• Maureen Gray
• Recovery from Misleading Featural and Relational Information
• Psychology

Describe
your research
experience

The question I am seeking to answer with my research is how the type of category (relational vs. featural) affects a person’s willingness to alter that category in the face of contradictory evidence.

How does a salient, but ultimately unreliable, featural or relational cue affect one’s ability to learn a category structure based on a subtler feature or relation? Subjects learned categories defined either by a subtle feature or relation in the presence of a salient feature or relation, or in the presence of no such distractor (baseline). During the first phase of learning, both the subtle property and the salient distractor were diagnostic of category membership. After subjects reached criterion, the salient distractor was rendered non-diagnostic. Subjects who had the featural distractor never learned to criterion in this second phase, whereas subjects with the relational distractor did. Patterns of learning suggest that the featural distractor put subjects in a “holistic” mindset that interfered with both featural and relational learning.

As one of the recipient's of OUR's inaugural Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (2014), the results of Maureen's research can be found here.