1. Effects of Discrimination Difficulty on Peak Shift and Generalization
- Author
-
Lee, Jessica C., Cahyadi, Tamara, Lovibond, Peter, and Schlegelmilch, René
- Subjects
Psychology ,Animal cognition ,Learning ,Perception ,Mathematical modeling - Abstract
In this paper, we test the effect of manipulating discrimination difficulty on subsequent generalization of learning and in particular, on the peak shift effect. Participants learned a discrimination where one stimulus led to an outcome (S+) and another stimulus led to no outcome (S-). Difficulty was manipulated by varying the degree of similarity between the S+ and S- across groups (easy/medium/hard). In contrast to similar studies in animals, we found that increasing the difficulty of the discrimination resulted in less peak shift. Using a hierarchical mixture model, we characterize the effects of discrimination difficulty on relational- and similarity based responding, and show for the first time, a similar mixture of responding on stimulus identification gradients. We conclude that peak shift on generalization and identification measures can be explained by mixtures of participants responding in different ways.
- Published
- 2024