perceptual to a conceptual approach by realizing the task’s abstract-relational affordance. We studied participants’ ability to make this transition with and without a working-memory load. The concurrent load caused participants to fail to break the perceptual-conceptual barrier unless the load was abandoned. We conclude that finding the conceptual solution depends on reconstruing the task using cognitive processes that are especially reliant on working memory. Our data provide the closest existing look at this cognitive reorganization. They raise important theoretical issues for cross-species comparisons of relational cognition, especially regarding animals’ limitations in this domain.

Cognitive psychologists distinguish implicit, procedural category learning (stimulus-response associations learned outside declarative cognition) from explicit-declarative category learning (conscious category rules). These systems are dissociated by category learning tasks with either a multidimensional, information-integration (II) solution or a unidimensional, rule-based (RB) solution. In the present experiments, humans and two monkeys learned II and RB category tasks fostering implicit and explicit learning, respectively. Then they received occasional transfer trials-never directly reinforced-drawn from untrained regions of the stimulus space. We hypothesized that implicit-procedural category learning-allied to associative learning-would transfer weakly because it is yoked to the training stimuli. This result was confirmed for humans and monkeys. We hypothesized that explicit category learning-allied to abstract category rules-would transfer robustly. This result was confirmed only for humans. That is, humans displayed explicit category knowledge that transferred flawlessly. Monkeys did not. This result illuminates the distinctive abstractness, stimulus independence, and representational portability of humans' explicit category rules. (PsycINFO Database Record

Contemporary theory in cognitive neuroscience distinguishes, among the processes and utilities that serve categorization, explicit and implicit systems of category learning that learn, respectively, category rules by active hypothesis testing or adaptive behaviors by association and reinforcement. Little is known about the time course of categorization within these systems. Accordingly, the present experiments contrasted tasks that fostered explicit categorization (because they had a one-dimensional, rule-based solution) or implicit categorization (because they had a two-dimensional, information-integration solution). In Experiment 1, participants learned categories under unspeeded or speeded conditions. In Experiment 2, they applied previously trained category knowledge under unspeeded or speeded conditions. Speeded conditions selectively impaired implicit category learning and implicit mature categorization. These results illuminate the processing dynamics of explicit/implicit categorization.

The uncertainty response has grounded the study of metacognition in nonhuman animals. Recent research has explored the processes supporting uncertainty monitoring in monkeys. It has revealed that uncertainty responding, in contrast to perceptual responding, depends on significant working memory resources. The aim of the present study was to expand this research by examining whether uncertainty monitoring is also working memory demanding in humans. To explore this issue, human participants were tested with or without a cognitive load on a psychophysical discrimination task that included either an uncertainty response (allowing the participant to decline difficult trials) or a middle-perceptual response (labeling the same intermediate trial levels). The results demonstrated that cognitive load reduced uncertainty responding, but increased middle responding. However, this dissociation between uncertainty and middle responding was only observed when participants either lacked training or had very little training with the uncertainty response. If more training was provided, the effect of load was small. These results suggest that uncertainty responding is resource demanding, but with sufficient training, human participants can respond to uncertainty either by using minimal working memory resources or by effectively sharing resources. These results are discussed in relation to the literature on animal and human metacognition.

The debate over unitary/multiple category-learning utilities is reminiscent of debates about multiple memory systems and unitary/dual codes in knowledge representation. In categorization, researchers continue to seek paradigms to dissociate explicit learning processes (yielding verbalizable rules) from implicit learning processes (yielding stimulus-response associations that remain outside awareness). We introduce a new dissociation here. Participants learned matched category tasks with a multidimensional, information-integration solution or a one-dimensional, rule-based solution. They received reinforcement immediately (0-Back reinforcement) or after one intervening trial (1-Back reinforcement). Lagged reinforcement eliminated implicit, information-integration category learning but preserved explicit, rule-based learning. Moreover, information-integration learners facing lagged reinforcement spontaneously adopted explicit rule strategies that poorly suited their task. The results represent a strong process dissociation in categorization, broadening the range of empirical techniques for testing the multiple-process theoretical perspective. This and related methods that disable associative learning-fostering a transition to explicit-declarative cognition-could have broad utility in comparative, cognitive, and developmental science.

The article explores—from a utility/adaptation perspective—the role of prototype and exemplar processes in categorization. The author surveys important category tasks within the categorization literature from the perspective of the optimality of applying prototype and exemplar processes. Formal simulations reveal that organisms will often (not always!) receive more useful signals about category belongingness if they average their exemplar experience into a prototype and use this as the comparative standard for categorization. This survey then provides the theoretical context for considering the evolution of cognitive systems for categorization. In the article’s final sections, the author reviews recent research on the performance of nonhuman primates and humans in the tasks analyzed in the article. Diverse species share operating principles, default commitments, and processing weaknesses in categorization. From these commonalities, it may be possible to infer some properties of the categorization ecology these species generally experienced during cognitive evolution.

Humans feel uncertain. They know when they do not know. These feelings and the responses to them ground the research literature on metacognition. It is a natural question whether animals share this cognitive capacity, and thus animal metacognition has become an influential research area within comparative psychology. Researchers have explored this question by testing many species using perception and memory paradigms. There is an emerging consensus that animals share functional parallels with humans’ conscious metacognition. Of course, this research area poses difficult issues of scientific inference. How firmly should we hold the line in insisting that animals’ performances are low-level and associative? How high should we set the bar for concluding that animals share metacognitive capacities with humans? This area offers a constructive case study for considering theoretical problems that often confront comparative psychologists. The authors present this case study and address diverse issues of scientific judgement and interpretation within comparative psychology.

The human response to uncertainty has been well studied in tasks requiring attention and declarative memory systems. However, uncertainty monitoring and control have not been studied in multi-dimensional, information-integration categorization tasks that rely on non-declarative procedural memory. Three experiments are described that investigated the human uncertainty response in such tasks. Experiment 1 showed that following standard categorization training, uncertainty responding was similar in information-integration tasks and rule-based tasks requiring declarative memory. In Experiment 2, however, uncertainty responding in untrained information-integration tasks impaired the ability of many participants to master those tasks. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that the deficit observed in Experiment 2 was not because of the uncertainty response option per se, but rather because the uncertainty response provided participants a mechanism via which to eliminate stimuli that were inconsistent with a simple declarative response strategy. These results are considered in the light of recent models of category learning and metacognition.

Participants produce steep typicality gradients and large prototype-enhancement effects in dot-distortion category tasks, showing that in these tasks to-be-categorized items are compared to a prototypical representation that is the central tendency of the participant’s exemplar experience. These prototype-abstraction processes have been ascribed to low-level mechanisms in primary visual cortex. Here we asked whether higher-level mechanisms in visual cortex can also sometimes support prototype abstraction. To do so, we compared dot-distortion performance when the stimuli were size constant (allowing some low-level repetition-familiarity to develop for similar shapes) or size variable (defeating repetition-familiarity effects). If prototype formation is only mediated by low-level mechanisms, stimulus-size variability should lessen prototype effects and flatten typicality gradients. Yet prototype effects and typicality gradients were the same under both conditions, whether participants learned the categories explicitly or implicitly and whether they received trial-by-trial reinforcement during transfer tests. These results broaden out the visual-cortical hypothesis because low-level visual areas, featuring retinotopic perceptual representations, would not support robust category learning or prototype-enhancement effects in an environment of pronounced variability in stimulus size. Therefore, higher-level cortical mechanisms evidently can also support prototype formation during categorization.

Smith and Minda (1998) and Blair and Homa (2001) studied the time course of category learning in humans. They distinguished an early, abstraction-based stage of category learning from a later stage that incorporated a capacity for categorizing exceptional category members. The present authors asked whether similar processing stages characterize the category learning of nonhuman primates. Humans (Homo sapiens) and monkeys (Macaca mulatta) participated in category-learning tasks that extended Blair and Homa's paradigm comparatively. Early in learning, both species improved on typical items more than on exception items, indicating an initial mastery of the categories' general structure. Later in learning, both species selectively improved their exception-item performance, indicating exception-item resolution or exemplar memorization. An initial stage of abstraction-based category learning may characterize categorization across a substantial range of the order Primates. This default strategy may have an adaptive resonance with the family resemblance organization of many natural-kind categories.

Some metacognition paradigms for nonhuman animals encourage the alternative explanation that animals avoid difficult trials based only on reinforcement history and stimulus aversion. To explore this possibility, we placed humans and monkeys in successive uncertainty-monitoring tasks that were qualitatively different, eliminating many associative cues that might support transfer across tasks. In addition, task transfer occurred under conditions of deferred and rearranged feedback—both species completed blocks of trials followed by summary feedback. This ensured that animals received no trial-by-trial reinforcement. Despite distancing performance from associative cues, humans and monkeys still made adaptive uncertainty responses by declining the most difficult trials. These findings suggest that monkeys’ uncertainty responses could represent a higher-level, decisional process of cognitive monitoring, though that process need not involve full self-awareness or consciousness. The dissociation of performance from reinforcement has theoretical implications concerning the status of reinforcement as the critical binding force in animal learning.

In an early dissociation between intentional and incidental category learning, Kemler Nelson (1984) gave participants a categorization task that could be performed by responding either to a single-dimensional rule or to overall family resemblance. Humans learning intentionally deliberately adopted rule-based strategies; humans learning incidentally adopted family resemblance strategies. The present authors replicated Kemler Nelson's human experiment and found a similar dissociation. They also extended her paradigm so as to evaluate the balance between rules and family resemblance in determining the category decisions of rhesus monkeys. Monkeys heavily favored the family resemblance strategy. Formal models showed that even after many sessions and thousands of trials, they spread attention across all stimulus dimensions rather than focus on a single, criterial dimension that could also produce perfect categorization.

Do nonhuman animals share humans' capacity for metacognition--that is, for monitoring or regulating their own cognitive states? Comparative psychologists have approached this question by testing a dolphin, pigeons, rats, monkeys and apes using perception, memory and food-concealment paradigms. There is growing evidence that animals share functional parallels with humans' conscious metacognition, although the field has not confirmed full experiential parallels and this remains an open question. This article reviews this new area of comparative inquiry and describes significant empirical milestones, remaining theoretical milestones and the prospects for continuing progress in a rapidly developing area. This research area opens a new window on reflective mind in animals, illuminating its phylogenetic emergence and allowing researchers to trace the antecedents of human consciousness.

The authors compared the complex shape perception of humans and monkeys. Members of both species participated in a Same-Different paradigm in which they judged the similarity of shape pairs that could be variations of the same underlying prototype. For both species, similarity gradients were found to be steep going out from the transformational center of psychological space. In contrast, similarity gradients were found to be flat going from the periphery in toward the center of psychological space. These results show that there are important common principles in the shape-perception and shape-comparison processes of humans and monkeys. The same general organization of psychological space is obtained. The same quantifiable metric of psychological distance is applied. Established methods for creating controlled shape variation have the same effect on both species' similarity judgments. The member of the to-be-judged pair of shapes that is peripheral in psychological space controls the strength of the perceived similarity of the pair. The results have broader implications for the comparative study of perception and categorization.

Bullying is a problem for schools around the world, and is an important topic for research because it has been associated with negative outcomes on numerous social, psychological, and academic measures. Antibullying prevention and intervention programs have varied greatly in their outcomes, with some studies reporting positive results while others have reported little or no positive impacts. Prompted by accountability demands, many agencies have developed standards with which to assess whether social programs are effective. Antibullying program evaluations have not been systematically reviewed to determine whether these types of standards are being applied. The purpose of this study was to assess the rigor of recent peer-reviewed antibullying program evaluations. Thirty-one peer-reviewed evaluations of antibullying programs, published within the last 10 years, were identified and coded for study characteristics. Shortcomings were identified in many of these program evaluations. In order to improve evaluation practices, researchers should consider using more rigorous designs to identify cause-effect relationships, including control conditions and random assignment, using more appropriate pre-post intervals, using more advanced methods of analyses such as hierarchical linear modeling, and systematically verifying program integrity to obtain dosage data that can be used in the outcome analyses.

In 1993 an article that has become a classic in public policy was published in The American Scholar. In this essay, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan discussed the ways through which behaviors that have been considered deviant subsequently come to be accepted by society. In “Defining Deviancy Down,” Moynihan asserted that these behaviors were being ignored, tolerated, or even normalized. His examples included the deinstitutionalization of people previously considered incapable of community living, the increased presence of homeless people on the streets of American cities, various changes in the acceptance of diverse sexual behavior, and differences in the meaning of marriage and family in the United States.

Reflections of the Senior Author The senior author (senior in more than one sense) was given cause to reflect on the meaning of the term mental retardation when he received his 30-year certificate and pin for continuous membership in the American Association on Mental Retardation in 2005. When he became a member of the organization in 1975 as a doctoral student at Columbia University, it was the American Association on Mental Deficiency that he joined. Although the focus of his studies at Columbia was mental retardation and even though that term had been the accepted terminology in the field for many years, the primary organization for students, professionals, scholars, and advocates in mental retardation still used the term mental deficiency in its moniker. This remained the case for the first 10 years of his membership. He is now a member, of course, of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, the official name as of January 1, 2007. He is also a member and board member of the Division on Developmental Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), which was formerly known as Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities (MR/DD), and earlier still as CEC-MR. Although these organizations have not explicitly rejected mental retardation as a term, they have clearly acknowledged the importance to their identities of terminology that is more inclusive, less stigmatizing, or both.

We explore humans' rule-based category learning using analytic approaches that highlight their psychological transitions during learning. These approaches confirm that humans show qualitatively sudden psychological transitions during rule learning. These transitions contribute to the theoretical literature contrasting single vs. multiple category-learning systems, because they seem to reveal a distinctive learning process of explicit rule discovery. A complete psychology of categorization must describe this learning process, too. Yet extensive formal-modeling analyses confirm that a wide range of current (gradient-descent) models cannot reproduce these transitions, including influential rule-based models (e.g., COVIS) and exemplar models (e.g., ALCOVE). It is an important theoretical conclusion that existing models cannot explain humans' rule-based category learning. The problem these models have is the incremental algorithm by which learning is simulated. Humans descend no gradient in rule-based tasks. Very different formal-modeling systems will be required to explain humans' psychology in these tasks. An important next step will be to build a new generation of models that can do so.

Humans monitor states of uncertainty that can guide decision-making. These uncertain states are evident behaviorally when humans decline to make a categorization response. Such behavioral uncertainty responses have also defined the search for metacognition in animals. While a plethora of neuroimaging studies have focused on uncertainty, the brain systems supporting a volitional strategy shift under uncertainty have not been distinguished from those observed in making introspective post-hoc reports of categorization uncertainty. Using rapid event-related fMRI, we demonstrate that the neural activity patterns elicited by humans’ uncertainty responses are qualitatively different from those recruited by associative processes during categorization. Participants performed a one-dimensional perceptual-categorization task in which an uncertainty-response option let them decline to make a categorization response. Uncertainty responding activated a distributed network including prefrontal cortical (PFC), anterior and posterior cingulate cortex (ACC, PCC), anterior insula, and posterior parietal areas; importantly, these regions were distinct from those whose activity was modulated by task difficulty. Generally, our results can be characterized as a large-scale cognitive control network including recently evolved brain regions such as the anterior dorsolateral and medial PFC. A metacognitive theory would view the uncertainty response as a deliberate behavioral adjustment rather than just a learned middle category response, and predicts this pattern of results. These neuroimaging results bolster previous behavioral findings, which suggested that different cognitive processes underlie responses due to associative learning versus the declaration of uncertainty. We conclude that the uncertainty response represents an elemental behavioral index of metacognition.

Although researchers are exploring animals' capacity for monitoring their states of uncertainty, the use of some paradigms allows the criticism that animals map avoidance responses to error-causing stimuli not because of uncertainty monitored but because of feedback signals and stimulus aversion. The authors addressed this criticism with an uncertainty-monitoring task in which participants completed blocks of trials with feedback deferred so that they could not associate reinforcement signals to particular stimuli or stimulus-response pairs. Humans and 1 of 2 monkeys were able to make cognitive, decisional uncertainty responses that were independent of feedback or reinforcement history within a task. This finding unifies the comparative literature on uncertainty monitoring. The dissociation of performance from reinforcement has theoretical implications, and the deferred-feedback technique has many applications.

Present-day exemplar theory faces difficult challenges, and important questions have arisen about the kinds of exemplar effects and processes that are empirically supported, and about the kind of exemplar theory that could still be constructive. One question concerns whether exemplar generalization in memory and categorization is broad and collective - extending to many related exemplars stored in memory - or whether it is focused and singular extending only to highly similar (nearly identical) exemplars. The present article considers this continuum from broad to narrow generalization. I demonstrate that in prominent memory and category tasks - tasks in which exemplar theory predicts broad generalization - generalization is in psychological reality very tightly focused. These demonstrations could ground a new, productive exemplar theory that is true to psychological process as humans conduct themselves in memory and category tasks. This new psychology may actually reprise the traditional exemplar theory that predated our sophisticated, mathematical exemplar models. Categorization is a central issue in cognitive science. Beginning with influential statements by Brooks (1978) and Medin and Schaffer (1978), instance or exemplar theory assumed a prominent position in explaining human categorization. Exemplar theory assumes that . we store the category members we experience as individuated memory representations. Then, when a to-be-categorized item (TBCI) comes along, we judge whether it belongs to a category by considering its similarity to those stored exemplars. Initially, formal treatments of exemplar theory enjoyed success in the literature (Nosofsky, 198(5). Recently, though, exemplar theory has been shown to have serious flaws and to fail qualitatively at critical points (Ashby & Alfonso-Reese, 1995; Ashby, Maddox, & Lee, 1994; Blair & Homa, 2001; Cutting, Bruno, Brady, & Moore, 1992; Maddox & Ashby, 1998; Myung & Pitt, 1997; Smith, 2002; Smith & Minda, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002; Smith, Murray, & Minda, 1997). Thus, important questions arise about the status of exemplar theory, about the kinds of exemplar effects and processes that are supported empirically, and about the kind of exemplar theory that could still be constructive. I consider these questions in this article. Considering them will lead me back to the original exemplar principle expressed in Brooks (1978) that remains one of the best statements about the psychology of exemplars. Once in the Alps, I was walking down a steep trail that I had walked years before. I was rehabilitating a knee and the doctor had told me that I could walk but must not fall. On I came, and it began to sprinkle rain. Suddenly the hackles stood up on my neck, and I knew I was coming to a place in the trail where I could fall. Fair warning, because a few seconds later - boom - down I went. What happened psychologically in the moment of my self-warning? What connections did my mind draw from the present situation to things it knew or had experienced? Was this a phenomenon of memory or categorization? What theory would describe it? A constructive way to frame these issues and this article is to contrast two psychological descriptions of what happened that day. First, my situation that day might have connected to many stored experiences of steep, rocky, or rainy trails. I might have summed up the similarities between the situation and those experiences and judged that there was enough steep-wet-rock-fall similarity to give myself a warning. By this description, I would have used diverse exemplar experiences in concert to produce my cognitive assessment. This is one way - a broad, collective way - in which we might use exemplar experience. This is one kind of exemplar theory. Second, my situation that day might have connected only to the single time I negotiated that bad step on that trail before. In this case, a connection would have been drawn from one precise context to another highly similar (nearly identical) context - one to one, match and warn. …

Categorization researchers typically present single objects to be categorized. But real-world categorization often involves object recognition within complex scenes. It is unknown how the processes of categorization stand up to visual complexity or why they fail facing it. The authors filled this research gap by blending the categorization and visual-search paradigms into a visual-search and categorization task in which participants searched for members of target categories in complex displays. Participants have enormous difficulty in this task. Despite intensive and ongoing category training, they detect targets at near-chance levels unless displays are extremely simple or target categories extremely focused. These results, discussed from the perspectives of categorization and visual search, might illuminate societally important instances of visual search (e.g., diagnostic medical screening).

Although positive regard for the needs of people with disabilities was apparently uncommon by many accounts prior to the 20th century, this may be a misconception of history. There were likely many people who responded to the needs of their family members and others in need of assistance because of their disablities, and their physical and emotional proximity. This, however, if so, is not easily discernable in historical records. Few and rare voices raised that endeavored to inform and inspire others toward humane treatment and educational interventions for people with disabilities have been documented. This rarity was particulary true for those considered to have an intellectual disability. Evidence of advocacy in disbility history are difficult to find. When found they have been embraced as critical to understanding the development of the field of developmental disabilities. A famous example is the work of Jean Itard. The proposals of the well-known author, Daniel Defoe, however, are also notable for his forward-thinking writing as it related to how society should respond to the needs of people with disabilities. A review of his work provides important examples of a philosophy of advocacy and education that preceded the work of Itard by approximately 75 years but that has rarely been acknowledged. This manuscript highlights and discusses several of these important works and provides a context for Defoe's contributions.

Researchers are exploring whether animals share with humans something like a metacognitive capacity. Though some results point to human-animal continuities in this domain, they face the dominant criticism that animals' performances might be associative. A persistent problem is that animal-metacognition paradigms present static environments of risk and reward that may foster inflexible and conditioned responding. Those environments do not challenge animals to show the flexibility in their decision strategies that could indicate an antecedent capacity to metacognition. Accordingly, we tested macaques and humans on an uncertainty-monitoring paradigm in which risk changed dynamically. Participants classified stimuli of different difficulties while also choosing when to use a cashout response to collect the accumulated rewards that would be forfeit on a discrimination error. Macaques (Macaca mulatta) and humans flexibly adjusted their decision criteria to achieve appropriate protection against the cost of error that could differ depending on trial difficulty and the number of rewards at risk. In particular, monkeys widened their cashout-response region as their accumulated rewards increased, providing more protection against a more costly error. These findings demonstrate a new continuity between humans' and animals' uncertainty systems. They reveal a calibration by macaques of present risk to trial difficulty tolerated. They show that animals' uncertainty-monitoring and risk-management systems have substantial trial-by-trial flexibility.

An influential theoretical perspective describes an implicit category-learning system that associates regions of perceptual space with response outputs by integrating information preattentionally and predecisionally across multiple stimulus dimensions. In this study, we tested whether this kind of implicit, information-integration category learning is possible across stimulus dimensions lying in different sensory modalities. Humans learned categories composed of conjoint visual–auditory category exemplars comprising a visual component (rectangles varying in the density of contained lit pixels) and an auditory component (in Exp. 1, auditory sequences varying in duration; in Exp. 2, pure tones varying in pitch). The categories had either a one-dimensional, rule-based solution or a two-dimensional, information-integration solution. Humans could solve the information-integration category tasks by integrating information across two stimulus modalities. The results demonstrated an important cross-modal form of sensory integration in the service of category learning, and they advance the field’s knowledge about the sensory organization of systems for categorization.

The behavioral uncertainty response has grounded the study of animal metacognition and influenced the study of human psychophysics. However, the interpretation of this response is debated--especially whether it is a behavioral index of metacognition. The authors advanced this interpretation using the dissociative technique of response deadlines. Uncertainty responding, if it is higher level or metacognitive, should depend on a slower, more controlled decisional process and be more vulnerable to time constraints. Humans performed sparse-uncertain-dense or sparse-middle-dense discriminations in which, respectively, they could decline difficult trials or positively identify middle stimuli. Uncertainty responses were sharply and selectively reduced under a decision deadline, as compared to primary perceptual responses (i.e., "sparse," "middle," and "dense" responses). This dissociation suggests that the uncertainty response does reflect a higher-level, decisional response. It grants the uncertainty response a distinctive psychological role in its task and encourages an interpretation of this response as an elemental behavioral index of uncertainty that deserves continuing research.

The controversy over multiple category-learning systems is reminiscent of the controversy over multiple memory systems. Researchers continue to seek paradigms to sharply dissociate explicit category-learning processes (featuring category rules that can be verbalized) from implicit category-learning processes (featuring learned stimulus-response associations that lie outside declarative cognition). We contribute a new dissociative paradigm, adapting the technique of deferred-rearranged reinforcement from comparative psychology. Participants learned matched category tasks that had either a one-dimensional, rule-based solution or a multidimensional, information-integration solution. They received feedback either immediately or after each block of trials, with the feedback organized such that positive outcomes were grouped and negative outcomes were grouped (deferred-rearranged reinforcement). Deferred reinforcement qualitatively eliminated implicit, information-integration category learning. It left intact explicit, rule-based category learning. Moreover, implicit-category learners facing deferred-rearranged reinforcement turned by default and information-processing necessity to rule-based strategies that poorly suited their nominal category task. The results represent one of the strongest explicit-implicit dissociations yet seen in the categorization literature.

For a number of years, I have been intrigued by what might be termed the retrospective diagnosis of developmental disabilities. In my book Minds Made Feeble: The Myth and Legacy of the Kallikaks (J. Smith, 1985), I expressed amazement that psychologist Henry Goddard in his study of the “good” and “bad” Kallikak families pronounced that a woman who had an illegitimate child in 1776 was “feebleminded.” This was 136 years after the birth of the child. In fact, Goddard diagnosed entire generations of Kallikaks who neither he nor anyone alive at that time had ever seen, let alone tested with even the most rudimentary of diagnostic techniques. Yet when his study was published in 1912, he asserted with confidence that he had found proof of a genetic basis for intellectual disabilities in these families.

Cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychologists have long been intrigued by humans’ and animals’ capacity to respond to abstract relations like sameness and difference, because this capacity may underlie crucial aspects of cognition like analogical reasoning. Recently, this capacity has been explored in higher-order, relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks in which humans and animals try to complete analogies of sameness and difference between disparate groups of items. The authors introduced a new paradigm to this area, by yoking the relational-matching cue to a perceptual-matching cue. Then, using established algorithms for shape distortion, the perceptual cue was weakened and eliminated. Humans’ RMTS performance easily transcended the elimination of perceptual support. In contrast, RMTS performance by six macaques faltered as they were weaned from perceptual support. No macaque showed evidence of mature RMTS performance, even given more than 260,000 training trials during which we tried to coax a relational-matching performance from them. It is an important species difference that macaques show so hesitant a response to conceptual relations when humans respond to them so effortlessly. It raises theoretical questions about the emergence of this crucial capacity during humans’ cognitive evolution and during humans’ cognitive development.

Most cultures have respect for and respond positively to individuals who make significant literary contributions to the way that people understand life and society. While the impact of literature may vary widely, those individuals deemed to have added important perspectives through their writing are often elevated to positions of high regard and influence. Thus, their work becomes important to our understanding of the human condition, including the meaning of disability.

Background Despite reverence afforded the therapeutic relationship construct in occupational therapy, many occupational therapists feel ill equipped to use themselves therapeutically to enhance the relationship with their clients. Furthermore, although occupational therapists often link the strength of the therapeutic relationship to therapy outcomes, related occupational therapy specific research has been limited. According to the psychotherapy literature, the working alliance is one element of the therapeutic relationship which has in fact been linked to therapy outcomes. Methods A mixed-methods, prospective, multiple case study approach was used to compare the experiences of the working alliance by both occupational therapists and clients across four therapeutic dyads. Results Several key elements were identified in this study's qualitative data as shaping the process of alliance development in occupational therapy including: the fostering of an interpersonal connection; the use of humour as therapeutic modality; an impetus to act that leads to functional enhancements; a shared sense of success and a positive feedback mechanism created through successfully attaining clearly delineated, client-centred therapy goals. Conclusions By considering these identified elements, occupational therapists may focus upon tangible considerations towards enhanced therapeutic use-of-self in the development of sound working alliance with their clients potentially improving therapy outcomes.

a b s t r a c t Categorization is essential for survival, and it is a widely studied cognitive adaptation in humans and animals. An influential neuroscience perspective differentiates in humans an explicit, rule-based catego- rization system from an implicit system that slowly associates response outputs to different regions of perceptual space. This perspective is being extended to study categorization in other vertebrate species, using category tasks that have a one-dimensional, rule-based solution or a two-dimensional, information- integration solution. Humans, macaques, and capuchin monkeys strongly dimensionalize perceptual stimuli and learn rule-based tasks more quickly. In sharp contrast, pigeons learn these two tasks equally quickly. Pigeons represent a cognitive system in which the commitment to dimensional analysis and category rules was not strongly made. Their results may reveal the character of the ancestral vertebrate categorization system from which that of primates emerged. The primate results establish continuity with human cognition, suggesting that nonhuman primates share aspects of humans' capacity for explicit cog- nition. The emergence of dimensional analysis and rule learning could have been an important step in primates' cognitive evolution.

The Kallikak Family was, along with The Jukes, one of the most visible eugenic family narratives published in the early 20th Century. Published in 1912 and authored by psychologist Henry Herbert Goddard, director of the psychological laboratory at the Vineland Training School for Feebleminded Children in Vineland, New Jersey, The Kallikak Family told the tale of a supposedly “degenerate” family from rural New Jersey, beginning with Deborah, one of the inmates at The Training School. Like most books in the genre, this pseudoscientific treatise described generations of illiterate, poor, and purportedly immoral, Kallikak family members who were chronically unemployed, supposedly feebleminded, criminals, and, in general, perceived as threats to racial hygiene. Presented as a “natural experiment” in human heredity, this text served to support eugenic activities through much of the first half of the century. This article reviews the story of Deborah Kallikak, including her true identity, and provides evidence that Goddard’s treatise was incorrect. “One bright October day, fourteen years ago, there came to the Training School at Vineland, a little eight year-old girl”(Goddard, 1912, p. 1)

Research in non-human animal (hereafter, animal) cognition has found strong evidence that some animal species are capable of meta-cognitively monitoring their mental states. They know when they know and when they do not know. In contrast, animals have generally not shown robust theory of mind (ToM) capabilities. Comparative research uses methods that are non-verbal, and thus might easily be labelled ‘implicit’ using the terminology of traditional human cognition. However, comparative psychology has developed several non-verbal methods that are designed to test for aspects of meta-cognition that – while perhaps not fully explicit – go beyond the merely implicit or associative. We believe similar methods might be useful to developmental researchers who work with young children, and may provide a sound empirical alternative to verbal reports. Comparative psychology has moved away from all-or-none categorical labels (e.g., ‘implicit’ vs. ‘explicit’) towards a theoretical framework that contains a spectrum of mental abilities ranging from implicit to explicit, and from associative to cognitive to fully conscious. We discuss how this same framework might be applied to developmental psychology when it comes to implicit versus explicit processing and ToM.

In the laboratory, musical novices often seem insensitive even to basic structural elements of music (octaves, intervals, etc.), undermining long-held theories of music perception, and threatening to leave current theories applicable only to experts. Consequently it is important to demonstrate novices' basic listening competence where possible. Two experiments examined the perception of musical intervals (minor thirds, major thirds and perfect fourths) by musical novices. Subjects received either standard instructions or familiar folk-tune labels to aid performance. The folk-tune labels greatly improved identification performance, producing expert-caliber performance by some musically inexperienced subjects. The effectiveness of the folk-tune manipulation was much more limited in a difficult discrimination task. The results suggest that novices do have some basic competence when assayed appropriately, and that familiar musical tokens may be a critical element in such assays. Larger implications of the role of familiarity in novices' competence are discussed, including those that relate to music cognition and aesthetics.

A central question in categorization research concerns the categories that animals and humans learn naturally and well. Here, the authors examined monkeys' (Macaca mulatta) and humans' (Homo sapiens) learning of the important class of exclusive-or (XOR) categories. Both species exhibited--through a sustained level of ongoing errors--substantial difficulty learning XOR category tasks at 3 stimulus dimensionalities. Clearly, both species brought a linear-separability constraint to XOR category learning. This constraint illuminates the primate category-learning system from which that of humans arose, and it has theoretical implications concerning the evolution of cognitive systems for categorization. The present data also clarify the role of exemplar-specific processes in fully explaining XOR category learning, and suggest that humans sometimes overcome their linear-separability constraint through the use of language and verbalization.

An influential theoretical perspective differentiates in humans an explicit, rule-based system of category learning from an implicit system that slowly associates different regions of perceptual space with different response outputs. This perspective was extended for the 1st time to the category learning of nonhuman primates. Humans (Homo sapiens) and macaques (Macaca mulatta) learned categories composed of sine-wave gratings that varied across trials in bar width and bar orientation. The categories had either a single-dimensional, rule-based solution or a two-dimensional, information-integration solution. Humans strongly dimensionalized the stimuli and learned the rule-based task far more quickly. Six macaques showed the same performance advantage in the rule-based task. In humans, rule-based category learning is linked to explicit cognition, consciousness, and declarative reports about the contents of cognition. These results demonstrate an empirical continuity between human and nonhuman primate cognition, suggesting that nonhuman primates may have some structural components of humans' capacity for explicit cognition.

Results that point to animals' metacognitive capacity bear a heavy burden, given the potential for competing behavioral descriptions. In this article, formal models are used to evaluate the force of these descriptions. One example is that many existing studies have directly rewarded so-called uncertainty responses. Modeling confirms that this practice is an interpretative danger because it supports associative processes and encourages simpler interpretations. Another example is that existing studies raise the concern that animals avoid difficult stimuli not because of uncertainty monitored, but because of aversion given error-causing or reinforcement-lean stimuli. Modeling also justifies this concern and shows that this problem is not addressed by the common practice of comparing performance on chosen and forced trials. The models and related discussion have utility for metacognition researchers and theorists broadly, because they specify the experimental operations that will best indicate a metacognitive capacity in humans or animals by eliminating alternative behavioral accounts.

The authors compared the performance of humans and monkeys in a Same-Different task. They evaluated the hypothesis that for humans the Same-Different concept is qualitative, categorical, and rule-based, so that humans distinguish 0-disparity pairs (i.e., same) from pairs with any discernible disparity (i.e., different); whereas for monkeys the Same-Different concept is quantitative, continuous, and similarity-based, so that monkeys distinguish small-disparity pairs (i.e., similar) from pairs with a large disparity (i.e., dissimilar). The results supported the hypothesis. Monkeys, more than humans, showed a gradual transition from same to different categories and an inclusive criterion for responding Same. The results have implications for comparing Same-Different performances across species--different species may not always construe or perform even identical tasks in the same way. In particular, humans may especially apply qualitative, rule-based frameworks to cognitive tasks like Same-Different.

Six years ago I asserted in print, with some sense of daring, that it was time to admit that the term mental retardation was a myth, a “false and unhelpful categorization of people with very diverse needs and characteristics” (Smith, 2002, p. 64). I quoted from Thomas Ssasz's (1960) classic work, The Myth of Mental Illness, and described the term mental retardation as being “scientifically worthless and socially harmful” (Ssasz, 1960, p. xi). I argued that the term should become an historical artifact of our evolving thought about children and adults with developmental disabilities. In my opinion, the millions of people who have been misunderstood and, sometimes, maligned by the term were deserving of a change in the manner in which they were regarded and treated. A disassembling of the aggregation of human conditions gathered under the term mental retardation might provide an opportunity to enhance our vision of who these people are as individuals and our understanding of their rightful places in our communities (Smith, 2002).

Similarity-choice (S—C) models of categorization contain two principal mathematical transformations: an exponential-decay similarity function and a choice rule. However, there is a tension between the psychological processes that models emulate and the mathematics they use to do so. To illustrate this, I show that in these models an unappreciated interaction occurs between the mathematical transformations so that the stages of the model essentially cancel each other out. The result is that the model’s output reflects its input linearly. This cancellation phenomenon has potentially serious implications regarding the interpretation and use of S—C models. The phenomenon also raises questions about the simplification and psychological grounding of categorization models. Modelers broadly might benefit from an internal analysis of their models, such as that described here.

It has been proposed that human category learning consists of an early abstraction-based stage followed by a later exemplar-memorization stage. To investigate whether similar processing stages extend to category learning in a nonverbal species, we applied a prototype-exception paradigm to investigating pigeon category learning. Five birds and 8 humans learned six-dimensional perceptual categories constructed to include prototypes, typical items, and exceptions. We evaluated the birds' and humans' categorization strategies at different points during learning. Early on in both species, prototype performance improved rapidly as exception performance remained below chance, indicating an initial mastery of the categories' general structure. Later on, exception performance improved selectively and dramatically, indicating exception-item resolution and exemplar memorization. Abstraction- and exemplar-based formal models reinforced these interpretations. The results suggest a psychological transition in pigeon category learning from abstraction- to exemplar-based processing similar to that found in humans.