CONCEPT LEARNING AS A FUNCTION OF CONCEPTUAL RULE AND AVAILABILITY OF POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE INSTANCES

160 undergraduates assigned randomly to cells of a 4 (conceptual rule: conjunctive, disjunctive, conditional, and biconditional) * 4 (memory condition: feedback retained for all, positive only, negative only, and for none of the instances) factorial design, solved an attribute identification problem via the selection paradigm. Rules differed in difficulty and the display of feedback for previously selected instances facilitated performance. The relative effectiveness of retained instances differed, however, with the rule; e.g., positives were more informative in conjunctive and negatives in conditional concepts. There were differences in the stimulus selection patterns of better and poorer Ss, which also interacted with rule and memory condition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved). © 1969 American Psychological Association.